Page 62 of Duke of Moonstone
“Terribly old. Older than anything in England.” Emily looked at the Duke for confirmation. “Is that right?”
“That is correct,” Alexander said. “Some of them are more than a thousand years old.”
“A thousand!” Emily set down her spoon with a clatter that made the Duke’s jaw tighten by a fraction. “That is older than everything.”
“Not quite everything,” Frances said, “but certainly older than this house. And older than your guardian though sometimes one might wonder.”
The words were out before she could weigh them. She felt her cheeks warm and did not look at the Duke.
A pause. Then, from the head of the table: “I am not yet ancient though I appreciate the comparison.”
Emily giggled. The sound broke across the table like sunlight through cloud, and Frances’s chest eased despite itself.
“I have been thinking,” Frances said, reaching for her water glass. “Emily, have you ever been to Hyde Park?”
Emily’s eyes went wide. “No. Is it very far?”
“An hour’s ride by carriage,” the Duke said. His tone was even. Careful.
“Could we go?” Emily looked between them with the urgency of a child who had just discovered that the world contains more than she had been shown. “Could we go tomorrow?”
Frances looked at the Duke. He looked back. The space between their gazes was charged with everything they were not saying—the argument, the accusation, the silence that had followed—and underneath all of it, something else. Something that had to do with the child sitting between them, looking from one face to the other with an eagerness that neither of them could refuse.
“I see no reason why not,” Alexander said.
Emily beamed. She launched into a series of questions—were there ducks? Were there trees to climb? Would there be other children?—and Frances answered each one, and the Duke answered too, his contributions spare but precise, and the meal continued.
The awkwardness did not disappear. It sat between the adults like a third guest, polite and unwelcome.
But Emily filled the spaces between them. She talked about pyramids and elephants and ducks she had not yet seen, and the silence that might have grown teeth was kept at bay by the voice of a child who did not know it needed keeping.
Frances’s gaze drifted to the Duke’s face. Once. Twice. A third time, which she told herself was the last.
He was watching Emily speak, and the hard lines around his mouth had eased again, and the candlelight was doing something unforgivable to the angle of his jaw.
Stop looking at him.
The excursion was a practical matter. Fresh air. Exercise. A child who had spent too many months confined to a single property in the countryside and who would benefit, as any physician would confirm, from open space and direct sunlight.
Alexander had said as much in the carriage when Frances had looked at him with that particular expression—the one that suggested she was reading something in his face that he had not written there—and asked whether he was looking forward to the outing.
“I am fulfilling an obligation,” he had said.
“Of course, you are.” She had turned to the window, and the corner of her mouth had done something he was not going to think about.
They arrived. Hyde Park stretched out before them in the afternoon sunlight—wide green lawns, the shine of the Serpentine visible through the trees, carriages rolling at a gentle pace along the sandy path. A breeze carried the scent of freshly cut grass and a floral aroma that Alexander could not identify and did not bother to.
Emily climbed down from the carriage with the footman’s help and stood on the gravel. She looked at the park. For a moment, she was very still, her small figure braced against the vastness of it, and Alexander recognized the posture—the careful assessment of a child calculating whether a new place was safe.
Then she ran.
“Come! Come look—there are trees!”
Her voice carried back to them, bright and startling, stripped of every caution she wore inside the walls of Whitestone House. She was running toward a stand of elms with her arms swinging and her bonnet already sliding sideways, and she looked, from this distance, like any child in any park on any afternoon.
Frances laughed. The sound was sudden and unguarded, and she gathered her skirts in one hand and went after Emily without looking back. The breeze caught the fabric and pressed it againsther legs as she moved, and her hair—improperly secured, as it always seemed to be—pulled loose at her temples.
Alexander stood by the carriage. He watched them. The woman in pale muslin and the child in blue, growing smaller against the green.
