“I Never Should Have Married You,” the Duke Told His Steward — But When His Wife Smiled and Replied, “Good News, You No Longer Have To,” He Had Only Five Weeks to Stop Her Leaving and Confess the Love He Had Hidden for Nearly a Year

 PART 4

It was not always so easy between them.

Two evenings later, Lady Margarite Selwin arrived at Fossborough with her mother for a fortnight’s visit that had been arranged with excruciating inevitability before Ketrick’s marriage had ever been contemplated. A match his father had once favored, before the debt to Josiah Alcott had reordered everything. Margarite had never entirely relinquished the habit of looking at Fossborough and its master with the particular proprietary interest of a woman who considered an arrangement merely postponed rather than concluded.

She was beautiful in the accepted way, golden and serene, with a talent for the small cruelty disguised as concern. Odelina met her over the drawing room tea things with a composure so flawless it was very nearly its own weapon.

“You must find it terribly quiet here after — forgive me, where was it you said you grew up? Some small property in the north.”

Margarite’s smile did not waver.

“It is a great deal to manage a house like Fossborough for a woman not bred to it.”

“I find it a great deal less to manage than a household of forty tenant families and a father who could not add two numbers together without losing the sum halfway through.” Odelina poured tea with a hand that did not shake. “Which is what I was bred to, Lady Margarite. And which I confess has proved excellent training for a duchess. Sugar?”

Ketrick, standing by the mantel with his coffee cooling untouched, watched his wife hand Margarite Selwin her cup with the serene courtesy of a woman in command of her own drawing room, and felt the strange, fierce warmth in his chest sharpen into something closer to pride. He had spent eleven months believing himself burdened by an arrangement not of his choosing. He was only now beginning to understand that he had, without quite noticing the moment it happened, come to think of Fossborough’s drawing room as hers rather than merely his. And to resent, with an intensity that startled him, any woman who walked into it expecting otherwise.

“You are very quiet this evening, Your Grace,” Margarite said to him later, when Odelina had gone to see about the dinner arrangements and left them briefly alone by the window. “One might almost think you had something on your mind.”

“One might,” he agreed, and did not elaborate.

“The clause,” Margarite said, with the particular delicacy of a woman who has done a great deal of listening at doors and drawing conclusions from it. “Everyone of consequence knows of it, Ketrick, whatever discretion your solicitor imagines he has preserved. Five weeks, is it not? Until you are a free man again?”

Her voice dropped, warm and inviting. An old familiarity in it that had once, years ago, before his father’s debt had rewritten both their futures, meant something to him.

“I have always thought your father’s arrangement rather a pity. There was another understanding once before it — one that a great many people believed would have suited you both far better.”

He looked at her for a long moment. At the golden, untroubled beauty of a woman who had never once, in all the years he had known her, said anything to him that cost her the smallest effort. And found that where once such an offer might have stirred something like regret in him, it now stirred nothing at all beyond a mild, distant impatience.

“I am aware of what people believe, Lady Margarite,” he said. “I have grown considerably less interested in it than I once was.”

Her smile thinned, but she said nothing further. And he excused himself soon after, on the pretext of the dinner arrangements, though in truth he went looking for his wife.

He found her in the small parlor off the kitchen passage. Of all unlikely places — sitting with Mrs. Burch and a girl from the village whose father had broken his leg in the low field, counting coins from a worn purse into the girl’s palm with a gentleness that had nothing performed about it. No drawing-room polish. Only plain, unwatched kindness.

He did not announce himself. He stood in the doorway a moment longer than was strictly proper and watched her. Watched the unguarded warmth of her face when she thought no one of consequence was looking. Watched her tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear with an ink-stained finger and laugh softly at something the girl said. Watched the whole ordinary, unspectacular scene with an attention he had not paid to anything in a very long time.

That night, alone in his study long after the house had gone to sleep, he took out a sheet of paper, meaning to write to Paraga about the Thornwick rents. He found himself instead simply sitting with the pen dry in his hand, thinking of the five weeks dwindling toward the eleventh, and of the fact that he had spent this entire evening — through Margarite’s tea, through dinner, through the long hour after when the ladies had retired and he had sat with the port going warm and untouched before him — thinking of nothing and no one but his own wife.

He had married her out of duty. He was beginning, with a dread that felt suspiciously like hope wearing an unfamiliar coat, to suspect he might lose her out of cowardice instead. And that the second failure would be entirely his own, with no dead father’s conscience to blame for it.

He took her to Alcott Grange on a bright, cold morning, some ten days after Margarite Selwin’s first cutting remark over the tea things, on a pretext so thin he was faintly ashamed of it. A matter of the mortgage papers, he told her, that wanted her signature. Nothing more. When in truth, he had been turning the notion over in his mind for a week and had simply run out of patience with his own hesitation.

“You held my father’s mortgage,” Odelina said, as the carriage rattled along the lane that led north from Fossborough Park, “and never once mentioned it in a year of marriage. I confess I find that rather more remarkable than the mortgage itself.”

“There did not seem a kind way to raise it.” He watched her profile against the passing hedgerows. “A husband informing his wife over breakfast that he owns the roof her childhood was spent beneath — it wanted a better setting than the toast and marmalade generally afford.”

He paused, and added more gently: “I have not let it fall to ruin, if that is your fear. I gave instruction the week after our wedding that the place be kept aired and weathertight, and a caretaker’s family installed in the gatehouse. I did not tell you because I did not wish you to think I had done it to buy your gratitude. I did it because it seemed a plain wrong to let a good man’s house rot merely because his daughter could no longer afford the keeping of it.”

She was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its wariness entirely, gone soft and unsteady in a way he had rarely heard from her.

“I did not know that.”

“I did not tell you. I am telling you now, because I find I no longer wish to keep such things from you. Whatever old habit of silence I inherited from my father.”