“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 7

Then he stepped back. Too abruptly. With the particular clumsiness of retreat rather than dismissal. He said something about the hour and the estate accounts waiting, and was in the saddle again before she could answer, riding back to Fossborough at a pace that left no room for conversation and precisely enough room for him to curse himself the length of the park.

She did not raise it again over breakfast, nor at any point that day. And he told himself he was relieved by her silence, and knew, even as he told himself so, that it was a lie of the same shape as “I never should have married you” — a true fact wearing the wrong explanation, offered because the real one was too dangerous to say aloud.

It was Paraga’s letter, arriving four days later, that broke the fragile quiet between them.

The solicitor wrote with his usual dry precision to confirm that the twelve-month clause would come due on the eleventh, that he stood ready to draw the necessary petition should either party wish to invoke it, and that, as a matter of complete formality, Your Grace, nothing more, he would require written notice of intention no later than one week prior, in order that the arrangements might be concluded discreetly, and without occasioning the smallest public remark.

Ketrick read it twice in his study. Then, against every instinct of restraint he possessed, he carried it to Odelina himself rather than leaving it for a footman to deliver. He found her in the library with a book open and unread in her lap, staring into the middle distance with an expression he recognized because he had likely worn it himself, alone, more than once these past weeks.

“Paraga writes,” he said, and held out the letter.

She read it without visible reaction. Folded it neatly along its original creases, and handed it back.

“One week prior to the eleventh. That gives us until the fourth to decide — and decide plainly, rather than dancing around the matter as we have both been doing since the night you told poor Hollis your regrets.”

She rose, setting the book aside with a care that felt to him like the opposite of the composure it was meant to convey.

“I will not pretend I do not know what I ought to do, Your Grace. I have no fortune, no great name, nothing to offer this house that a properly bred wife could not offer better. You have been generous in your fashion. Kinder than I expected. At times, kinder than I think you meant to be.”

Her voice caught very slightly on the last word. She mastered it at once, in the way he had come to recognize as her particular courage — not the absence of feeling, but the iron refusal to let it show where it might be used against her.

“I have begun writing to my cousin in the north, regarding whether her household might have use of a companion. I thought it only sensible, given the date.”

The floor of his own library seemed, in that moment, to tilt very slightly beneath him.

“You are looking for a position.”

“I am looking for a plan, Your Grace, in case you require one of me. I have found that women in my situation who fail to plan tend to find themselves considerably worse off than women who do.”

She met his eyes then, and there was nothing performed in it at all. Only a raw and terrible honesty that he understood, with a lurch, had cost her more to offer than any of her sharpest retorts ever had.

“I would rather know now than be surprised later. That is all I ask. I do not ask you to reassure me, Ketrick. I only ask that when the fourth comes, you tell me plainly one way or the other. And do not make me guess at the whole of you from the set of your jaw.”

She left him standing alone among his father’s books, with Paraga’s letter still in his hand. A fortnight. No more. In which to decide whether he was the kind of man who let the woman he had somehow, unforgivably fallen in love with walk out of his house to be some stranger’s companion — or the kind of man who finally said aloud the true thing he had been circling for weeks, before the silence between them hardened into something neither of them could undo.

He did not sleep that night, or the next. Turning Paraga’s letter and the calendar’s cruel arithmetic over in his mind until the numbers blurred into something that felt less like a legal deadline and more like a sentence being read against him. Five weeks had become far fewer within days, and Ketrick found himself for the first time in his adult life entirely unequal to a problem that could not be solved by authority, or coin, or the simple exercise of a duke’s considerable will.

He watched her in those days with the weary attention of a man observing a fire he feared he had let burn too low to save. She had not stopped speaking to him. Had not grown cold or distant in any way a stranger might have noticed. She still corrected Hollis’s arithmetic. Still rode out most mornings, though never again, he noticed with a private ache, along the river track where his hand had once fumbled with the buttons of her glove. But there was a carefulness in her now, a deliberate evenness to her voice whenever the subject of the coming weeks arose, that told him plainly enough she had begun, in earnest, to prepare herself for an ending she believed inevitable.

He found the letter to her cousin half-finished on the writing desk in the small parlor one afternoon. Left there by accident — or, he suspected, by weary carelessness that had nothing calculated in it at all. He did not read it. Some scrap of honor kept his eyes from the page. But he saw enough of the salutation and the date at the top, freshly inked that very morning, to understand that whatever composure she showed him at dinner was costing her considerably more than she let on.

“You are hovering, Your Grace,” his mother observed, finding him in the corridor outside the parlor some minutes later, still standing with his hand not quite raised to knock. “It is unbecoming in a man of your height. Say what you mean to say to her, or go and shoot something. But do stop haunting doorways like a nervous suitor. You are neither nervous, nor, as far as I am aware, still merely a suitor.”

“I do not know what I mean to say,” Ketrick admitted. Which was, for a man who had spent his whole life certain of his own opinions, a confession that cost him a great deal to make aloud.

“Then you had better discover it quickly,” his mother said, not unkindly. “Because I do not believe that girl intends to wait past her own good sense to be told plainly whether she is wanted. She has spent her whole life being informed by circumstance — if not by unkind design — that she was a burden rather than a blessing. I should think a man who loved her — and do not trouble to deny it to me, Ketrick, I have eyes — would wish to correct that impression a good deal sooner than a legal deadline forces his hand.”

He did not go to her that afternoon. He told himself the words were not yet ready, that a declaration offered clumsily would do more harm than a little more patient silence. But he understood, even as he told himself so, that it was very nearly the same cowardice that had kept him silent for eleven months already — merely wearing a more reasonable-sounding coat.