Page 8 of Bred By the Duke

She has moved her operation to the drawing room as instructed and has spread the seating plan across the card table, where it looks like the planning of a small war. Aunt Honora is already down, watching the workmen as they begin to arrive for their day.

“The marquee is up,” she says to no one in particular. “Cassia’s friend wouldn’t let them leave yesterday until it was done.” There’s the smallest hint of respect in her voice, which surprises me.

“Delphine lands tomorrow at noon,” my mother says, ignoring Honora. “Sanderson can collect her. You'll take her in to dinner at the rehearsal, and you'll sit with her at the breakfast, because Cassia's put you next to Theo's godfather, who is deaf in one ear and mad on the subject of trains.”

“Trains?”

“Don't be difficult.” She moves a card. “You're thirty-two, Lucas. Your father was married at twenty-eight and you were born the following spring, and I am not saying that to wound you, I'm saying it because there will be four hundred photographs taken in this house on Saturday and every one of them will be looked at for the next hundred years.”

“By whom?”

“By everybody.” She says it the way other people say by God. “The Corvain’s have known us since before the war. Delphine is intelligent, she has been raised to it, she wouldn't have to be taught a single thing. You could do the whole business in eighteen months without one difficult conversation.”

“You make it sound like a boiler replacement. Like an arrangement.” I push the card with my name out of alignment while I search for Rochelle’s.

“A great many marriages are, darling, and they last considerably longer than the other sort.” She looks up at me then, and there is something under the enamel that I don't often get to see. “I'm not asking you to be unhappy. I'm asking you to be sensible. I’m asking you to consider this because it doesn’t seem like you have an alternative option lined up.”

Honora speaks to the window. “Peregrine's dog has been waddling around the grounds.”

“Thank you, Honora,” my mother says.

I get as far as the hall before Gilbert calls. He wants to talk about the settlement, and the trust, and the way the Fernwicke arrangement was drafted in 1”11 by men who assumed that any duke would obligingly produce a son by thirty. He uses the word continuity five times. He uses the word contingency twice.

“There's no urgency, Your Grace,” Gilbert says, meaning the opposite.

I'm still holding the phone when Elsie comes down the east stairs with a small suitcase.

“What is that?” I ask.

Elsie goes pink to the ears. “Miss Gallacher’s suitcase, Your Grace. The Dowager Duchess said the blue room's wanted for Miss Corvain, so I'm to put Miss Gallacher in the yellow room for now.”

Something in my chest tightens and sends the message up my neck and into my jaw.

“Take it back upstairs, please. Unpack it exactly as she left it. The blue room is Miss Gallacher's, this week and every week she is in this house.” Elsie hesitates, caught between two authorities, and I take pity on her. “Tell my mother I gave the instruction. Tell her I was extremely rude about it.”

Elsie goes back up the stairs so fast the suitcase bangs the banister twice.

***

They come back at four. I'm on the south lawn with Barry, who is a good man with an unshakeable belief that every surface in the country has the potential to be a car park. I hear the car and then Cassia's laugh and Rochelle's, low and warm, and the tightness in my chest I’ve been carrying all day finally loosens.

I don't see her again until after dinner, and only because I go looking, which I am no longer pretending I'm not doing.

She isn't in the morning room or the kitchen. I find her, eventually, in the old laundry off the back passage, sitting cross-legged on the tiles in the dark with the door propped open and a lamp brought in from somewhere. She's made a bed out of two folded blankets and an ancient eiderdown, put down a bowl of water, and Nester is stretched along her thigh with her enormous gray head in Rochelle's lap and her ribs going up and down like a bellows.

Rochelle is stroking one long ear between her thumb and finger, over and over, and murmuring something to the dog that I can't hear.

Everyone in this house today has wanted something from me. My mother wants a photograph. Gilbert wants continuity. Cassia wants the perfect wedding. And here is this woman, who has every reason to be upstairs with the door shut against me, sitting on a cold floor at nine at night looking after somebody else's dog because nobody else thought to.

She looks up. The professional face starts to arrange itself. I get down on the tiles before it can finish, my back against the whitewashed wall, close enough that our shoulders are nearly touching.

“You'll ruin your suit,” she says.

“I have others.” Nester's tail moves twice against the blanket. “Rochelle. I'm going to say the thing you told me not to say this morning, and then you can throw me out.”

She doesn't tell me to stop.

“I'm not sorry it happened,” I say. “I'm sorry I left.”