Page 58 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“Yes.” She went to the sideboard.

The plates were arranged in their usual order. She served herself without looking at him, and he crossed to the table. The distance they maintained was the same as it had always been.

At that moment, she could not have said whether that sameness was a relief or a particular form of cruelty.

She sat. He sat. The footman poured, withdrew, and left them alone with the bread and the butter and the sounds of the square beyond the window: a hawker moving along the far pavement with something in a cart, pigeons on the fence rail, the ordinary noise of a city that had no idea what had happened in a garden the previous afternoon.

“The Milton steward sent a letter,” Kenneth said, opening a note beside his plate. “Regarding the drainage on the north pasture. I had hoped the survey would take longer.”

Alice looked at the toast on her plate. She suddenly became aware of her own hands: folded in her lap, very still, in the particular way she had developed in girlhood for sitting in rooms where she was not wanted and could not leave. She unfolded them and picked up her knife.

“Do you have to go back?” she asked.

“Not yet.” He set the note down. “The estate can wait a few days.”

He reached for the marmalade. His hand moved past the butter dish, past the rack of toast, and she was aware of the trajectory of his arm the way she had been since the clearing.

She looked toward the window and watched the hawker disappear around the corner.

“Alice.”

She made herself look at him. He was watching her intently, without performance. The marmalade pot hung in his hand, forgotten. His eyes moved over her face once, deliberate, and then settled.

“Last night,” he said.

“Yesterday,” she corrected. “And I am perfectly well.” She found the word she needed and kept her voice even. “We ought not to⁠—”

The door opened. Freddie entered at full velocity, Charlie three paces behind, the governess in the corridor behind them both, already wearing a tired expression.

“Papa.” Freddie dropped into his chair. “There is a pigeon on the windowsill of the nursery. A large one. Charlie says it is injured, but I think it is merely fat. Can we keep it?”

The moment ended. Whatever had been beginning between them folded itself away, quiet and unremarked.

Alice looked down at her toast and was careful not to feel anything about that.

Her father arrived at half past eleven unannounced.

She was in the morning room with the household accounts and a problem regarding the linen delivery that the housekeeper had placed before her. She had been staring at the same column of figures for twenty minutes and thinking about marmalade when the butler appeared at the door and bowed.

“Lord Peltbury, Your Grace. He did not send word.”

No, he would not have. Sending word would have suggested that her answer might matter.

“Show him to the drawing room,” she said. “I will be there shortly.”

She smoothed the front of her gown and crossed the corridor. The drawing room was warm, sunlit, the long windows open to the sound of Grosvenor Square.

Her father stood before the fireplace with his hat under his arm.

“Alice.” He bent forward into the approximation of an embrace, close enough to satisfy decorum. “You look well. Country air agrees with you.”

“We have been in London for some weeks, Father.”

“Of course, of course.” He settled into the chair nearest the fire and looked around the room with the approval of a man pricing furniture. “Bearmoor House is rather fine. I had heard as much. One does not appreciate the scale of these ducal establishments until one stands inside them.”

“Shall I ring for tea?”

“Please.”