Page 78 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

She held on.

Behind her, she was distantly aware of Kenneth speaking to Carver in a hushed tone. The rustle of papers. The clink of coin. Carver’s murmured reply, professional and brief, and then the sound of the study door opening and closing as the investigator departed with the quiet efficiency of a man whose livelihood depended on his ability to disappear.

When Alice finally pulled back, she kept her hands on Rachel’s arms, as though releasing her would permit the last four months to reassert themselves.

Rachel’s face was wet. Her eyes, their mother’s eyes, were red-rimmed and exhausted.

“How long?” Alice asked. She did not look down. She did not need to.

Rachel’s hand moved to the swell of her belly, an involuntary gesture, protective and resigned in equal measure. “Five months. I knew before the engagement was announced. I should have told Father. I should have told you.” Her voice splintered on the last word. “But I could not.”

Alice looked at her sister, at the face she had measured herself against since girlhood, the face that had always been held up as the correct version of what a Haraway woman ought to be. And she saw, beneath the shame and the travel-worn exhaustion, a woman who was terrified.

“Sit down,” she said.

She guided Rachel back into the chair and pulled a second one close, their knees nearly touching, and then she turned to the young man who had been standing very still near the desk, watching the reunion with the expression of someone who understood he was not the relevant person in the room and had made his peace with it.

She recognized him now. He was a leaner, older version of the boy who used to come with his father to tune the pianoforte at Peltbury House.

“Mr. Mercer,” she said. “George.”

“Your Grace.” He bowed, and the bow held none of the practised ease of the men she had met in ballrooms. “I owe you and His Grace an apology that I am not certain I know how to make adequate.”

“You owe me an explanation,” Alice said, not unkindly. “The apology can wait.”

Rachel told her.

It came out in pieces rather than as a coherent narrative, the way confessions did when they had been held in for too long: the chance meeting at a shop on Bond Street, George grown into a man she barely recognized, the letters that began as friendly correspondence and became something else entirely, the trysts arranged through a network of sympathetic servants that Alice, who had lived in the same house and noticed nothing, found quietly staggering. Their father announcing the engagement to Kenneth like a verdict. The pregnancy confirmed by a physician in a rented room off Cheapside, with George holding her hand and neither of them speaking for a quarter of an hour afterward.

“I intended to marry the Duke,” Rachel said, looking at her hands. “I intended to let him believe the child was his. I had it all accounted for, Alice. Every detail. And then I stood in the vestry in my wedding gown, looked at the door, and I could not walk through it.” She pressed her lips together. “Not because of the Duke, but because of you. Because you would have been there, in the pews, believing I was someone I had already stopped being, and I could not bear you witnessing that.”

Alice sat very still. “Why did you not tell me?”

Rachel looked up, her eyes raw. “Because you believed I was good. You were the only person in that house who looked at me and saw someone worth admiring rather than someone performing a role. I could not be the one to show you it was a performance.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “I was supposed to be your example, Alice. I was supposed to be the one who did everything correctly.”

The words settled in the space between them.

“I was running away that day as well,” Alice admitted.

Rachel stared at her. “What?”

“The morning of your wedding, I had a bag packed at the servants’ entrance. I was going to find work as a governess somewhere no one would think to look.” Alice held her gaze. “I believed no one would notice I had gone.”

Rachel’s face crumpled. “Alice.”

“We were both leaving,” Alice said. “Both of us, on the same morning, from the same house. Neither of us thought the other would care enough to miss us.” She reached for her hand and squeezed it gently. “We were both wrong.”

Rachel pressed her free hand to her mouth and wept. Alice let her, because some things required weeping before they could be set down.

When the worst of it had passed, Rachel turned to Kenneth, who had moved to stand near the window with his arms crossed and his face arranged in the careful neutrality he adopted when giving people the room to be human without his interference.

“Your Grace,” she said. Her voice was steadier now, though only just. “I humiliated you. I left you at the altar and vanished without explanation, and I have no defence for it.”

Kenneth regarded her for a moment. “The circumstances have changed considerably since April, Lady Rachel.” He did not look at Alice, which carried its own weight. “What matters now is what comes next.”

George stepped forward. He stood straight, but Alice could see the tension in his jaw, the containment of a man about to make a case he feared would be insufficient. “Your Grace, I intend to marry Rachel. I have intended it since before any of this. I earn a good wage, and I will provide for her and our child.” He paused. “But Lord Peltbury will never consent. He will never release her dowry. And without his support, the situation becomes…”

“Complicated,” Kenneth supplied.