Page 81 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The table went still.

Rachel’s hand moved to the swell of her belly. Her cheeks colored, and she looked at Alice, who looked back with a steadiness that held an entire conversation.

“I am,” she said.

Freddie absorbed this. “Will it live here?”

“No. Mr. Mercer and I will live elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“Dorset,” George said. “I have a position at a school.”

“Is it a good school?”

“I believe so.”

“Better than ours? Because our tutor, Mr. Pennworth, is very dull. He smells of ink and cabbage and once fell asleep during fractions.”

The corner of George’s mouth moved. “I teach music, not fractions.”

“Good. Fractions are a swindle. I have said this before, and nobody listens.” Freddie reached for another roll. “Can you play something after breakfast? There is a pianoforte in the drawing room that nobody uses. It may be out of tune. Everything good in this house is.”

Alice’s hand found Rachel’s beneath the table, and Kenneth saw it, the small motion of connection. The warmth that had settled behind his ribs that morning turned over again and did not leave.

Charlie had not spoken. He sat very still, watching George’s hands beside the teacup. Then, without looking up, he asked, “Do you draw?”

George turned to him. “I am afraid I don’t. Music is the extent of my talents.”

“That is all right,” Charlie said. “Music is a kind of drawing. It makes shapes in the air.”

The room held the sentence for a beat longer than it should have. Kenneth, who had spent seven years attempting to understand the workings of his son’s mind and had frequently fallen short, felt something give way in his chest that he did not attempt to name.

He sent the letter at ten. A footman carried it across the square, and Kenneth estimated, based on long acquaintance with Lord Peltbury’s habits and his hunger for ducal summons, that the man would arrive by noon.

He arrived at half past eleven.

Kenneth had spent the intervening hour in his study with George Mercer, who sat upright in the chair opposite and answered questions with the quiet directness of a man who understood he was being assessed and had decided against performing.

“You understand what you are asking of her,” Kenneth said. It was not a question.

“I understand what I am asking her to leave behind, Your Grace. I also understand what I am offering in return. It is not commensurate, in any material sense. I know that.”

“And yet…”

“And yet she chose it.” George met his eyes. “I did not ask her to run. I would not have asked that. She came to me, and I could not send her away.”

Kenneth regarded him for a long moment.

George Mercer was not a man who would command a room or win a seat in Parliament or manage a thousand acres. He was a man who played the pianoforte with skill and loved a woman with a fervor that had survived disgrace and poverty and months of hiding in rented rooms.

Kenneth, who had married his first wife because the duchy required an heir and his second because the church required a bride, found that he had nothing further to say on the subject of insufficient credentials.

“The cottage in Dorset is sound,” he said. “The roof was replaced last year. The school is well-regarded. The headmaster is a fair man.”

George inclined his head. “You have been more generous than I have any right to expect.”

“I have been practical. My wife’s sister will not live in want. The question of generosity does not arise.”