Page 64 of A Baby to Seal the Duke’s Fate

He waited. For someone with so much to say earlier, she certainly does not seem to want to talk now, he thought.

She held his eyes for a moment longer and then turned with deliberate calm and went back toward her rooms without another word. Leopold remained in the corridor and watched her go.

The house was silent around him, the nursery door still half-open. His mother’s actions and words grew increasingly odd since Cecily’s and Phoebe’s arrival. What was prompting such changes?

Chapter 12

Honora was in the kitchen before dawn.

The kitchen was dim and warm and still partly asleep, with the fire banked low and the first kettle beginning to whisper on the stove, the rest of Belgrave quiet overhead. No footsteps in the hall, no demands from the nursery yet, no need to pretend she belonged anywhere except the chair nearest the table.

Martha had already put the tea down in front of her.

Honora wrapped both hands around the cup and looked into it as though it might answer questions she did not want to ask out loud.

Martha sat opposite her with her own cup and a face that said she had been awake long enough to decide not to be polite about anything important.

For a while neither of them spoke.

Then Martha said, “What are you running from?”

Honora went still.

It was the first time the question had been asked so plainly.

Not what had happened, not who she knew, not whether she was hiding something.

Honora stared at the steam rising from her tea.

Martha waited.

There was no pressure in it. No sharpened suspicion. Only the blunt patience of someone who had already decided not to be embarrassed by silence.

Honora kept her eyes on the cup. “I am not running from something.”

Martha said nothing.

Honora drew in a slow breath. “I am running toward something I already lost.”

That was the truest thing she had said in days.

The kitchen went quiet again.

Martha looked at her for a long moment and then reached for the kettle, poured a little more tea into both cups, and set the pot down with care.

“In my experience,” Martha said, “the people who stay at Belgrave are the ones who stop running long enough to notice it is not a bad place to stop.”

Honora looked up then.

Martha’s face did not change. She did not press for more, did not ask what Honora had lost or whether the loss had a name, and only sat there with her tea, letting the words settle between them.

Honora should have lied.

A cousin, a debt, a disappointment, anything ordinary.

Instead she sat in the warm kitchen while the house woke slowly around them and found that she could not quite bring herself to move past what Martha had said.

Not a bad place to stop.