Page 17 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

“Are you talking to yourself or to her?”

Louisa looked up. Her mother stood in the nursery doorway, still in her evening gown, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders against the night chill, one hand resting against the doorframe as though she had been standing there for a moment already, watching, before making her presence known.

“A little of both, I think.” Louisa glanced down at Eleanor, whose eyes had grown heavy, fighting sleep still but losing ground with every rock of the chair. “She is not much of a conversationalist yet, whatever her opinions on the matter.”

Lady Henswick’s mouth curved. She crossed the room, her slippers soft against the floorboards, and settled into the chair opposite, close enough that Louisa could reach out and touch her knee if she wished.

“May I?”

“Of course.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Lady Henswick drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders and watched them both, the creak of the rocking chair the only sound in the room besides Eleanor’s breathing, slow and even now, drifting toward deep slumber.

Louisa let the silence sit, sensing her mother had come with something more than idle company in mind, and waited.

“I keep thinking,” Lady Henswick said eventually, her eyes fixed somewhere past Louisa’s shoulder, on the window and the dark garden beyond it, “that tomorrow you will not sleep beneath this roof again. Not as my daughter, living in my house. You will be his wife, in his house, and I shall have to make appointments to see my own child.”

“Mother—”

“Let me finish, please, before I lose my nerve entirely.” Lady Henswick’s hands twisted lightly in her lap.

Louisa recognized the gesture, one she had seen a hundred times before, her mother’s tell for a conversation she had rehearsed and still found difficult to have.

“I know this marriage is not what I imagined for you. I imagined a long courtship. A man who danced with you a dozen times before he ever worked up the courage to call. Some slow unfolding of affection I could watch happen across a Season or two.” Lady Henswick’s eyes finally flicked back to Louisa’s face. “Instead, you have arranged your own marriage in the space of a week, to a man you have met perhaps four times in your life, and tomorrow I am meant to stand in a church and give you away to him as though this were the ordinary way of things.”

“It is not the ordinary way of things. I know that.”

“I only want to know,” Lady Henswick said, quieter now, leaning forward slightly in her chair, “whether you are afraid. You need not pretend otherwise with me, of all people. I have known you since before you could form a single sign with those clever hands of yours, and I would rather hear the truth than watch you smile bravely through tomorrow because you believe that is what is expected of you.”

Louisa looked down at Eleanor, now deeply asleep, her small chest rising and falling in the slow, unhurried rhythm of a child with no notion of the argument that had once been fought over her future, nor the one being fought more gently over her guardian’s heart tonight. She let the question settle before she answered it, turning it over the way she turned over most things, unwilling to speak until she had examined it properly.

“I am not afraid of him,” she admitted.

Lady Henswick waited, saying nothing, giving her the room to continue.

“Whatever else I might say about the Duke, I do not believe he means me any unkindness.” Louisa’s thumb moved absently over the edge of Eleanor’s blanket, smoothing a wrinkle that did not need smoothing. “He has been clear with me from the start. Clearer than any man who has ever courted me properly. And I find I trust clear dealing more than pretty words.”

“Then what does frighten you? Something does. I can see it in your eyes, Louisa, whatever face you try to show your father downstairs.”

Louisa exhaled slowly, and the honest answer came easier than she had expected, drawn out of her by the quiet of the room and the weight of the sleeping child against her shoulder.

“Failing them.” She looked up and met her mother’s eyes properly. “Both of them. Eleanor, if I have judged this arrangement wrongly and it does not give her the safety I have promised her. And Kit, if I cannot reach him after all, if what happened in that schoolroom proves to be nothing more than a single fortunate morning that does not repeat itself.” Her arms tightened slightly around the baby. “I have made a great many promises this past fortnight, Mother. I am only now beginning to understand the full weight of keeping all of them at once.”

Lady Henswick rose from her chair, crossed the small distance between them, and knelt beside the rocking chair, taking Louisa’s free hand in both of her own.

“Do you know,” she said, “I have watched you make one decision after another since Nell died, and I do not believe you have made a single one of them for yourself.” Her thumb moved gently over Louisa’s knuckles. “Every choice, every single one, has been for Eleanor, or for the promise you made to a dying woman in a room I was not even permitted to enter. I am not certain you have once asked yourself what you want, only what is required of you.”

“What I want does not matter in this instance.”

“It does to me.”

Eleanor stirred against Louisa’s shoulder just then, a small huff of breath, and one tiny hand worked free of the blanket, fingers flexing uncertainly until they brushed against Louisa’s hand. Louisa curled her finger into the little palm, and Eleanor closed her fist around it, holding on with surprising strength. Both women went still, watching.

“Look at that,” Lady Henswick whispered, and the worry on her face eased at last into something warmer, something closer to the smile Louisa remembered from her childhood. “She knows exactly whose hand to hold, even asleep.”

“She has good instincts.”