Page 24 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

The second course arrived, and conversation drifted easily from Kit to Eleanor, Louisa describing the changes she intended to make to the nursery like a different set of curtains, perhaps, and softer blankets for the cradle, along with a few other small comforts she thought Eleanor might need.

To his surprise, Julian found himself offering opinions rather than simply permissions, suggesting the room that had once been his nursery might suit better than the one currently assigned, given its proximity to the wet nurse’s quarters.

“You remember your nursery well enough to have an opinion on its merits?”

“I remember it well enough to know it had better light in the mornings than the room currently in use, and considerably less draft in the evenings. Beyond that, I confess my memories of it are somewhat vague. I was rather young when I left it for the schoolroom, and my father was not a man who encouraged lingering fondness for childish spaces.”

“That is rather sad, said so plainly.”

“It is merely a fact, Duchess. I have found sadness a poor use of energy better spent on practical matters.” But something in his voice did not entirely match the words.

Louisa did not press further, sensing correctly that the subject had reached the limit of what he was prepared to offer this evening.

She asked question after question, genuinely curious rather than merely polite, and he found the answers coming easily, more easily than they had in any dinner conversation he could readily recall, the words arriving without the usual effort of feigning interest he associated with most social interactions.

By the time the final course had been cleared and the candles had burned down, Julian realized, with some private astonishment, that the better part of two hours had passed in easy, uninterrupted conversation, and that at some point during the second course he had stopped noticing the unfamiliar closeness of the rearranged place setting.

It occurred to him, not without surprise, that he had spent years dining in silence without ever questioning the habit. He had thought the absence of conversation preferable to the strain of making it. Yet Louisa possessed the uncommon ability to speak without exhausting him.

She filled the spaces naturally, asked questions worth answering, and expected nothing from him beyond honesty. It was… not unpleasant. Indeed, he found he rather preferred it to another evening alone with only the sound of cutlery and the mantel clock for company.

* * *

Louisa climbed the stairs afterward with a single thought following her the whole way up, small and unexpected and entirely unwelcome in its persistence.

Ashvale Park does not feel quite so lonely tonight.

She paused at the top of the staircase, considering the thought properly, turning it over the way she turned over most things that troubled her.

The house had felt, upon her arrival that afternoon, beautiful but hollow, every room too large, too still, too carefully arranged for people who no longer properly lived in it. She had felt the weight of that stillness pressing down on her the whole length of Mrs. Whitfield’s tour, and had wondered whether she had married into a house rather than a family.

Tonight, walking toward her rooms with the echo of two hours’ easy conversation still settling pleasantly in her chest, the house felt different. Not transformed, precisely. Simply less empty than it had a few hours ago.

It is only because dinner went well, she told herself firmly, continuing down the corridor toward her chamber. We spoke of Kit’s lessons, the nursery, the harvest, and his boundary dispute with the Alderleys, and found that we have a great deal to discuss when the subject is practical rather than personal. That is all this is. A marriage of convenience proceeding rather more smoothly than either of us had any right to expect, and nothing more complicated than that.

She reached her door and paused there for a moment, hand on the handle, replaying the warmth that had crept into Julian’s voice as he mentioned his tenant families by name, the unexpected ease with which he had answered every question she’d put to him, the brief unguarded honesty of his answer about his childhood nursery, offered and then quickly set aside as though he had surprised even himself by saying it aloud.

Nothing more than that…

She let herself mostly believe it, then went to bed.

CHAPTER 12

“Your Grace, will you take the eggs or the kippers this morning?”

“Both, I think.”

“Very good, Your Grace. Is there anything else you require?”

Julian considered a moment before folding the letter. “No, thank you.”

He sat alone at the breakfast table, the morning light falling pale and clean through the tall windows, the house around him stirring awake—footsteps on the stairs, the distant clatter of pots from the kitchens below, a door opening somewhere above that might have been the nursery. He found himself listening for that last sound rather more closely than he had any occasion to before yesterday.

“Simmons.” His butler had appeared at the sideboard to refill his coffee, and Julian addressed him without quite looking up from his letters. “Has the wet nurse and the child settled in comfortably?”

“I believe so, Your Grace. Mrs. Whitfield saw to her rooms personally, and I’m told the child slept through most of the night, which I understand is no small mercy for a household unaccustomed to infants.”

“No, I imagine it is not.”