She Was Having Tea Alone—Until Duke’s Quadruplet Boys Whispered Pretend You’re Our Mother…

Chapter 10

He crossed the small room and took her hand, and drew the glove from it finger by finger, slow and careful, as though the bareness of her hand were a thing that deserved its own ceremony. And when it lay uncovered in his, he pressed his mouth to her knuckles once, gravely, the way a man swears an oath.

“I love you,” he said, “for the pouring of the milk, and the mending of the hem, and the plain word you gave Lady Aldous in my nursery, and every kindness you never once expected to be repaid. Not for anything you rescued me from — I was not in need of rescue. I was only in need of being seen plainly, and you saw me before you knew there was any advantage in the looking.”

“Yes,” she said. It was the only word she needed.

They were married in the spring, quietly, in the chapel at the family seat, with four identical boys standing in a solemn row at the front, each one certain in his own heart that the wedding was, in some essential way, his own doing. The wedding was small, as such things went, though a duke’s smallest wedding is still an event the county speaks of for a year.

Lady Aldous did not attend. She wrote once from Bath the following autumn, a letter that arrived at the house and went, as promised, into the fire unread — though Eleanor, watching it burn, felt no triumph in it, only a quiet closing of a door that had needed closing.

Mrs. Pruit stayed on as housekeeper until her hands grew too stiff for the work, and was given a cottage on the grounds, and a pension no one made her ask for twice.

Mrs. Cole’s tea room became, without anyone quite planning it, the place the family took tea whenever they were in the square, and she never once let the Duke pay full price, on the grounds that she had known Eleanor first.