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

Chapter 12

The boys, in the months that followed, taught Eleanor more about her own husband than he had ever told her himself, and she thought sometimes that this was the great irony of the whole arrangement — that a duke, who could command the attention of every drawing room in the county, had left the most important telling of his own story to four small boys who had not the least idea they were delivering it.

It was Edmund, the third boy, who first let slip the matter of the birthdays.

“Papa never has his birthday,” Edmund said one evening, with the air of a child announcing a monstrous injustice. “I asked him, and he said a man’s birthday is a thing for children and he did not see the use of it.”

“Edmund,” said the eldest, whose name Eleanor had learned was William, in the particular tone of a boy who has been given responsibility he never asked for. “Papa did not say you could tell that.”

“He did not say I could not,” Edmund said, and returned to his pastry with the serene confidence of a child who has found a loophole and intends to exploit it to the full.

Eleanor said nothing about it that evening. But she remembered.

She asked Mrs. Pruit, without making much of it, when the Duke’s birthday fell, and Mrs. Pruit told her, and then said, with a look that was almost a smile, “And I have not told you so that you could do something with it.”

“No,” Eleanor said. “Of course not.”

The birthday fell on the third of February, in the depths of the winter, and Eleanor spent a fortnight preparing for it in a way that made none of the preparations to him. She could not give him the sort of thing a duke would want — he had every thing a duke could want, and the wanting of it was precisely the problem. So she gave him, instead, the thing no one had thought to give him in four years.

She had the boys each write him a letter. Not the letters a governess would have supervised, stiff and correct and thanking him for his paternal care. Real letters, in the wavering scrawl of boys who had never been asked to say such things in writing, and who therefore said them with a directness that no adult would have dared.

William wrote that he thought Papa was the strongest man in England, and that he intended to be like him, except that he would not be so quiet.

The second boy, whose name was Henry, wrote that he missed Papa at supper when Papa was in his study, and that if Papa would come to supper more, he would stop asking for a second pudding, which was a lie, but he thought it might work.

Edmund wrote a letter that was, in the main, a detailed account of a method he had invented for making a poultice stay on a horse’s leg, and appended at the bottom, almost as an afterthought, that he loved Papa more than his horse, and asked that Papa not tell the horse.

And Tom, the quiet one, who watched everything, wrote only a single line, in a hand that was careful and small.

I like when you are in the room. It was signed, simply, Tom.

Eleanor read them all before she wrapped them, of course, because she wanted to make sure they were not so foolish as to embarrass him. And she read Tom’s, and wept, and then did not know why she was weeping, and had to sit down.

On the third of February, she gave the Duke the letters, and told him they were from the boys, and she said nothing else. She did not stand over him while he read them. She went to the window and looked out at the frost on the garden, and pretended not to see, in the reflection of the glass, the way his hand trembled as he lifted the final page.

When he spoke, his voice was rough. “You did this.”

“I helped them write it,” she said. “The words are their own.”

“The words are their own,” he repeated, and there was something so raw in the repetition that she turned from the window.

He was not looking at her. He was looking at the letters, at the last one, at the single line, and he said, in a voice that had lost all of its duke in it, “I did not know they knew. I thought I had been careful.”

“No,” Eleanor said gently. “You had been careful not to let them see you grieve. But you had not been careful enough to hide from them that you love them. No one can do that. And you should not want to.”