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

Chapter 20

The old woman left at the end of the fortnight, and she left behind her, in the house, a great and unspoken absence, and she took with her, in the carriage, a promise from the boys that they would visit her in the autumn, and a promise, from Tom, that he would write to her, and that he would, in the letter he sent, tell her what he had done at school, and that he would, in a way that was exactly like him, include a great many observations that she would read and re-read and keep.

The summer passed, and it was a good summer. The school continued, and the girl who had read “The cat is on the mat” had, by the end of term, read an entire book, which was no small thing, and which Eleanor celebrated, because it was the sort of thing that deserved celebrating.

The Duke was quieter of late, but not in the way of a man who is cold, and not in the way of a man who is grieving, but in the way of a man who has come, slowly and with great difficulty, to a kind of peace, and who does not know what to do with it, and so sits in it.

And Eleanor, who had been a mender of linens, and who had been a woman who was, in her way, almost always alone, and who had been taken up, against her expectations, by four small boys and a man in a plain coat, and who had, in the course of two years, become a duchess, and a stepmother, and a wife, and the occasion of a school, and the mender of a great many things… found, in the last evening of the summer, that the thing she had been given was, in the end, a great deal.

She sat by the nursery fire that evening — the nursery fire in the house that had once held its grief like winter — and the four boys were around her, grown another inch, and no less inclined to argue over jam, and the Duke came in from the garden with a little of the evening’s warmth still on him, and he drew his glove off, and he crossed the room, and he did not ask her to forgive him for the interruption, because there was nothing to forgive, and he took her hand in his, and he sat down beside her, and he was quiet.

And Tom, older now and still the quiet watcher, looked up from his book, and he said, in his quiet voice, and with no one’s prompting, “Do you remember, the morning we found you, and asked you to pretend?”

“I remember,” Eleanor said.

“I thought,” Tom said, “that we were pretending. That day. I thought that we had asked you to pretend, and that you had, and that when we got home, it would be over, and we would have to pretend again the next year, and the year after, and that we would never have a mother at the gate.”

“And now?” Eleanor said.

“Now,” Tom said, “I think that the pretending was the truest thing that has ever happened to me. Because you pretended, and you were so good at it, that the pretending became real, and it has been real since.”

He looked at her, and there was something in his face that was not quite like a boy.

“I think,” Tom said, “that we did not ask you to pretend to be our mother. I think that we asked you, without knowing it, to be the person you are. And you were. And I would rather have you than anyone pretending to be someone they are not.”

The Duke’s hand tightened around hers, and he did not say anything, and Eleanor did not say anything, and outside the window, the garden, which had been frozen that first morning, was green in the last light of the summer evening.

And she thought, not for the first time, how strange it was that a morning could turn over entirely on nothing at all. A cup of milk. A cold table. A boy’s plain request, spoken like a lesson learned by heart.

It was not the grand gestures that proved a heart. It was what a person did for a stranger who could offer nothing back, when they believed no one of consequence was watching at all.

She laced her fingers through the Duke’s, and she did not let go, and she thought of a woman she had been, who had taken tea alone at the corner table of the Amble Street tea room, because it was the one hour of the day that belonged to no one else.

She was not that woman any longer. And she was glad, in the quiet, unremarkable way that she was glad of most things.

And the house, which had once been cold, was cold no longer.

The End.