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

Chapter 3

She did not know that this was the single truest thing he had seen anyone do in a year, and that he intended to find out exactly who she was.

The Duke of Harwick had been called many things by many people, most of them true — grave, exacting, difficult to read. He had not been called warm since his wife died, bringing four sons into the world at once, an event so unlikely that the physicians had spoken of it for a year afterward, as though it were a comet.

He had raised the boys since, with the particular terror of a man who did not trust himself with soft things, and that morning the governess had taken ill. On the way to school, a wheel caught hard in a rut near the square, and while the coachman climbed down to inspect it, the four boys — having already decided that a mother must somehow be found before they reached the school gate — slipped out through the opposite door. By the time the coachman straightened, they had vanished into the morning crowd. He had searched the square with his heart going like a hammer against a nail that would not sit straight, and he had come at last to the tea room window, and found them safe, warm, fed, sitting in a row with a strange woman who did not know his name and would not have cared for it if she had.

He did not go in at once. He stood in the cold and watched a moment longer, because he wanted to see what she did when she believed no one who mattered was looking.

She wiped a spot of milk from the fourth boy’s chin with the corner of her own handkerchief. She did it without thinking, the way a woman does a thing she has done a hundred times, though she had never had a child of her own to do it for.

That was the moment he decided. Not the tea. Not the kindness of sitting them down. The handkerchief.

When he came through the door, the bell above it rang thin and bright, and four small heads turned at once, and the eldest boy said, “Papa,” in a voice gone suddenly young and relieved, and scrambled down from the bench to catch him around the knees.

Eleanor rose. She did not curtsy, not knowing yet that the plain coat concealed a title, and even after she came to know it, she would never quite manage to curtsy to him properly — a fact that would come to please him more than he ever admitted.

“Forgive them,” the man said. His voice was low, worn thin at the edges with the fright he was only now letting go of. “They are not in the habit of commandeering strangers.”

“They were cold,” Eleanor said. “And it was no trouble.”

“It was tea and milk and an hour of a stranger’s morning,” he said. “That is not nothing.”

“It is not much either,” she said, and reached for her own cup, which had long gone cold, and drank it anyway, because she did not like waste.

He did not offer her money. He would think of that later and be glad of the omission, because she would have refused it and been offended by the offering, and he did not yet understand how close he had come to insulting the very thing that had stopped his heart in the doorway.

What he did instead was ask her name, plainly, the way a man asks a thing he intends to remember.

“Vance,” she said.

“Eleanor Vance.” He left it there, no more forthcoming than that, and she took it for a surname of no particular consequence, the way she took most things, without curiosity to spare.

She did not know then that he was a duke, and that a duke did not, as a rule, walk his own sons to school gates in a plain wool coat with no footmen in sight, and that he had been doing exactly this every day since the fever took his wife, because he did not trust the raising of four identical boys to anyone he had not watched with his own eyes.

She did not know that the coldness in his face when he thanked her was not coldness at all, but a man working very hard not to show how much the sight of her — patient, unbought, gentle with children not her own — had undone something in him he had thought was done being undone.

She learned the reason for their escape before they left the tea room. William, with the solemn courage of a child confessing a crime, explained again about the mothers at the school gate. The Duke closed his eyes for a moment, understanding at last what his sons had been trying to solve without him.

Eleanor might have let the matter end there. Instead, when Tom asked in a whisper whether she would still come, she looked at the four anxious faces and then at their father. He did not presume to answer for her.

So she walked with them to the school. She stood beside the Duke at the gate while other boys arrived with mothers, aunts, and elder sisters, and when William reached for her hand she let him take it. She did not claim a name that was not hers. She was simply there. For the four boys, that was enough.