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

Chapter 4

The boys did not want to leave. The fourth one, the quiet one, tugged at her sleeve as they were herded toward the door and said, “Will you come tomorrow?” in a voice pitched low enough that only she heard it.

And she said, “I take my tea here most mornings,” which was not quite a promise, and was entirely one.

She watched them go through the window — four small shapes and one tall one, walking away into the frost — 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.

She did not know then that the man in the plain coat had gone straight from the school gate to his study and sent for the housekeeper of the Amble Street house he kept for quiet business, a woman named Mrs. Pruit, who had served the family thirty years and kept secrets the way other women kept linens — folded, and put away, and taken out only when needed.

He did not tell Mrs. Pruit why he wanted to know the particulars of a mender of linens on the corner of the square. He only asked her to learn them quietly, and to trouble no one in the asking.

Mrs. Cole, for her part, spent the rest of the day telling anyone who would listen that the Duke of Harwick had stood in her tea room not two hours past, though she had not known him for a duke until his coachman finally caught up with the party outside and called him your grace in a voice gone thin with relief. The name went round the square by supper.

It did not reach Eleanor. She was three streets over, hemming a hem and thinking of small cold hands, and not at all of dukes.

The following morning she came to the tea room at her usual hour, not because she expected the boys, but because it was where she always sat, and the frost had not lifted, and the tea was, as ever, the one comfort she allowed herself without apology.

She had not been seated five minutes when the door opened and four familiar shapes came through it, followed at a slower pace by the tall one in the plain coat, who this time did not linger in the doorway, but came directly to her table and asked, with a formality that sat oddly on a man who had chased his own sons across a frozen square the day before, whether he might sit.

“It is a public tea room,” she said. “You do not require my permission.”

“I would rather have it,” he said, “than not.” And he sat.

The boys arranged themselves as before, and Mrs. Cole brought the pot without being asked, and for a while there was nothing but the small business of milk and sugar, and four boys arguing in whispers about which of them had the most jam.

Eleanor watched the man across from her. He did not eat much. He watched his sons the way a man watches a fire he has only just gotten to catch — careful not to disturb it, grateful it was burning at all.

“You are not from the square,” she said. It was not quite a question.

“I keep a house two streets from here,” he said. “For quiet.”

“And your sons’ mother?”

“She died bringing them into the world,” he said, without drama, the way a man says a thing he has said many times and worn smooth with the saying. “Four years past.”

She did not offer him sympathy dressed up in soft words, because she had learned from her own losses how little that kind of softness was worth to a person actually grieving. She only nodded and said, “That is a great deal of boy to raise alone.”

And he almost smiled at that — an unpracticed thing that did not sit easily on his face, as though the muscles for it had gone stiff from disuse.

“It is,” he said. “I manage it badly most days.”

“You managed yesterday well enough.”

“Yesterday I was frightened out of my wits, and found you had done the managing for me.”