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

Chapter 7

That evening the Duke found Eleanor in the corridor outside the nursery, her arms full of mended linens, and he had the look of a man who had heard the whole of the story already, likely from Tom, who told his father everything eventually, in his own quiet time.

“She will not trouble you again,” he said.

“She already has,” Eleanor said. “And I have already survived it. I am not made of glass, your grace.”

“No,” he said, and there was something in his voice that had not been there before — low, and certain. “I am beginning to understand that.”

She did not know then that Lady Aldous had gone that same night to write a second letter. This one not to family, but to the sort of person who traded in whispers for a living, and that within the week the whispers would reach further than the nursery, further than the square, into rooms where a duke’s reputation could be quietly, expensively unmade.

The whisper, when it came, was simple and cruel in the way only a well-aimed simple thing can be. That the Duke of Harwick had installed a common woman in his nursery under the pretense of governess, and that his late wife’s memory was being insulted daily by a mender of linens who had, by some accounts, set her sights considerably higher than the nursery.

It did not matter that none of it was true. It only mattered that it was said, and said in the right drawing rooms by the right mouths, until it took on the weight of fact by sheer repetition.

Eleanor heard it first from Mrs. Cole, who heard everything, and who told her with the particular gentleness of a woman delivering bad news she wished she did not have. Eleanor did not cry in the tea room. She had trained herself long ago not to cry where it showed, and she did not break that training now, though her hands, when she lifted her cup, were not quite steady, and she set it down again rather than let anyone see.

She went to the house that afternoon and found the Duke in his study, and she told him plainly that she thought it best she resign her position before the talk did more harm to the boys than any pastry lesson could undo.

“You would let them win,” he said.

“I would let the boys keep their father’s good name,” she said. “It is not the same thing.”

“It is exactly the same thing,” he said, and for the first time since the tea room she saw something like anger in him, though it was not aimed at her. “You have done nothing but good in this house since the day you sat four cold boys down and poured them milk. I will not have you punished for it.”

“It is not your choice to make, your grace,” she said. “It is mine, and I have made it.”