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

Chapter 9

She did not know then that he was, at that very hour, standing before Lady Aldous in the drawing room of the family seat, informing her with a coldness she had never before heard in his voice that she would remove herself to Bath by the week’s end, and that her letters, should she trouble to write any, would go into the fire unread.

He came to her rooms above the Mercer’s shop that evening, which he had never done before, and which was, she understood even as she opened the door to him, a considerable admission in itself.

He stood on the narrow landing with his hat in his hands, like a man who had forgotten, for once, how to be a duke.

“I did not come to ask you back,” he said.

“I came to tell you the truth, since I have clearly failed to make it plain enough before now.”

“Then tell it,” she said plainly.

“I watched you before you knew I was watching,” he said. “In the tea room. I stood at that window a full minute before I came in, because I wanted to see what you did when you believed no one of any consequence was looking. You wiped a child’s chin with your own handkerchief. You did not know his name was worth anything. You would have done the same for any cold child in that room.

“I have spent four years surrounded by people who are kind to my sons because of what my sons are. I did not know how much I wanted to be looked at the same plain way until you looked at me and saw a tired man in a bad coat, and were kind to him too.”

“I did not know you were a duke,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “That is the whole of why I am standing on this landing.”

She let him in, finally, out of the cold, and the small room filled with the smell of tallow candle and her own tea gone cold on the table. And he told her, in plain sentences that cost him more than she would ever fully know, of the surgeon’s fee and the widow’s rent and the school two villages over, and of the wife he had grieved honestly, and the sister-in-law he had finally, belatedly, sent away, and of the four sons who had not stopped asking after her since the day she left.

“I will not ask you to answer me tonight,” he said when he had finished. “I have learned this past week what it costs to press a person before they are ready. I will ask you again in the spring, if you will let me. And your no will be exactly as safe with me as your yes.”

She looked at him a long moment. The candle guttered once, and steadied.

“You may ask me now,” she said. “I find I do not need the spring.”