“Let’s not thank them for that,” he said, his expression clouding. “I’m still angry at them for it, if we are being honest.”
This was so touching that she didn’t know what to say, and when she was silent, he smiled at her and held out his hand. “Shall we practice the cotillion?” he asked.
“Alright then,” she said, taking his outstretched hand. “If you insist.”
The steps in the cotillion were harder than those in the waltz, but she had also practiced this one many more times. It was one of the standard dances her own dancing instructor had goneover many times with her when she was growing up. Still, it had been years since she’d danced it, and as they began, the Duke immediately engaged her in conversation.
“You must practice talking during it,” he explained. “That’s how it will be in London. No one stays silent during a cotillion. It would be too boring, otherwise, as everyone is sick of the cotillion.”
“Well if everyone is sick of it, why do they keep doing it?” she asked, then she answered her own question. “Ahh yes, because it is tradition.”
“Tradition is very important,” the Duke said, moving away from her just as she also moved away from him.
“Tradition is overrated she said,” she said, as they came back together. “But I suppose that is why you and I are so unbelievable as a love match: you believe we should stick to the old ways, and I believe we should create new ones.”
She was testing him, she knew: she wanted to see how he would react to her mentioning a love match after she was so sure he had tried to kiss her. But if she’d been expecting this to elicit some kind of reaction, she was disappointed. The Duke remained calm and cool as he said, “Hopefully thetoncan believe that opposites attract.”
They continued dancing for a little longer in silence, and then Emery remembered she was supposed to be making conversation. Of course, the only kind of conversation shewanted to have was the serious kind. She wasn’t much interested in small talk. And although the Duke had been reticent to discuss himself and his family life in the past, she had a feeling that he would be more open to it now.
“Can I ask you about your childhood?” she asked after a moment. Immediately, and predictably, he stiffened, but then after several more moments of them dancing around each other, he seemed to relax again.
“What exactly do you want to know?” he asked at last.
“There were some things you said to me, in the carriage after the wedding, that I’ve been wondering about,” she said slowly. “You said that your parents had a love match but that it led to damage, that Henry had romanticized it but he hadn’t actually seen the harm it had done.”
The Duke swallowed. “Ahh. So, you want to know what I meant by that?”
“I suppose I do,” she said quietly. “And it might be nice for you to tell me, as well. Maybe… maybe if you don’t tell your friend, or your siblings, about your feelings, maybe you could tell me instead?”
He looked at her sharply, and she smiled softly. “I am your wife, after all.”
He was quiet for a moment, and she was afraid that she had offended him, that he might even yell at her again, like he had in the carriage. But when he spoke again, his tone was soft, even appreciative.
“My parents loved each other very much,” he began. “I’m the eldest by many years, so I was the only one who saw them as they really were. Everyone else heard stories of their love, but I witnessed it. And it truly was a joy to behold. That is, their love was radiant. I could see it in the way they looked at each other, even as a young child. When I was young, that’s how I thought all marriages were, and I was shocked, as I got older, to learn that most marriages are not.”
“So you admired their love?” she clarified.
“As a child, yes, I admired it. I even craved it myself, I suppose. I would imagine my own wedding and my future wife and I thought I would love as much as they loved one another. But as I grew older, I began to see firsthand just how selfish their love made them.”
Emery tilted her head to one side and gave him an inviting look, as if asking him to go on.
“They were very caught up in their emotions,” he said, with a faraway look in their eyes. “They would spend lavishly on one another and then go off on holidays to far-flung places, leaving the castle for weeks at a time. I know it’s normal for the upper classes to not take much of a hand in the rearing of their children, but this was extreme. They wanted nothing to do withus. And especially when the girls were very little, just babies, they would cry and cry for our mother, and she was nowhere to be found. I had to act as a kind of mother to my sisters, and I was barely out of leading strings myself.”
He shook his head, and she could tell, from the flash of anger in his eyes, that this was a difficult story for him to tell. “And that’s not to mention how much they drained our resources by the money they spent together or on one another. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, it wasn’t until I became the Duke that I understood just how much money my parents had wasted. Instead of putting money aside for the girls’ dowries or to help Henry--younger sons, as you know, are often left penniless by their parents--they bought each other expensive gifts and never once thought about their children.”
“I’m so sorry,” Emery murmured. They were still dancing, and she realized, with a jolt of surprise, that she had been so absorbed in his story that she’d completely forgotten to count her steps or even worry about the dance. It had become automatic; instinctive. “I didn’t know all this.”
“No one knows,” he said quietly. “I have told no one, and Henry wouldn’t have known anything about it to tell you.”
“How old were you when they died?” she asked.
“Fourteen. It was a carriage accident, I’m sure Henry has told you. Very tragic, of course. Devastating. I’ll never forget when I heard--and all the servants kept calling meYour Graceand I didn’t know what was happening, because that was my father’stitle.” He stopped, swallowed, and then kept going. “So I was mourning my parents, but at the same time, I was also thrust into all this responsibility that I wasn’t ready for. I was just a lad of fourteen and I suddenly was learning that my parents, whom I loved and missed terribly, had bankrupted the estate, and I had to fix it, but I didn’t know how, and meanwhile I also had to act as father to my younger siblings, who were still in desperate need of their parents. It was…”
He trailed off, and she didn’t press him to clarify exactly what it was like to experience such an onslaught of emotions and responsibilities when he was still only a child himself. She could imagine how difficult it had been. And the pain in his eyes was clear enough: it had changed him. Whatever kind of boy he had been before, this experience had turned him into someone else entirely.
Maybe he wasn’t overprotective and controlling before. Maybe he became this because he had to be in order to survive.
“I hadn’t even graduated from Eton,” he said with a hollow laugh. “And that’s what I had to deal with.”
