The words stung, but he allowed it. “You’ll be the child’s nurse. Or her governess. Or her…” The wordmotherdied on his tongue. Lady Rose did not respond. She only rocked the child. Her lips were pressed white with fury and fatigue. Felix turned to leave the room. “We will leave in an hour. Start packing whatever you may need.”
“This can never happen. No one will accept an unmarried woman living at your house.”
Felix’s posture stiffened in the cold. His eyes were sharp, biting when he spoke. “Then we shall wed. No room for scandal or questions.”
Lady Rose’s face morphed into disgust. “You expect me to believe that you would wed a near-stranger to save face?”
“I expect you to believe that I would wed a near-stranger to give that child a name,” Felix said. “Whether it saves my face is beside the point.”
She shook her head. “Marriage is not an instant solution to all of your problems, Your Grace.”
“No. But it is the solution to Lizzie’s.”
The words landed where he intended them to. Lady Rose said nothing. She looked down at the baby, at the way Lizzie’s fist had curled into the wool at her shoulder, trusting, and blind to all of it.
“You did not help Julia,” she said at last, her voice quieter now, stripped of its edge. “You can’t even remember how many women you’ve ruined, let alone name the ones you’ve abandoned. Why should this be any different?”
“Because she is here,” he said. “And I am here. And whatever I was before, I am asking you now.”
The silence stretched. Lady Rose’s jaw tightened. She was working through something, he could see it—not persuaded, not yet, but no longer certain she could hold the line.
“I will not be managed,” she said finally. “Not by you nor by whatever arrangement you think tidies this away.”
“I am not asking you to be managed. This is for Lizzie.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“If I agree,” she said slowly, “it is for her. Not for you. Not for your name or your roof or whatever peace of mind you imagine this purchases.”
Felix held her gaze. “Understood.”
She looked down at Lizzie once more, and something in her face closed over. The expression resolved itself into the flat, exhausted features of a woman who had run out of better options.
“Then we are agreed,” she said. “For her.”
A line from Ovid floated up into his memory.Aut amat, aut odit mulier; nihil est tertium.
A woman either loves or hates. There is no third option.
He wondered which one she was closer to just now.
Felix bowed and turned, striding down the corridor, calling behind him, “You will find my words are ironclad. We have one hour to settle business, Lady Rose, and then we will leave.”
In all of her time at the abbey, Rose knew the cloistered corridors of St. Clement’s had never seen such a spectacle: Felix, immaculate even in the dim hall, striding forward with her and the bundled baby at his side.
She could not believe they had come to this arrangement in such a short space of time. A few moments earlier, she was to be the guardian of her late friend’s child. Now she was also to be the wife of a duke. It was a lot to take in.
The duke’s boots rang with authority and certainty against ancient flagstones, echoing down the passage.
Ahead, the younger novices arrayed themselves in a loose blockade of feigned indifference, their heads bent studiously over nonexistent tasks. Every eye tracked the progress of the odd little family.
Rose kept her focus straight ahead. Lizzie had woken during the walk, and she now regarded the world with a damp solemnity,her jaw working as she contemplated whether to laugh or scream.
Felix broke their momentum and stopped in front of the Mother Superior’s office. The door was already open, as if the old woman had anticipated their immediate return.
Rose found herself pitying the woman as they stepped inside. For all her cruelty, she had run this bleak institution longer than Rose had been alive, and now her carefully calibrated order was being upended by a man who swept in, paid his tithe, and left chaos in his wake.
Mother Superior’s gaze did not move from the baby. “You return quickly, Your Grace.”
