He held her gaze with an intensity that bordered on reckless.
“I will write to the surveyor,” he said. “About the mill channel. If the gradient supports it —”
“It will need to be measured. But the principle is sound.”
“Yes.” He did not look away. “It is.”
They spent the next hour over the maps. When the clock struck one, Rosamund realised she had missed luncheon entirely and Clara had almost certainly staged a coup in the nursery. She stood.
“I should rescue Parsons.”
“Parsons has survived worse. She weathered my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother was not six years old with a grudge against rain.”
She crossed the room. At the door, she turned back.
“Eat the tray, Tristan. Your tenants will not benefit from a duke who collapses from self-neglect.”
“Is that concern I detect, Duchess?”
“It is practicality. Dead dukes are notoriously poor at drainage reform.”
She left before he could answer—before the warmth in his expression could settle into a shape she would have to do something about. The corridor swallowed her footsteps, andshe climbed the stairs with her pulse running faster than the conversation warranted.
That evening, after Clara was asleep and the house had settled into its nighttime quiet, Rosamund sat at her writing desk to answer Eleanor’s letter. The quill hovered. She stared at the blank page, composing and discarding sentences.
From somewhere deep in the house—two floors below, behind closed doors—she heard the unmistakable sound of a pianoforte. A single melody, played slowly, played badly, albeit persistently.
She recognised the tune. It was one her mother used to play.
The quill dropped from her fingers. She pressed both palms flat against the desk and held herself there, very still, while the notes climbed through the floorboards and the walls and the careful distances he had built into the architecture of this arrangement, and reached her anyway.
He was learning her mother’s music. Without telling her. Without asking. Without any expectation that she would hear.
From the nursery, Clara murmured in her sleep. The melody stumbled, recovered, pressed on.
Rosamund picked up the quill.
Dear Eleanor, she wrote.I find I have rather less to say than I thought, and rather more to feel than I know what to do with. Come on Thursday. Bring the Cowper.
She sealed the letter. Set it on the tray.
The pianoforte played on—reaching for a melody it could not yet hold, refusing to stop trying.
CHAPTER 19
“How delightful that you could join us, Your Grace. We had begun to wonder whether the new Duchess of Rathbourne preferred her own company to ours.”
Lady Willoughby delivered the greeting with a smile so finely calibrated it could have been measured with instruments. She stood in the centre of her drawing room, every bit the society-trained woman who had been arranging people into advantageous configurations since before Rosamund was born, and the hand she extended carried the warmth of a hostess who already knew the temperature of every conversation she intended to conduct.
“You are very kind to include me, Lady Willoughby.” Rosamund took the offered hand and released it before it could become an examination. “I confess the invitation was a welcome surprise.”
“Surprise? Nonsense. You are a duchess now, my dear. Duchesses are not surprised by invitations. They areinconvenienced by them.” Lady Willoughby laughed—a sound like crystal tapped against crystal—and turned to guide Rosamund into the room. “Come. Everyone is simply dying to meet you.”
Dying was, Rosamund suspected, precisely the right word. The drawing room held nine women arranged across settees and chairs with the strategic precision of chess pieces. Tea things occupied the central table—Wedgwood, naturally, because Lady Willoughby’s taste was a weapon she wielded without apology—and every face that turned toward the doorway wore an expression of polished interest that concealed the sharper business underneath.
She knew this room. Not this specific room—she had never been inside the Willoughby townhouse—but the species of gathering it contained. She had attended dozens before the trial. Drawing rooms where women assessed each other’s gowns and prospects with an efficiency that would have shamed a stockbroker. Rooms where alliances were formed over seedcake and betrayals were conducted in the pause between pouring and sipping.
