Frances looked up. “Fortunate?”
“To have you and His Grace to care for her.” The housekeeper’s smile warmed. “Whatever the circumstances were before, she is safe here. That matters a great deal.”
It was a simple thing to say. Perhaps even an obvious thing. Yet spoken without suspicion, without gossip, without the sharp curiosity that had followed the child everywhere, it touched Frances more deeply than she expected.
Safe here.
Was she? Frances hoped so. Fiercely, suddenly, she hoped so.
“She deserves to be,” Frances said quietly.
“She does,” Mrs. Carter agreed. “And I think she knows it, in her own little way.”
Frances almost smiled. “She knows when she is hungry, certainly.”
“That is a very important beginning.”
A small laugh escaped Frances before she could stop it. Mrs. Carter’s eyes brightened with approval, as though laughter in the house were as useful as clean linen.
“I shall tell Cook about the tart,” the housekeeper announced. “And have one of the footmen return for the papers later, unless Your Grace wishes to keep them.”
Frances looked down at the scattered columns. They had given her nothing: Andrew, evasive; Andrew, admired; Andrew, inthe country; Andrew, always keeping himself just beyond reach. Nothing useful, and yet not nothing.
“No,” she said slowly. “They may be taken away.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
Mrs. Carter dipped a curtsy and left the library. Frances remained among the old papers for a moment after the door closed. The room was quiet again. Sunlight had shifted across the carpet, catching the black ink of a headline near her shoe:A Duke Too Charming to Catch.
Frances bent, picked it up, and looked at the words one last time.
Charming? Yes.
Difficult? Certainly.
Impossible to catch? Perhaps. But not impossible to follow.
She folded the paper and set it back in the crate with the others. Mrs. Carter knew nothing. The gossip columns knew nothing. The house knew only what Andrew had allowed it to know.
Still, someone had known enough to ask questions. Someone had known enough to start the first whisper. And Frances, though oddly warmed by the thought of the baby safe beneath this roof, felt curiosity settle inside her more firmly than before.
There was a truth hidden somewhere, and sooner or later, she would find where it had been placed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“We have been invited to a house party,” Andrew said a few days later, at breakfast.
Frances looked up from her toast. Andrew had intended to introduce the matter with more ease, something casual, perhaps, something that would make the invitation sound like an ordinary social obligation rather than precisely what it was: an opportunity for society to inspect their marriage at close range and decide whether it satisfied curiosity.
But there was very little point in softening facts for Frances. She had a way of finding the sharp edge regardless.
“A house party,” she repeated.
“At Lord and Lady Pembroke’s. It begins in two days.”
Her brows lifted slightly. “And you think we should attend?”
“I think avoiding it would draw more attention than accepting.”
