“Stay,” he said. “Do not return to your room tonight.”
“I never do.”
“Stay longer. Stay until—” He exhaled, unsteady. “Just stay.”
She did.
Outside, the December wind pressed against the windows of Rovewood Hall, and within, a duke held a governess in the dark and gathered the courage to name what was growing between them—vast, ungovernable, and impossible to deny.
He was very nearly there.
Chapter Twenty
“Miss Weston, do dukes have mothers?”
Lorraine set down her teacup with the measured care of a woman who had learned that Thomas’s questions, however innocently delivered, tended to detonate without warning. “They do, as a rule. Dukes are not, to my knowledge, assembled from spare parts in a workshop.”
“Then where is His Grace’s mother?”
Jenny, folding linens by the nursery fire, went very still. Lorraine marked the reaction and tucked it quietly away.
“That is a question for His Grace, sweetheart.”
Thomas considered this with the judicial gravity he applied to all matters of importance. Seated cross-legged upon the floor, his watercolours spread before him, he worked at a female kestrel with the same exacting attention to plumage Dominic had encouraged the day before. The compass lay beside him on the rug—as it always did now—within arm’s reach, a small, steadfast talisman against the world’s uncertainties.
“Is she dead?” Thomas asked, with the bluntness peculiar to children and surgeons.
“Thomas.”
“Mama’s mother is dead. My mother is dead. Lots of mothers are dead.” He dipped his brush into burnt sienna and applied it to the kestrel’s wing with careful precision. “I only wish to know if his is.”
Lorraine exchanged a glance with Jenny, who did not speak this time, but only lowered her eyes to her work with sudden, studied absorption.
“Yes,” Lorraine said at last, her voice gentler now. “His Grace’s mother died when he was a boy.”
Thomas nodded, as though this confirmed a pattern he had already begun to suspect. “That is what I thought.”
He returned to his painting, frowning slightly at the kestrel’s wing.
She knew very little of Dominic’s mother. He had mentioned her very few times, in passing, during their late-night conversations, his tone flat and carefully neutral—the voice he reserved for subjects long sealed away.
There were doors in Dominic’s past that opened only from within; to force them achieved nothing but retreat.
Yet Thomas’s question lodged in Lorraine’s mind like a burr, and it remained there two hours later when lessons ended and she found herself—without quite knowing why—walking toward the long gallery in the east wing.
***
She had passed through the gallery before, but she had never lingered. The corridor was cold and dimly lit, its walls crowded with the accumulated portraiture of two centuries of Vanes: men in wigs, armour, and hunting coats; women in silk and lace, their expressions composed into aristocratic endurance; children posed beside spaniels they had almost certainly not been permitted to touch beyond the sitting.
Today, she lingered.
She moved slowly along the wall, reading the brass plates beneath each frame.Edmund Vane, 3rd Duke of Ravenswood, 1689–1741.A man with a jaw like a shovel and the air of one who had never encountered a difficulty he could not resolve with money.Catherine Vane, née Aldridge, Duchess of Ravenswood.Beautiful and remote, painted in blue that echoed the cool distance of her gaze.
Generation upon generation. The same grey eyes recurring like a familial signature—sometimes pale as winter sky, sometimes dark as a gathering storm. The same strong jaw. The same quality of stillness, as though even in oil paint, the Vanes withheld something essential.
She was halfway down the gallery when she found him.
The portrait was smaller than the rest—not a grand commission, but something more intimate, perhaps eighteen inches square, hung slightly apart from the ancestral procession, in the narrow space between two windows where the light fell soft and indirect. The brass plate read simply:
