Page 51 of Duke of Sapphire

She had done it on the road, without knowing she was doing it. A remark here, a silence there, the way he held a letter he had already decided to close. The laughing in the garden, unexpected and genuine, there and then gone. The cushion, placed without comment.

Henry had inherited the Dukedom at twenty-two, Lavinia had mentioned, in passing, in the drawing room. Then, there was the cousin in Scotland who had written every month, Nathan Drummond. She had gathered that Henry had sent quarterly estate summaries in return, which told her a great deal about both men. A man who sent estate summaries in response to letters was a man who did not know how to write the other kind.

She had been so consumed with her own situation—the escape, the relief, the uncertainty still waiting in London like an unpaid debt—that she had not fully turned and looked at his.

She looked at it now.

She watched Henry say something to Ian that made Ian sit up straighter with the expression of a child given a responsibility. Henry turned back to Tristan.

She looked down at her plate.

A footman appeared at Henry’s elbow. He held a small, folded note on a salver.

Henry took it. He read it in the time it took Charlotte to set down her fork.

His expression did not change. That was the problem. It was entirely still; in the way it went still only when something required controlling.

He folded the note. He set it beside his plate.

He did not look at Charlotte. He looked at Tristan and said something easy and light about the second course, and Tristan responded in kind.

Charlotte watched Henry reach for his wine. His hand was steady.

She picked up her fork. She did not taste whatever she was eating.

What was in that note?

She did not ask.

She sat at the warm table, in the easy light, in the comfortable company of people who had been kind to her, and she watched her husband’s face from the corner of her eye and she waited. She knew, with the particular certainty that had yet to fail her, that whatever the note had said, it was not good.

CHAPTER 15

Sappherton House was very tall. That was Charlotte’s first thought—not elegant, not imposing, not any of the words she had been composing herself to think during the last hour of the journey. Just tall. The black iron railings gleamed, the brass knocker caught the grey afternoon light, and before the carriage had fully stopped, the front door was already open.

“The staff has been notified of our arrival,” Henry said, stepping down first and offering his hand. “There is no need to be nervous.”

“I am not,” Charlotte said.

She was extremely nervous.

She took his hand, descended the step, and stood on the pavement of Grosvenor Square for the first time as its Duchess, which was a sentence she had not previously had cause to think.

The staff had assembled with quiet efficiency—two neat rows just inside the entrance hall. The indoor servants were in order of rank, their faces arranged into expressions of welcome that only wobbled slightly when Henry said, “Allow me to present my wife, Charlotte, the Duchess of Sappherton.”

The housekeeper—a compact woman of perhaps fifty, with iron-grey hair and a face that had clearly not received advance notice—did not move. She stood very still.

“Your Grace,” Mrs. Ellison said at last. “We are most honored.”

The butler beside her, Mr. Gedge, managed the introduction with rather more composure, though his gaze moved once to Henry and back.

Charlotte curtsied, which felt faintly absurd given that it was her house, and then remembered that she was the Duchess and that curtseying was for other people now and straightened.

You have managed a journey from Scotland. You have climbed a tree at midnight. You can manage a household. She was not entirely certain she believed it.

“Mrs. Ellison,” Henry said, already moving, “we will require the blue guest rooms made up for Master Ian. Charlotte’s chambers are in order, I trust.”

“Of course, Your Grace. Everything is prepared.”