Page 101 of A Mother for the Blind Duke’s Orphans

“Perhaps I am a fool,” she said more to herself.

Julia leaned closer and kissed her cheek. “Then you are in distinguished company. Most happy marriages require at least two.”

Poppy laughed despite herself, but the sound trembled.

The farewells took time.

The Duke of Berkshire approached them and bowed over her hand again. “Sterling deserves such a charming duchess beneath his roof.”

Poppy opened her mouth to retort, but Hector appeared suddenly and closely.

“Sterling deserves many things, Berkshire. Your commentary is not among them.”

Jasper only grinned. “A jealous husband to the last.”

Poppy felt heat rise to her face. Hector’s head turned slightly toward her, as if he had heard the change in her breathing.

When Julia and Leander departed with a sleeping Thomas in tow, she felt her heart ache with loss. Hector promptly went to his chambers, and Poppy walked around the ballroom one last time, imagining a different night altogether where she was wrapped up in her husband’s arms, swaying happily to the sound of soft music.

Later, in her bedchamber, sleep refused Poppy. The house settled into darkness around her, all its daytime movement folded away. She lay still for a long while, looking toward the shadowed outline of the door, conscious of the corridor beyond it and, farther still, the rooms that contained Hector’s life but not hers.

Poppy rose.

She did not call for a maid, nor did she light a candle. She moved through the house by memory, guided by the faint remaining warmth of the evening and the ache she had no wish to name. The ballroom drew her back not because it had wounded her, but because it had given her something beautiful at first. For one evening, the house had felt alive with music and laughter, and she had imagined what it might be to stand beside Hector not as an arrangement, but as a wife.

The room was dark when she reached it.

The candles had been extinguished or allowed to gutter low elsewhere. Only the broadest shapes remained: the pale suggestion of windows, the darker mass of furnishings along the edges, the open floor where the dancing had been. Without music, the room seemed to be holding its breath.

She froze when she saw Hector standing near the center of the ballroom. For a moment, Poppy did not move. In darkness, he seemed less like the Duke of Sterling and more like a man who had come too late to a place where he had wanted to be brave. His cane touched the floor at his side, and his head was slightly bowed.

I should leave.

Whatever private reckoning had brought him here, it was not hers to interrupt.

She stepped back as quietly as possible.

“Poppy,” his low voice echoed in the empty ballroom.

She closed her eyes briefly. “I am sorry; I did not mean to disturb you.”

“You did not.”

“I did not think that you would notice me.”

“In my own ballroom?”

“It is dark.”

“Yes.”

“And your eyesight⁠—”

“Is of little use at the best of times,” he said, not unkindly. “And even less now.”

Poppy walked farther into the room. “Then how did you know it was me?”

He turned toward her. The darkness hid his eyes, but she knew their color even without seeing them. “I know your scent.”