Page 78 of A Duchess for his Family

For three days, Sophia and Benedict conducted their marriage with exquisite civility.

They said good morning. They inquired whether the other had slept well. They discussed the weather, the post, the condition of the south road, and whether the drawing-room chimney continued to smoke when the wind came from the east. They did not discuss the pond. They did not discuss Benedict’s words. Most particularly, they did not discuss whether their marriage had been a mistake.

At breakfast, Sophia sat beside Amelia while Benedict occupied his usual place at the head of the table. Silver covers gleamed beneath the pale morning light. The coffee smelled dark and bitter, the toast warm and faintly scorched. Every small domestic sound seemed unnaturally distinct, from the clink of a spoon against china and the rustle of a newspaper, to Marjorie’s knife scraping too loudly across a plate.

Sophia felt Benedict’s gaze upon her twice. The first time, she looked up too late and found him studying his correspondence with great severity. The second, their eyes met. His expression altered. So did hers.

Then Marjorie asked whether jam might properly be considered a fruit, and the moment was lost in a prolonged argument about preserves.

At dinner, Benedict held Sophia’s chair as he always did. His fingers came close to the bare skin above her glove, and her breath caught before she could prevent it. He heard. She knew because his hand tightened upon the carved wood. Neither spoke. Their silence filled Rivermere more completely than any quarrel could have done.

Sophia told herself she was angry. She repeated it while reading letters in the morning room and while walking the long gallery with Amelia. Anger was strong. Anger possessed dignity. Anger did not wake in the night with the memory of Benedict’s stricken face after he had spoken.

But beneath it lay hurt, and beneath the hurt something more humiliating still. She missed him. She missed his dry replies and his grave attention. She missed looking up from her book to find him seated opposite her, with one ankle resting upon the other knee, and his expression stern even in repose. She missed the way the room changed when he entered it.

Apparently, a husband could become a habit in less than a month.

Fortunately, the girls gave her little opportunity to indulge in misery. Amelia required assistance arranging her books according to a system she revised twice before luncheon. Marjorie discovered that the gallery’s polished floor was excellent for sliding in stockings, a fact which Sophia was forced to acknowledge before forbidding further experiments near the staircase.

They walked in the gardens, read in Sophia’s sitting room, and spent one rainy morning constructing a fortress from cushions and shawls. It was, Marjorie declared, a fortress under siege.

“By whom?” Sophia asked.

Marjorie looked surprised by the question. “Enemies, of course.”

“What sort of enemies?”

“The worst sort.”

Amelia, seated inside the fortress with a book across her knees, glanced up. “She has not decided yet.”

“I have decided,” Marjorie protested. “They are French pirates.”

“French pirates generally arrive by sea,” Sophia observed.

“They came up the river.”

“There is no river at Rivermere.”

Marjorie frowned. “Then they carried their ship.”

Amelia lowered her book. “All the way from the coast?”

“They are very determined pirates.”

Sophia pressed her lips together, but laughter escaped her.

By the fourth afternoon, the rain had passed, leaving the estate washed and shining. Water clung to the leaves in bright drops, and the air smelled of damp earth, roses, and the clean green sweetness that followed a summer storm.

Sophia sat beneath the old cedar near the west garden with the twins. Amelia was attempting to sketch a bird she had seen upon the lawn. Marjorie was attempting to improve the picture by adding a sword.

“It is a robin,” Amelia pointed out patiently.

“It may still require defending itself.”

“Robins do not carry swords.”

“That is why cats catch them.”