Page 73 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

He fell into step beside her.

“I asked you a question.” There was that familiar tone in his voice, as if he were reaching for a leash to rein her in. “Are you conducting yourself as a duchess should? Are you obeying His Grace? If you cannot manage your own husband, Rosaline, you’ll become a joke. And a joke reflects poorly on your entire family. And on me. Is there news of an impending heir? There should be talk of an heir if you are conducting yourself⁠—”

“Have you redecorated the hall?” She paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked with feigned interest at the new wallpaper. “It’s rather loud, don’t you think? Like it’s shouting to be heard.” She placed her hand on the banister. “Beatrice and Ivy are upstairs, correct?”

Samuel’s jaw tightened.

A year ago, his questions would have landed on her like sharp hooks, each one digging into the soft place they were meant for. She would have stood in this hall and felt herself shrink with every word. She waited for it to happen, but it did not.

He was a weak, disappointing man standing in a hall with loud wallpaper. He had spent three years controlling her life and growing larger in her mind, and now that he could no longer do it, he had shrunk to his real size, which she realized was not very impressive.

“You are as insolent as always,” he scoffed. “Marriage has not improved your disposition.”

“No,” Rosaline replied pleasantly.

She went up the stairs, leaving him gaping after her in his loud hall.

The nursery door had barely opened before someone barreled into her.

“You came, you came, you came!” Ivy had crossed the room like a cannonball and clung to Rosaline’s waist with all of her strength. “Beatrice said you might not visit because duchesses are very busy. But I told her that you promised on the frogs, and you never break a frog promise, and I was right.” She tilted her chin up, beaming. “Have you brought me a stag? Are we going to Scotland? Did you bring me anything at all?”

“Take a breath, you mercenary creature. I have brought myself, and that will have to do.” Rosaline crouched and gathered Ivy in her arms. She pressed her face into her sister’s hair, which smelled of chalk and jam and innocence, and she held on a moment longer than necessary. “Let me look at you. I believe you have grown five inches since I last saw you, and I forbid it. Stop growing at once.”

Ivy giggled and submitted herself to Rosaline’s inspection before launching into a tale of a frog she had smuggled into the house and then promptly lost. The ensuing catastrophe had banished her to the nursery for an entire day. Ivy was sure that the frog had emigrated to Scotland without her out of spite.

Rosaline listened and laughed at the retelling, and let the warmth of Ivy’s small body against her do its work on the cold thing that had been lodged beneath her ribs for days.

Across the room, Beatrice remained silent. She sat in the window seat with a book open on her lap, watching them.

Rosaline knew that look. Beatrice noticed everything—the weight she had lost, the shadows under her eyes, and the way she had held onto Ivy a bit too long. And judging by her expression, she had decided that something was very wrong.

“Ivy.” Her voice was quiet, but her eyes did not leave Rosaline’s. “Go and tell Cook that the Duchess is here and we will want the good cakes, not the plain ones. Stand over her until she promises. Take your time. Check the cakes personally, as this is a grave responsibility.”

Entrusted with an important task, Ivy tore off toward the stairs with the door swinging shut behind her.

When the sound of her footsteps faded, Beatrice turned to Rosaline. “Tell me who I have to ruin.”

“No one.” Rosaline settled into a chair and folded her hands in her lap. “It’s nothing, Beatrice. Simply a quarrel that every married couple has.”

“You have not slept, judging by the circles under your eyes. You have not mentioned your husband once, and you held onto Ivy as if you were saying a permanent goodbye.” Beatrice closed her book and set it down. She slid off the window seat and sat beside Rosaline. All the usual sharpness in her voice had gone quiet and grave. “I warned him, you know. At the wedding. I told him I read a great deal and never forget a slight. I told him that I would find a way to make him regret it if he made you feel small. I meant it then, and I mean it now. So, what did he do?”

Rosaline, who had kept the pain of the fissure with Magnus behind her teeth for a week and swallowed her words in Abigail’s drawing room, found that she could share it with her sister. Beatrice, who had shared with her all the good and the bad throughout the years, was the one person she could entrust with it.

So she told her. Not all of it. Not the dangerous heart of it with the names, because that was Magnus’s story to tell. And because she could not risk anything coming to rest on her sisters’ shoulders. But she told the shape of the quarrel.

Beatrice listened without interrupting, which for her was an act of superhuman strength. When Rosaline fell silent, she remained quiet, turning the story over.

“So he is a fool,” she concluded.

“Bea…”

“Your husband is a large, romantic, self-immolating fool, which is the very worst kind, because they think their nobleness is a virtue.” Her eyes narrowed. “I could put stinging nettles in his bed. I am not without resources. I could acquire a good, a truly vindictive good, and place it in his study. I have read several books on poisons, the kind that would force a person to spend several days hugging their chamber pot. Nothing fatal. I am not a monster.”

She was ticking off her methods one by one on her fingers, her tone entirely serious. Rosaline felt the corners of her mouth twitch upwards for the first time in a week.

Beatrice, however, was not done. “I could write him a letter so devastating that he would have to leave the country. I am excellent with letters. Or Ivy could simply pester him for an extended period, which no adversary in history could survive.”

“Stop.” But Rosaline was smiling helplessly. It both hurt and helped in the same breath. “You cannot goose a duke, Bea.”