Page 56 of Manufacturing a Duchess

“Alec, please, we need to talk.”

“We most decidedly need to do no such thing. No amount of money is worth this. This business arrangement of a marriage cannot proceed. I am taking my daughter back to the house and we will commence packing to depart. At once. Within the hour.”

“Alec, no! Alec, please! Please let me explain! I want you to understand!”

He ignored her and rode away. Marjorie broke down into sobs in front of him. But today, she did not lean into him for comfort. He set his mouth even more firmly as he put as much distance between himself and Aurora as quickly as possible. Behind him, he heard her call out to him again, and then her voice broke into wrenching sobs. That sound pulled at him so that it took everything he had not to wheel his horse around to ride back to her. The urge was so strong, he had to twice stop himself from doing so.

His face setting even grimmer, he kept riding away. I do not hear her, I do not hear her. She was in the wrong. This is unacceptable. This marriage cannot go forward. He heard his daughter’s quiet sobs as well. Marjorie will understand. I will explain it all to her. She is the daughter of a duke. She will have to see this was the right decision. He would make sure of that. Yes, he would focus on that, and not on the fact that his heart felt like it had just been ripped into a million pieces.

When Alec pulled up to the front of the house, he leapt down and tossed the reins to a groom before reaching up to lift his daughter and set her on the ground. Grabbing her hand, he took the front steps at a fast clip, barely slowing down to announce to the butler, “Call my man. And my daughter’s nursemaid. We are preparing to leave this house at the earliest possible moment. See my horse is curried and fed.”

At the foot of the stairs, Alec stopped, turned, and glared at the butler. “And I shall need my coach prepared and brought round. Can you see it is readied for me within the hour?”

The butler momentarily gaped at him but then pulled himself together. “Certainly, Your Grace. I shall see your requests are taken care of immediately.”

Alec grunted in assent. And then, picking up a scrap of the manners which he had torn into shreds over the last few minutes: “Thank you.”

“Of course, Your Grace, of course.”

“Come, Marjorie. We shall have to find Peg and start to pack.”

“I don’t want to, Papa. I want to stay. Where is Miss Aurora?”

“At once, Marjorie.”

* * *

Marjorie’s lip set mulishly, but she obeyed. She did not recall ever seeing her father this angry. She had seen him grouchy. She had seen him drunk once, when she found him passed out in front of the fireplace. How old had she been? Four or five? That had terrified her—she had believed he was dead. But she had never seen him this furious. While it frightened her, Marjorie suddenly felt a steel of her own begin to assert itself. We have not left yet, Papa, she said to herself, though she did not dare whisper it out loud. She continued to hold his hand and climb the stairs, nevertheless.

Forty-Six

Aurora could barely see Alec riding away with Marjorie, her eyes were so entirely blinded by tears. The strength of the sobbing, which took her by surprise, caused her to drop to her knees and bury her head in her arms. Any final doubts of how much she loved him dissolved. No, not dissolved, shattered. Her heart felt as if she were being stabbed with the shards. Still, he did not turn around. He did not come back. She heard the sounds of hooves receding, the soft thunk of the clods of earth displaced by the horse’s travel diminishing as she knelt there.

She lost sense of time. Her mind felt as if it had fallen into a sea of gray, which smothered all thought. Gradually, though, she became aware of the scent of the grass mere inches away from her face. Her legs felt stiff, and one of her feet had gone to sleep. A butterfly landed on top of her right arm, and she raised her hand to shoo it away. Her cap had fallen off, and her hair, plaited and woven around her head, lay bare to the sun. A few curls near her ears had become sodden with her weeping, and she brushed them away. She sat up straight and looked around.

Aurora was completely alone. She could hear the small stream a few feet away burbling without care through the trees; she could also hear the muffled sounds of the manufactory in the far distance. The midday sun beat down on her, though a soft breeze came through intermittently, drying the salty tear tracks on her face. The world around her was utterly normal, completely untouched by the emotional storm which had just swept through. It made her feel as if she were returning from some far-distant world, its echoes receding out of her reach as she knelt there.

A part of her wanted to run after Alec, begging him not to leave, telling him she would agree to everything he wanted. She would out-duchess any duchess; she would live to socialize and gossip; she would learn the arts of vapid conversation and forget about Homer and Keats and—and here she shuddered—Byron. Definitely no more Byron. Finally, yes, she would renounce the manufactory, once and for all.

As quickly as the impulse arose, Aurora rejected it. Not that, never that. Instead, she felt a sadder feeling take its place, fully aware for the first time of the emotional cost of going forward with what she wanted. Is this the person I have become? She wondered. Or the person I have always been, and now I finally know it? Regardless, she knew who she was now and how she wanted to live her life, mores and strictures be damned.

Yet she had hoped; she had hoped so very much.

The storm of tears had cleared away any remaining fuzziness in Aurora’s mind. There was a sudden and abrupt clarity, as if without noticing, she had climbed a high peak and the clouds were gone, revealing a landscape sharply etched before her, showing Aurora to herself. That clarity carried its own pain, because she could not call herself a victim here. Or at least, not wholly a victim in whatever this marriage “game” was.

Because she had muddled it all up with her impatience to introduce Marjorie to the place she had loved since she was very young. It had begun so simply: Why not show Marjorie the manufactory? And then, if she visited, it would be best to dress her in the way Aurora herself dressed on most of her visits, to keep both hair and skirts out of danger from being caught in the machinery. As Aurora had told Alec! But after the fact.

She knew it was not the thing to do, that this was not regular behavior by women of the proper sort (how her mother had reminded her of this, over and over again). In fact, she knew it was something she needed to explain to Alec. But this opportunity, this moment had arisen, and so she had grabbed at it. She could tell Alec later. He would understand after she explained. She never imagined he would actually see them. But then he turned up at the factory. The look on his face—and he had chased them! He felt he had to chase them. Because she had run away. She had panicked! As if she were in the wrong.

She was not in the wrong, she knew she was not. But she was, wasn’t she? She had behaved like a child, not thinking, just blithely doing. How stupid could she have been?

Once again, Aurora had tried to run before she had learned to walk. She wanted to share this world, her world, with this little girl she had come to care deeply for. But Alec was right. She was not Marjorie’s mother. And he was her father. She could now see that her world, the world of Aurora Hardcastle, and his—they could not meet. There was no way they could meet.

She felt the tears start up again. What had she been thinking? Her father had warned her. Perhaps if Alec had loved her? Or was that question more romantic fairytales? Nevertheless, it was clear he did not, yes? She almost groaned in frustration. All her poetry and her reading of Homer was utterly useless at this moment. Romantic, heroic absolutes did not work with the reality of life itself. What a naïf she was. Missie had been correct in her disdain—she, Aurora, knew nothing. Nothing. And the learning process was unbearably painful.

She pushed herself up to a standing position and lurchingly walked back into the trees, toward the stream. Kneeling down at its edge, she splashed the cool water against her burning cheeks. But even that did not provide her with enough of a respite. Impulsively, she reverted to an old (and often scolded) habit: she laid herself, full-length, down on the ground, keeping a good grip on the edge of the bank, and plunged her whole face, including the top of her head, into the water. She stayed submerged until her lungs began to burn, and then, gasping, she yanked her head out.

The bracing hit of the cold water brought with it additional clarity. This countryside was her home and had a comforting familiarity to it. But it was not the countryside which made its claim on her. Rather, it was the people: her parents, the house’s staff, Calum, the workers at the manufactory. They demanded something from her. If she had been a man, accepting this claim would have been taken as a given. As a woman? She was meant to toss it away and abjectly submit to her role.