Page 45 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“That’s a very limited definition of exploration,” Freddie called back, but he did not disappear beyond the birches.

Charlie settled on a flat rock near the water and pulled the telescope from his pocket. He trained it on the far bank, where a pair of wagtails were working their way along the mud.

Jonathan tied the horses and came to stand beside Alice, a few yards from where Charlie sat. For a while, neither spoke. The stream filled the silence between them, and Alice let it, grateful for a sound that demanded nothing.

“He will come round, you know,” Jonathan said quietly. “Kenneth is not good at this. He never has been.”

Alice picked at a strip of bark peeling from the birch. “Good at what, precisely?”

“Any of it. Conversation. Apology. The basic mechanics of existing in proximity to a person he cares about.” Jonathan paused. “He was not raised to it. His father was a cold man. Exacting. The sort who believed that affection was a weakness to be trained out of a son the way one trained a horse not to shy at shadows. Kenneth learned early on that the safest course was to feel nothing, or at least to appear as though he felt nothing, and he has spent thirty-three years perfecting the performance.”

“He is very good at it,” Alice sighed.

“He is excellent at it. The finest emotional fortification I have ever encountered. Walls so high and thick that the man inside them has forgotten there are doors.” Jonathan glanced at her. “You are the first person I have seen make him forget to lock one.”

Alice’s hand stilled on the bark. She did not look at him.

“I want to tell you about Theresa,” he added. “Because he never will. And I believe you deserve to know.”

Alice turned. Jonathan’s face held no trace of its customary humor. He looked tired, and fond, and rather sad. For a few seconds, she considered dissuading him, telling him that it was none of her business.

“Tell me,” she demanded.

He picked up a stone from the bank and turned it over in his fingers. “Theresa was the daughter of a viscount. Pretty, kind, quiet. A good match by every measure that Society considers relevant: breeding, dowry, temperament. Kenneth’s father had been dead for two years by then, and the duchy needed an heir. Kenneth did his duty. He proposed. She accepted. They married soon after.”

He tossed the stone into the stream. It broke the surface and vanished.

“He was never in love with her,” he continued. “He respected her. He was kind to her in his own way. But he married her because the estate needed stability, and she was available and willing and came recommended by people whose judgment he trusted. He chose a wife the way he chose a steward or a solicitor: on credentials. On suitability. On the reasonable assumption that competence and proximity would produce stability, if not happiness.”

Alice pressed her palm flat against the birch trunk. The bark was rough and cool beneath her skin.

“Theresa was ill almost from the start of her confinement.” Jonathan’s voice had dropped further. “The physicians could not agree on the cause. Some blamed her constitution. Others said the pregnancy itself was the problem, that her body was not suited to carry a child, let alone two. Kenneth brought every doctor he could find. He spent a fortune. He sat outside her chamber for days at a time while she grew weaker, and there was nothing he could do. Nothing any of them could do.”

In the distance, Freddie’s voice rose in triumph. He had found a frog, or a particularly interesting stone, or perhaps the heron he had been hunting since breakfast. The sound carried across the water, bright and untroubled and very young.

“She died in labor,” Jonathan sighed. “The twins survived. Theresa did not. And Kenneth has carried the guilt of that ever since. Not the grief, you understand. The guilt. Because he did not love her, and she died bearing his children. He tends to believe that he is responsible for whatever misery anyone around him suffers.”

Alice’s throat constricted. She swallowed against it and kept her eyes on the stream, on Charlie’s small figure crouched at the water’s edge, on the sunlight catching the brass of the telescope.

“He punishes himself,” Jonathan said. “Every day. Every closed door, every avoided conversation, every time he retreats into his study and his ledgers and his schedules. He has built a life designed to ensure that no one gets close enough to be harmed by proximity to him. He believes he failed Theresa. He is terrified of failing his boys.”

Alice pressed her fingers against the bark until the ridges left white impressions on her skin.

She thought of Kenneth’s face in the candlelight, the door closing on their wedding night, and the distance he maintained across breakfast tables and corridors and the vast, echoing rooms of a castle built to house a family he would not allow himself to have.

Chapter Fifteen

“Are we really doing this, Papa?” Charlie asked softly. “Are we really going to the autumn fair?”

Saturday arrived under a sky scrubbed clean by overnight rain. The carriage rattled along the turnpike road toward Langton Cross, and Freddie had pressed himself so far forward on the bench that Alice feared he would slide off it.

She looked up at Kenneth, who flashed her a tired smile.

“Indeed, we are,” he said simply.

“Will there be swordfighting?” Freddie demanded. “Tommy Briggs said last year that a man swallowed fire. Real fire. From his mouth.”

“Tommy Briggs,” Kenneth said from the opposite bench, “has a tendency to embellish.”