Page 2 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

“How.” Louisa’s arms tightened around the baby. “How I mean to do this. He is right that I have no husband. No income of my own beyond what he gives me. No answer for what I will tell people, or what they will call her, or what will happen to her the first time some spiteful woman at a ball decides to make an example of us both.” She swallowed. “I have never in my life not known what to say, Mother. And I have no idea what I am going to do.”

Lady Henswick reached out and smoothed a strand of hair back from Louisa’s forehead, the way she had done since Louisa was small enough to require it.

“You made a promise to a dying woman,” she said, “and you have not once wavered from it, not for a single day. That is not nothing, Louisa. That is the beginning of an answer, even if you cannot see the rest of it yet.”

“It does not solve anything.”

“No,” she agreed. “But you solved nothing yesterday either, and yesterday you still managed to keep her fed, warm, and loved. I imagine you will manage the same tomorrow. The rest,” she said, with the calm certainty that had steadied Louisa’s whole life, “tends to arrive when it is needed and not a moment before. It always has for you.”

Louisa looked down at Eleanor’s sleeping face and did not entirely believe her mother. But she wanted to, badly enough that she let herself pretend for a moment.

“Go and sit with her in the nursery,” Lady Henswick urged. “I will speak to your father. He will come around. He always does, given time and enough of your stubbornness pressed against his.”

Louisa managed something close to a laugh, thin as it was. “That is not a compliment.”

“It was not meant as one.” Her mother’s mouth curved, gentle. “It was meant as the truth.”

Louisa carried Eleanor up the stairs, past the portraits of ancestors who had never once had to answer for a promise like hers, and into the small nursery that had been hastily assembled from what had once been a sewing room. She laid the baby down in the borrowed cradle, tucked the blanket beneath her small chin, and stood over her for a long while, watching her breathe.

What am I going to do?

The question would not leave her, no matter how she turned it over. She had no husband. No fortune of her own. No answer for the whispers that would follow her the moment Society learned that an unmarried woman of good family had taken in a servant’s orphaned child and meant to raise her as her own.

She had made the promise easily, in the moment, with Nell’s cold hand in hers and the girl’s dying eyes fixed on her face.

“Promise me she will never be alone. Promise me she will be loved.”

Louisa had given her word without a single thought for how she would keep it, because in that moment, there had been nothing else to give.

Now the moment had passed, and the promise remained, and Louisa stood alone in the nursery with no earthly idea how a woman with no husband and no fortune of her own was meant to raise a child and keep her safe from a world that punished women for exactly this kind of loyalty.

She had never, in twenty-five years, been without an answer.

Eleanor stirred faintly in her sleep, one tiny hand opening and closing around nothing, and Louisa reached down and let the small fingers close around one of her own instead. The grip was absurdly strong for something so small.

“I do not know how yet,” Louisa whispered, so quietly it barely disturbed the air. “But I will find it. I promise you that as well.”

She closed her eyes for a moment.

Oh, Grandmama…

Edith would have known what to do. She had never once needed a voice to speak, and yet she had always managed to say the truest things Louisa had ever heard, straight from the heart and past every polite pretense standing in the way of it.

She would have taken one look at the argument, one look at Louisa’s stricken face, and her hands would have moved with absolute certainty, cutting through every fear Louisa could not yet find words for.

“I wish you were here,” Louisa murmured, brushing her thumb gently over Eleanor’s small curled fist. “You would have known exactly what to say to me tonight. You always did.”

CHAPTER 2

“Aletter, My Lady. Delivered not ten minutes ago.”

Louisa looked up from the basket beside her, where Eleanor lay sleeping with the thoroughness of an infant who had decided the entire household existed to keep quiet around her. The butler, Hodges, held out a silver tray with a single folded letter on it, sealed in dark wax.

“For me?” Louisa took it, turning it over. The seal was unfamiliar, a hawk in mid-flight, wings sharp against the wax. “Hodges, do we know anyone with a hawk for a seal?”

“I could not say, My Lady.”

“No,” Louisa murmured, half to herself. “Neither can I, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.”