Page 70 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

She looked at him a long moment, at the quiet certainty in his face, entirely undiminished by four days of his mother's fabric samples and seating charts, and felt something settle in her chest that no amount of ribbon or place cards had managed to disturb.

"Give me an hour," she said, drawing the paper back toward her, pen already finding the fourth paragraph she had abandoned a fortnight ago. "I believe I know, finally, how to finish it."

"Take two," he said, rising, dropping a kiss against the crown of her head before he left her to it. "I will tell my mother you are indisposed. It will not even be entirely a lie."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The house transformed by degrees as the week progressed. Footmen carryed crates of hothouse flowers up the front steps, a small army of seamstresses altered drapery in the ballroom, invitations sealed and dispatched in numbers that made Amelia's hand ache from the sheer volume of names she'd copied out herself.

"The centerpieces cannot go where you have placed them, Mrs. Fletcher. The dowager countesses will be seated along that wall, and I will not have Lady Ashworth craning her neck round a bank of hothouse roses to see who else has arrived." The Dowager Duchess did not raise her voice. She rarely needed to, yet the housekeeper was already redirecting two footmen toward the far end of the ballroom before the sentence had finished.

"Yes, Your Grace."

Amelia stood near the tall windows with a list in one hand and an ink-stained thumb she had given up trying to scrub clean, watching the room reassemble itself for the third time that morning.

In three days, she had learned more about the precise architecture of a London ballroom than she had ever wanted to know. She knew which families required proximity to the doors for their consequence, which required distance from them for their pride, which flowers gave certain matrons headaches and could therefore not be used regardless of how well they matched the drapery.

"Your Grace." One of the younger footmen, Thomas, appeared at her elbow with the urgency of a man who has been sent to solve a problem above his pay. "The confectioner's man is asking again about the ices. He says he cannot promise both the lemon and the raspberry will hold if the kitchens are as warm as they were yesterday."

"Tell him lemon, then, if he can only promise the one." She said it before the Dowager Duchess could weigh in, and felt a small, private satisfaction at having an answer ready at all. Three days ago, I would not have known there was a decision to make. "And ask Mrs. Fletcher whether the larder downstairs might hold them better than the kitchen proper."

"Very good, Your Grace." He was gone as soon as she finished speaking, and Amelia allowed herself a breath, brief and unwitnessed, in the small eye of the storm she had somehow become responsible for calming.

It was not, she told herself, an unpleasant kind of work. There was something almost satisfying in watching the house take shape around her, in choosing the particular blue that would catch candlelight best against the ballroom's pale walls, in knowing, finally, the difference between the two ribbons the Dowager Duchess had once held up to the window and found her hopelessly unable to distinguish.

I did not expect to enjoy this. She caught herself thinking it more than once, arranging seating charts at the dining table long after the Dowager Duchess had retired for the evening, and felt a small, private pride that she had not anticipated when the whole scheme began.

She had learned, an entire second language, and there was something deeply sastisfying in becoming fluent in it however little she had wanted the lesson.

But it was also, she admitted to no one, exhausting in a manner unlike anything she had known before.

There was a loneliness to being surrounded, every hour of every day, by people requiring decisions from her, and having no one beside her, at the end of it, to simply set the decisions down with.

"Estate business again," Hopkins informed her, the fourth morning running, when she asked after her husband over a solitary breakfast. "He left before dawn, Your Grace. He did not say when he expects to return."

"Of course he did not." She said it lightly, though the lightness cost her something each time she had to produce it. She understood, in the abstract, that a duke's obligations did not pause simply because his wife was assembling three hundred candles and a guest list into a single coherent evening. She understood it, and found the understanding did remarkably little to ease the loneliness of organizing, alone, an event meant to celebrate them both.

Sebastian had left before breakfast again the next morning, some matter of drainage on the tenant farms that could apparently not wait, and would not return, by his own estimate, until well past supper. She did not doubt the drainage was real. She doubted, increasingly, whether it was the whole of the reason.

He is using estate business to avoid this house the same way he once retreated to the room in Jermyn Street to avoid things. The thought arrived unbidden, standing amid a forest of half-arranged candelabra, and she set it aside deliberately, unwilling to hand it more weight than a single unkind moment deserved. He has estate matters. Estates do not manage themselves simply because a ball is three days off.

"Amelia." The Dowager Duchess appeared at her side, notebook in hand, and for a moment something almost gentle moved behind the brisk efficiency. "You look tired."

"I am well."

"You are tired, and pretending otherwise, which I recognize because I spent the better part of my own marriage doing precisely the same thing." She said it without unkindness, though it landed with more weight than Amelia expected. "You have managed three days of this rather better than I did my own first ball as duchess, if it is any comfort. I wept in the stillroom the night before mine and told no one for a decade."

"I have not yet wept in the stillroom."

"Give it time." The faintest curve of a smile. "You have addressed hundreds of cards, approved a menu for as many guests, and settled a dispute between the florist and the confectioner over cart space that I confess I would have simply refused to referee myself. You are doing considerably better than you are giving yourself credit for."

It was, Amelia realized with some surprise, the first entirely unguarded kindness the Dowager Duchess had offered her since the wedding, and she did not quite know what to do with the warmth it produced, standing there amid roses that would not last the week and lists she had not finished.

"Thank you," she said, and meant it, and turned back to the room before either of them could examine the moment too closely.

By evening, the ballroom stood nearly finished, banks of white and pale blue catching the last of the daylight through tall windows, and Amelia stood alone in the doorway for a long moment simply looking at it, feeling something complicated settle in her chest.

It is beautiful. I built this, or near enough to it, out of ribbon and roses and decisions I did not know how to make a week ago.