Page 21

CHAPTER 21

“ Y ou are in excellent hands with Mrs. Burton. She will guide you through your responsibilities as Duchess,” Isaac said, placing his knife precisely at the edge of his plate, as if the conversation itself required structure.

Fiona kept her eyes on the roasted pheasant before her, which, while perfectly browned and artfully garnished, might as well have been boiled boot leather for all the appetite she could muster. She shifted in her seat, the fine silk of her gown rustling faintly against the upholstery.

He had not even looked back when he left her with the housekeeper. Not a word, not a gesture. Just a firm, formal, dutiful instruction and gone, as if she’d been another parcel delivered to the staff.

Now here he sat, calm and composed, eating as though it were any other evening. As though this were not their wedding night. As though he hadn’t spent the entire day being... efficient.

Am I a wife or merely a new fixture to be catalogued and instructed?

She set her knife down with a little more force than necessary, her fingers now resting stiffly against the linen. “Indeed,” she murmured, eyes still on the pheasant. Perhaps he would move on to a less galling subject.

He took a sip from his wine, then continued, “Craton has not had a Duchess in some time. You must pardon the fact that there will be quite a great deal on your shoulders now.”

Fiona’s shoulders drew ever so slightly upward, then settled, but her spine stayed rigid. She drew a slow breath, counted to three in her head, and replied, “I understand.”

That, surely, was enough. Enough to indicate she had heard, that she was aware, that she would do her duty , as every Pierce woman was trained from birth to do.

But of course, he wasn’t finished.

“Mrs Burton is more than capable of seeing you thro?—”

“I know ,” Fiona said sharply, the words leaping from her lips before she could contain them. Her hand tightened around her fork, the silver pressing hard into her palm.

There was a pause. She glanced up and saw his brows lift by a fraction—barely enough to be called a reaction, yet unmistakably a response.

Her cheeks burned. She placed the fork down gently, carefully. Do not make a scene. Not again.

“What I meant to say is...” She smoothed her napkin with deliberate attention, then lifted her eyes to his. “May we take our meal without further discussion of duties?”

“Why, but the very meal we share now is an act of responsibility, Fiona.”

Her fingers curled into her lap, nails pressing against silk. The man cannot possibly be serious.

“Our very marriage is a manifestation of those responsibilities. We knew this from the start. Is that not why we agreed to this union in the first place?”

Fiona’s fork clattered slightly against the porcelain as she picked it up, then set it down again. “What I do not recall us agreeing to,” she said, eyes fixed on the salt cellar, “is disrupting the peace during mealtimes.”

“A mere reminder is not a disruption of peace, Fiona.”

She nearly groaned aloud. Instead, she pressed her thumb to the crease between her brows, willing the ache there to fade. Her mouth opened, then closed again. She picked up her glass of wine and took a long, steady sip.

“I refuse to argue with you just now,” she muttered, not looking at him.

She heard the sound of his knife meeting the plate’s edge, deliberate and precise.

“Wise choice, darling.”

Her hand jerked, and she nearly spilled her wine. Darling? Her ears burned. Her skin prickled. She was not certain if she wanted to throw the glass or climb under the table.

They resumed eating, each lost in their own thoughts, the cutlery between them now less instrument and more shield.

Fiona reached for the bread and found their hands brushing at the dish. She pulled back at once. He did not.

“Do you dislike Mrs Burton?” he asked after a pause.

Fiona dabbed the corner of her mouth with her napkin, folding it and unfolding it. “I do not know her well enough to say.”

“She has run the household efficiently for years.”

“So I gathered,” she replied, and then, more coolly than intended, added, “You certainly trust her more than me.”

His jaw moved slightly, the only hint he had registered the remark. “That is not fair.”

“Neither is being handed off like a poorly wrapped parcel and expected to smile at the receiving end,” she said, laying down her fork. “I may have agreed to this marriage, but I was not prepared to feel quite so... superfluous.”

There. She had said it.

The silence stretched again.

He leaned back in his chair, gaze not on her but on the flickering candle between them. “You are not superfluous.”

She blinked. That he responded at all surprised her.

He looked at her then. “I do not know how to make room for someone. That is not an excuse. Only an admission.”

He confesses awkwardness like other men confess affairs.

She found herself softening. Slightly.

“Well,” she said, pushing a morsel of pheasant to one side of her plate, “perhaps we might consider starting with a topic less weighty than household staff.”

A faint quirk of his brow. “Such as?”

“Such as...” She looked around helplessly, then lifted her glass. “Wine. This wine. It is tolerable.”

That earned a small breath of something that might, in dimmer lighting, pass for a chuckle. “A rousing endorsement.”

She sipped again, her lips twitching. “Do not mock me, Isaac. I am attempting small talk.”

“Then by all means, let us discuss the bread next.”

Fiona tilted her head. “It is adequate.”

A beat passed. Fiona leaned back slightly in her chair, studying him.

“I must ask—did something happen?” she said. “To the house, I mean. It looks as though it was left behind mid-renovation... a decade ago.”

Isaac’s knife paused mid-cut.

She watched him from the corner of her eye, but he didn’t answer. Not at once.

Wrong question.

He resumed slicing his meat with a precision far too focused to be natural.

“The manor is as it needs to be,” he said at last.

Fiona blinked at him. “Is it? Because it appears to need walls. And lighting. And, in certain corridors, actual floors.”

Still, no response.

She drew in a breath, then let it go. There it is again. That wall he builds so quickly, so efficiently.

The silence that followed was heavier than before. Not charged, like earlier, but cool. Detached.

They finished the rest of their meal in that hush, each locked within their own silence. And for all the candlelight around them, the room felt dimmer than it had at the start.

When the final dish had been cleared and the footmen excused, Fiona rose with a quiet nod and left the dining room without waiting for him to follow. Her steps echoed softly down the corridor, past faded tapestries and sconces that gave more shadow than light.

Her chamber was warm when she arrived, the fire already lit, and Miss Jameson standing ready beside the dressing table with her hands folded and her expression impossibly prim. The maid moved forward without a word, and Fiona allowed herself to be unbuttoned, unfastened, untangled from the layers that had clung to her all evening.

The brush whispered through her hair, each stroke counted and careful. Fiona sat perfectly still, watching her reflection without truly seeing it. When her nightgown had been drawn over her shoulders and her slippers removed, Miss Jameson curtsied and slipped silently out of the room.

Fiona climbed into bed, sinking back against the pillows, her fingers drawing idle patterns across the coverlet. Her gaze drifted to the adjoining door. It remained closed.

She waited as the candle burned lower and the fire offered its last few crackles, each sound drawing out the silence until it became a presence all its own. Not even a footstep disturbed the stillness, and when her eyes drifted shut, the weight of the evening pressed against her chest with quiet insistence, like a second blanket she had not asked for.

I ought not to be surprised, the thought settled in, too calm to be angry and too sharp to be ignored. After all, I am a duty. Nothing more. He said as much. Shown it too.

Her body remained beneath the coverlet, but her mind would not still as she stared upward and waited for sleep to claim her.

It never did.

She awoke with a start, though the room was quiet, the fire nothing more than a bed of embers and the light beyond the windows grey with morning. Her limbs were stiff beneath the covers, her body sunk deep into the mattress as though reluctant to rise. For a moment she simply lay there, listening to the silence, a peculiar ache forming somewhere behind her ribs.

It was not sorrow. Not exactly.

Just... something unshaped and unwelcome.

Why should I feel disappointed? She sat up, brushing her hair back from her face with one hand, the other clutching the blanket to her chest. What precisely had I expected? That he would come in with poetry and promises? She almost scoffed at herself, then rose from bed and moved toward the washstand with more energy than she felt.

Breakfast was served in one of the smaller drawing rooms, where she ate alone, the only company the ticking of the longcase clock and the clink of her spoon against porcelain. Not even a note had been left in Isaac’s absence.

After breakfast, Mrs Burton appeared at the door with hands clasped and a slight incline of the head. “If your grace is ready, I would be pleased to show you the house.”

Fiona followed, her hands folded before her, eyes taking in the worn beauty of the hallways—the gilt faded on the wall sconces, the carpets soft with age and footsteps long past. The manor had once been glorious, and it still retained the bones of grandeur, but there were corners where time had clearly been left unchecked.

They climbed a wide staircase and entered the portrait gallery. The housekeeper gestured toward the oil paintings that lined the wall, her eyes gleaming with pride.

“His grace was much younger when this portrait was commissioned,” she said as they came to a depiction of Isaac, stiff in pose, dark eyes unflinching even in paint. He could not have been more than sixteen.

Fiona’s gaze drifted over the rest—an imposing older gentleman with sharp cheekbones, presumably the late Duke; beside him, a gentle-eyed woman in muted silks; and a smiling young lady with clever eyes, surely Elaine.

But between these was a space—an obvious one—marked by a hook and the faint square where dust had not touched the wall.

Her brow furrowed. “Was there another portrait here?”

Mrs. Burton seemed uncertain. Her lips parted, closed, and then she turned briskly toward the opposite wall. “And here, we have the second Duke of Craton and the earlier descendants. That fellow in the periwig was known for his fondness of imported lemons.”

Fiona’s eyes remained on the empty space, though she turned to follow the housekeeper. That was deliberate.

She said nothing further, though her mind filed the detail away. They passed into another hallway, the second floor now quieter, the light fainter.

They moved past a door on the left, its frame as grand as the rest, but curiously locked.

Fiona paused. “What is in that room?”

Mrs Burton’s step faltered, but only for a moment. “Oh, that is just one of the many storage rooms, your grace,” she said, quick with the answer.

Fiona’s gaze lingered on the door. “I see.”

Another note, another entry on the list of peculiarities.

The rest of the tour passed without interruption, though Fiona could not help but notice how the rooms grew finer yet no less worn. The drawing room had excellent bones, its moulding exquisite, but the upholstery was dulled with use and the rug threadbare in patches. One room held a settee with one leg propped by a sliver of wood.

She paused near a window, looking out at the hedges that ringed the garden below. Her fingers brushed the faded silk of the curtain.

“How long has it been since Craton was redecorated?”

Mrs Burton offered a small motion of her shoulders. “Not in some time, your grace.”

Fiona nodded, the wheels in her mind already turning. I wonder what he would say if I suggested improvements. Or whether he would listen at all.

She folded her hands once more and continued on, her eyes still catching on every crack and faded edge.

It was a magnificent home. It simply needed someone to care for it again.

Her day unfolded without the faintest glimpse of her husband. Not a passing glance, nor the creak of a floorboard to suggest he had even occupied the same wing of the house. It was not simply absence—it was evasion, she was certain of it now.

By midday, restlessness had settled over her like a poorly fitted shawl. She had read three chapters of a novel without retaining a word, abandoned her embroidery after tangling the thread twice, and stared at the same corner of the drawing room for an embarrassingly long stretch of time. Eventually, she summoned paper and pen and wrote to her friends.

A tea invitation, hastily composed and promptly dispatched.

The following afternoon, the sitting room was bright with pale light, the fire well tended, and the tea tray laid with care. Fiona perched at the edge of the settee, trying not to smooth her dress more than twice in any given minute. Her fingers tapped lightly on her teacup, her posture a study in attentiveness.

“I must confess, we were not expecting such an early invitation from you, Fiona dear,” Hester said, brushing crumbs from her glove as she reached for another nut butter biscuit.

Fiona managed a smile. “Why, I missed you three too much to wait another day to see you.”

Anna’s gaze narrowed just slightly, her cup paused mid-air, as if the scent of something unsaid lingered in the room.

Fiona shifted in her seat and glanced away. She sees too much. She always does.

The truth—unvarnished and quietly humiliating—was that she had hardly seen Isaac since their wedding supper. He did not dine with her. He did not speak to her. He did not seek her out in the morning nor appear by chance in the hallway. It was as if the argument had closed a door between them, and he had locked it from his side.

“I daresay,” Nancy added with a sparkle in her eyes, “we thought you’d be too invested in your husband to remember us, much less miss us, Fiona.”

Fiona lifted her teacup and took a small sip. She kept her smile in place. “Some of us are capable of doing more than one thing at a time, Nancy.”

Nancy let out a soft laugh and exchanged a knowing look with Hester.

“You know what they say,” Anna murmured, placing her saucer down with meticulous grace, “there is a time for everything. So hosting us now only affords you more time to dote on your dear husband later.”

If only they knew. Perhaps I am not what my husband expected, and I am already a disappointment.

Her cheeks warmed under the weight of their teasing. She stared into her tea as if the answers might steep there with the leaves. If only it were a conventional marriage, she thought, with dinners shared and nights not spent alone. The odd ache returned, soft and persistent, and entirely unwelcome.

“Such an impressive place you have now, Fiona,” Hester said, turning her attention to the room. “But much worn, I’m afraid.”

Nancy nudged her sharply with an elbow.

“I—I mean, it’s all beautiful, of course,” Hester said, her voice pitched higher in haste. “But a little old...”

Anna and Nancy exchanged identical glances, their eyes fixed on Hester with familiar reproach.

“Oh, no need for all that,” Fiona said, waving a hand lightly. “I do agree with Hester. As beautiful as everything is, much of it is outdated. As a matter of fact, I was just contemplating some renovations this morning.”

Hester brightened. “See? Fiona always agrees with me.” She stuck out her tongue in triumph.

“Very mature, Hester,” Nancy muttered, rolling her eyes.

Their laughter rang through the room, genuine and warm, though Fiona’s mind tugged at the thread she had only just voiced aloud.

“I am yet to discuss my plans with the Duke, of course,” she added, adjusting the edge of her napkin. “But I will soon enough.”

Her fingers twisted the linen before her, the motion absent but telling. The thought of broaching the subject with Isaac made her stomach tighten in that peculiar way she could not name.

“Well, you have plenty of time now, Fiona,” Anna said gently. “So you needn’t rush into anything. And with a bit of patience, you will see that all will fall right into place in your marriage.”

Fiona smiled, though her chest ached with the weight of unspoken doubts.

If only I could believe that.