The room felt stifling. She looked out of the window at the dark shapes of the hedges and decided a walk in the garden would clear her head before bed.
Stepping out into the night garden, she let out a small sound of delight. She had not expected this. A quiet late-night stroll through an aristocratic estate turned out to be genuinely enjoyable — romantic, even, in a way that had nothing to do with anybody else being in it.
Well, she reasoned, I'll be handing this magnificent place over to Diana eventually. I may as well make the most of it while I have it.
She wandered along the gravel, admiring the flowers under the moonlight, and then stopped short, because something in the garden had caught her eye.
Roses. Whole banks of them, blooming under the moon, the colour drained out of them by the light and replaced with silver.
This scenery is truly stunning, she thought, smiling in admiration. The kind you only ever find at a duke's estate.
She looked at the meticulously tended flower beds, at the edges clipped to a line, at the way not one stray shoot had been permitted anywhere, and nodded. There was real class to this place. Everything flawless, down to the very last detail.
Then her nose began to itch.
It was a familiar sensation, and it had never once in her life been the herald of anything good.
In the middle of that beautiful romantic scene she let out an enormous sneeze that shattered the quiet elegant atmosphere and wiped her graceful, refined image completely off the map.
She wiped at her sniffling nose. The night air was chillier than it looked, and this lady's fragile constitution was clearly not going to permit much more time outdoors.
She turned to head back inside for the warmth, her gaze drifting up toward the balcony above her as she went.
Ian stood at the window with his arms crossed, silently watching the small figure of his wife down in the garden with a thoughtful expression.
He saw her rub at her eyes. He saw her sniffle right afterwards.
And he badly, comprehensively misread the situation, and concluded that she was standing alone in the garden at one in the morning, crying to herself out of sheer self-pity.
A strange, unsettling feeling stirred in his chest and refused to be put down again.
"I'm back," announced a voice behind him.
Kai came in under a towering stack of documents — red-haired, sagging at the knees, looking utterly pitiful.
"You're late," Ian said.
That set him off instantly. "Late? Late? I was out west ten minutes ago. Ten! Getting back this fast already counts as lightning speed by any standard you care to name, and do you have the faintest idea how exhausting long-distance magic circles are? Working for a big boss like you is anything but easy."
He set down the stack of paperwork with a thump.
"And I suppose his lordship really means to finish this entire pile tonight. The pile that isn't due until next week."
"Yes," Ian said calmly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Kai clutched his head with both hands and lamented aloud how unlucky he was to be working for such a workaholic.
Then Ian set down his pen.
"Kai."
The tone was unusual enough that the young assistant actually startled.
"Do you think I'm too much?"
Kai's face said, quite clearly, do you even have to ask. Sensing an opening the size of a barn door, he seized it and unleashed a tirade — the overwork, the hours, the severe sleep deprivation, the fact that a man could genuinely collapse from this, and who exactly, he would like to know, would be held responsible if something happened to him?
"I'm asking about the Duchess," Ian said.
Kai stopped mid-word.
His face filled up with question marks. He could not begin to understand why his ice block of a master would suddenly bring up the Grand Duchess out of a clear sky at one in the morning. Too shocked to believe it, he rushed over and pressed a palm to Ian's forehead.
"Have you caught something incurable? Is that it? A raging fever?"
"Knock it off."
Kai backed away, still not recovered, muttering that this was the first time in his entire employment that he had heard his lord mention the Duchess at all, and beginning to genuinely suspect that something was medically wrong with the man.
Ian did not answer him. He had fallen into thought.
His marriage had been, from the first day, purely a union of convenience between two strangers. That was all it had ever been contracted to be. She had always felt less like a wife than a tenant — someone living quietly in this house, using the corridors at hours he did not, present the way a piece of furniture is present.
And that faint, forgettable, nominal wife had just skipped breakfast without a word of warning. And had raised, out loud, across his own desk, the idea of a divorce.
The image of Eloise flashing that brilliant smile and walking away replayed itself in his mind, and would not stop replaying, and would not let him alone.
"She said it herself," Ian said. "Divorce."
Kai's jaw dropped so far it was audible.
It took him a while to collect himself, and when he did he asked, timidly, "And after hearing such shocking news — did my lord at least offer the Duchess any words of comfort?"
"Why would I need to do that?"
Kai sighed, from a very great depth, utterly defeated by his employer's infinite loop of obliviousness.
"You're not even acting like a person anymore," he said indignantly. "If the Duchess ends up in tears, the fault is entirely yours. Entirely. One hundred per cent."
"That's absurd."
"Is it? Is it absurd?" Kai launched into a full lecture, striding up and down the study. "Why does a newlywed couple sleep in separate rooms? Answer me that. And I would bet — I would bet my quarter's wage — that the two of you have not exchanged ten sentences with each other since the wedding. Ten!"
Stung, Ian told him irritably to knock it off.
But Kai was fired up now, and had somehow arrived at the subject of workers' rights, and suggested that his lordship might show precisely this level of concern for his employees while he was at it.
Then he threw the decisive blow.
"Do you even know your own wife's birthday?"
Ian's hand froze mid-motion. Ink pooled off the nib and dripped onto the page.
Silence filled the air where the answer should have been.
Kai looked at him with a knowing, judgmental gaze that said I knew it, dripping with disdain.
"The twenty-third of September," he said. "Which happens to coincide with the Great Autumn Festival. It is the single easiest date in the calendar to remember, and you still couldn't."
Truly hopeless.
"It's a political marriage," Ian said. "There's no need to sweat the details."
"The entire mess," Kai said flatly, "is your fault."
Ian recalled her words, precisely as she had said them. That she was ready to divorce him. That she would step aside for someone more suitable, provided the replacement was capable.
The words kept going round.
"Divorce," he muttered under his breath, his expression blank with shock, and he was, for the first time, genuinely unsettled.
"What?" Kai shouted, slamming his hand down on the table hard enough to rattle every object on it. "Divorce!"
"Don't make such a fuss about it."
But Kai could not be calm at all, not knowing that his patient, gentle-natured lady had been driven to say a word like that inside her own home.
"It was hypothetical," Ian insisted.
"She cried while she said it! Do you have a heart left in there at all?" Kai flung his arms out at a man who could not see what was directly in front of him — and then stopped, because he had remembered a piece of hot intelligence. "And today. Today the Duchess went on a shopping spree at a fashion boutique. And bought an entire stack of romance novels."
He seized Ian's shoulder and shook it.
"Do you not see this as a crisis?"
"What crisis?" Ian asked, unfazed.
"How can you—" Kai gestured wildly. "New clothes. Romance novels. Do you understand what those two signs mean together? The Duchess may be falling out of love. Or worse — far worse — she may already have another man in her thoughts."
Ian flinched.
Another man. The words hit like a thunderclap, and unbidden he saw his wife standing beside some stranger, at a distance far shorter than the one she kept from him.
"And I'll tell you this," Kai declared boldly. "If you go through with a divorce, I'm quitting on the spot. I can't take it anymore."
"Your quarterly wage hasn't been paid out yet."
The colour drained from Kai's face in the very middle of his fired-up speech.
"If you truly want to quit," Ian said, "pack your things and leave now."
Kai executed an instant hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and swore eternal loyalty to his paycheque.
Finding the whole fuss unbearable, Ian threw him bodily out of the study, and the young assistant scrambled off down the corridor with rapid, flustered bows.
Left alone, Ian sat with the words he had been given: that she had endured more than enough for the sake of the family's honour, and could not go on any longer.
He stared blankly at the pen in his hand. His mind was too scattered to hold a column of figures for more than a few seconds at a time.
At last he set the pen down and sighed.
"This is truly troublesome," he said to the empty room, acknowledging at last the chaos that had taken hold of him.