Summer arrived at last in earnest.
The fields around Merrow ripened into a patchwork of green and gold. Children tumbled in the schoolyard, their shouts drifting through open windows. The house breathed easier, its damp corners warm and dry.
Life settled.
It was, Livia realized one lazy afternoon as she sat under the crooked oak—Dobbins’s boy had finally been persuaded not to climb above a certain branch—almost… peaceful.
Miss Hartley had terrorized the vicar into tacit approval of her curriculum. The Derby manufactory had survived its first round of reinvestment without collapsing. The caricatures in London had moved on to a politician caught with his mistress in a hackney.
“It is suspicious,” she said aloud, flipping a page in her book.
Rowan, stretched out on the grass with his head in her lap, squinted up at her through sun.
“What is?”
“This,” she said, gesturing vaguely. “No fires. No floods. No sudden letters announcing that your third cousin has gambled away his inheritance on tulips.”
“I have no third cousin,” he said. “And if I did, I would not pay his tulip debts.”
She smoothed a stray strand of hair from his brow.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Things are… going well. Too well. The universe will notice.”
He caught her hand, kissed her wrist.
“You are incapable,” he murmured, lips brushing skin, “of enjoying contentment without prodding it to see where it will tear.”
“It is prudent,” she protested weakly.
“It is exhausting,” he said. “Lie back and let the sun do its restorative work.”
“You sound like Miss Hartley,” she muttered.
“I am flattered,” he said.
She smiled.
They were quiet for a time, the drowsy hum of insects and distant voices lulling.
“Livia,” he said eventually, his tone altering.
“Mmm?” she said, running her fingers idly through his hair.
“I have been thinking,” he said.
“That is always dangerous,” she observed.
“Possibly,” he allowed. “But this thought will not leave me.”
She stilled, his seriousness seeping into her.
“What is it?” she asked.
He shifted, rolling onto his side so he could look up at her properly. His eyes, in the dappled light, looked darker, thoughtful.
“When we spoke, months ago,” he said slowly, “about… children…”
Her hand tensed in his hair.
“Yes,” she said.
“We said we would… wait,” he went on. “Until we had steadied ourselves. Until we were certain we could be… better than our parents.”
“Yes,” she repeated.
“We have…” He hesitated. “We have begun to… build something. Here. Between us. With the tenants. With Harcourt and Derby and Miss Hartley and all the rest. It is not... finished. It will never be. But it holds. Most days.”
She studied him.
“Are you saying,” she asked carefully, “that you wish to revisit the question?”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
Her heart thudded.
“Why?” she asked quietly.
He gave a small, humorless laugh. “Because Mrs. Pike asked me yesterday when the next generation of Merrows would be running about her cabbages. Because Lady Agnes informed me that if I do not produce an heir soon, she will take in strays and name them all ‘Rowan’ out of spite. Because Whitlow made a remark about long-term planning that somehow included grandchildren.”
“That is not a reason,” Livia said. “Those are… irritations.”
He sobered.
“And because,” he said more softly, “when I see you with Dobbins’s boy. Or with the little ones at Miss Hartley’s school. Or when I imagine this house ten years from now, fifteen… I find… a space. A shape. That is… empty.”
Her throat tightened.
“Rowan,” she whispered.
“I am not saying,” he hurried on, “that we must fill it. Or that we must fill it now. I am only saying that I no longer feel only… fear. There is fear. And there is also… something else. Curiosity, perhaps. Or… hope.”
Hope.
There it was again, that dangerous word.
“And you?” he asked quietly. “Do you still feel only fear?”
She looked away, out across the fields.
Children, indeed, tumbled like bright scraps of cloth in the distance.
She had never wanted to be a mother.
She had watched her own die, her body consumed by childbearing and illness, her mind narrowed to worry and pain.
She had sworn, somewhere in the hot, cloying sickroom of her youth, that she would never tie herself to such a fate.
Then she had tied herself to a duke instead.
“I…” She swallowed. “I do not know.”
He nodded, his gaze dropping.
“I do not wish to trap you,” he said. “I promised I would not. If the thought makes you… ill… we will not speak of it again.”
“No,” she said quickly. “Do not do that. Do not… bury it. It will fester.”
He huffed a breath. “We are very good at digging up topics that would be more peaceful left under the ground.”
“Yes,” she said. “But peace, I have found, is often just neglect in a prettier dress.”
He smiled faintly. “Spoken like a woman who once discovered an unpaid invoice three years old in a drawer.”
“It haunted me,” she shuddered.
He reached up, cupped her cheek.
“I do not want,” he said quietly, “a child… if it means losing you. To death. Or to… bitterness. Or to yourself.”
She met his gaze.
“I do not want a child,” she said, “if it means losing *you.* To fear. To temper. To… disappearing into your father.”
He flinched.
“I am not him,” he said, low and urgent.
“I know,” she said. “You are not. But parts of him live in you. As parts of my mother live in me. We would be fools to pretend otherwise.”
He exhaled, the air shuddering.
“We have,” she said slowly, “been honest with each other about nearly everything. Our tempers. Our fears. Our past follies. If we are to… attempt this… we must be even more so.”
He nodded.
“All right,” he said.
She took a breath.
“What do you fear most?” she asked. “In this.”
He stared up at her, the leaves casting shifting patterns over his face.
“Losing you,” he said again. “In any way. Death is the worst. But there are quieter forms. When I remember my mother, I see her… shrinking. Leaving rooms when he entered them. Apologizing for things that were not her fault. Smiling less. She… faded.”
His jaw tightened.
“I fear children,” he said softly, “because they are… hostages. Soft places that the world—and men like my father—press to force compliance. I became careful, as a boy, not to care too much about anything. Or anyone. Because when I did, he used it.”
Her chest ached.
“I watched him start rumors about my mother when she displeased him. I watched him threaten to send my younger cousin away to some distant school if his parents would not do as he asked. I… learned. That love was… dangerous. That if I admitted a weakness, someone would exploit it.”
He looked at her.
“I have spent the last year undoing that,” he said. “Letting you in. Letting Harcourt in. Letting Whitlow in, God help me. To choose to bring a child into that… is like building another gate into a wall I have just managed to repair.”
Her eyes stung.
“You trust me,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “More than I trust myself.”
“Do you trust yourself,” she asked, “to be… better than him? To see that gate and guard it, not use it?”
He hesitated.
“Most days,” he said. “Some days… I do not know.”
She nodded.
“And you?” he asked, voice raw. “Besides the obvious horror of childbirth and the specter of your mother. What do you fear?”
She looked down at her hands.
“I fear,” she said quietly, “vanishing.”
He frowned.
“Now,” she went on, “I am… useful. I have a role. Several. Daughter. Trader. Duchess. Partner. I am… busy. Engaged. My mind is… fed. I fear that with a child, all of that will shrink to one word: mother. That the world will accept that word as reason enough to erase all the others.”
His eyes softened.
“I watched women in Town,” she said, “who had been lively debutantes, arguing about poems and novels, become pale shadows who did nothing but nurse and sew and smile politely while men spoke over their heads about politics and profit. Perhaps they were happy. Some, likely, were. But others… their eyes looked like locked rooms. I do not wish to live in a locked room again.”
He reached up, thumb brushing away a tear she had not realized had fallen.
“And yet,” she whispered, “when I see Mrs. Pike with her baby on her hip, laughing and scolding and bargaining all at once, I see… something else. Strength. Roots. A sort of… continuity I have never allowed myself to imagine.”
She laughed, watery.
“I do not even know,” she said, “if I can have children. My mother was often ill. Who knows what damage was done. It may be that all this worry is wasted on a possibility that will never come.”
He smiled faintly. “We are very efficient. Worrying about things that may never happen.”
“It is a Harcourt-Everly trait,” she said.
He caught her hand again, his fingers weaving with hers.
“Then perhaps,” he said slowly, “we do what we did with Merrow. And Derby. And Miss Hartley. We make… terms. With each other. With ourselves.”
She tilted her head. “Terms?”
“If we choose,” he said, “to… try… then we set conditions. Promises. Not the vague sort people make at weddings and forget. Specific. Sharp. So that if we begin to break them, we can haul each other back.”
Curiosity prickled through her fear.
“Go on,” she said.
“One,” he said, his gaze intent, “we swear that our lives will not narrow only to the nursery. That you will continue to be my partner in this estate. In our ventures. That you will still go to London when necessary. That you will not be… banished from the counting house by a cradle.”
“And you?” she asked.
“And me,” he said. “I will not hide from nappies in the stables. I will not leave you alone with wailing at three in the morning. I will hold my own child, not just pat its head in the nursery twice a week like some visiting baronet.”
She smiled, shaky.
“Two,” he went on. “We agree that if, at any point, this”—he gestured between them—“begins to… fade… under the weight of screaming and sleeplessness and sickroom air, we will *stop.* And tend to it. We will not say, ‘Children first, marriage after.’ We will not let this house become… cold.”
Her heart clenched.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. I promise that.”
“Three,” he said, a little more grimly, “we will not let anyone—Agnes, Harcourt, the vicar, the entire damned peerage—decide for us how many children we must have. One, two, ten, or none. We will decide. Together. And if the first nearly kills you, we will not risk a second for the sake of a spare.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “Agreed,” she said. “Fiercely.”
He exhaled.
“Four,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “we will accept, if nothing happens, that we are no less… whole. That our worth is not measured in small feet thundering down hallways.”
She opened her eyes, meeting his.
“That,” she said, “may be the hardest.”
“Yes,” he said. “But we have done hard things.”
Silence fell.
Birds trilled overhead. The breeze stirred leaves.
“Do you want,” he asked quietly, “to try?”
She swallowed.
“I…” Her voice failed. She tried again. “Yes. I think… I do. Or at least… I want to want to. And this is closer than I have ever been.”
His eyes closed for a moment; when he opened them, they glistened.
“I want to,” he said simply.
Fear rippled.
So did something else.
Excitement. Terror. Anticipation. A strange, fierce tenderness for a hypothetical person who did not yet exist and might never.
Livia laughed, incredulous at herself.
“Very well,” she said. “Let us… open the gate. A little.”
He laughed too, shaky.
“I should warn you,” he said, “this may be the first contract we ever make that is not entirely under our control.”
“We,” she said dryly, “have never truly been under our own control.”
He grinned. “Fair point.”
He pushed himself up, so they were face to face under the oak’s crooked branches.
“Livia,” he said. “I love you.”
The word, spoken so simply, so firmly, did not terrify her as it once had.
Because, she realized, heart pounding, she had an answer now.
“I love you,” she said back.
His breath caught.
He froze.
“Say it again,” he whispered, as if afraid he had misheard.
She smiled, tears blurring the leaves behind him.
“I love you,” she repeated. “You great, foolish, stubborn man.”
He made a sound that was half laugh, half sob, and then he was kissing her, his hands framing her face, her arms around his neck.
The world spun.
The fear did not vanish.
But it had, at last, a companion.
Love, she thought, breathless as he tumbled them, gentle and insistent, onto the grass.
Hope.
They would, she suspected, always walk the line between them.
Hand in hand.
Under crooked trees.
In houses with leaking roofs and too many ledgers.
With, perhaps, someday, the sound of another heartbeat in the house.
Not to redeem them.
Not to fill some empty social quota.
But because, finally, they had made peace—not with their parents’ ghosts, not with society’s demands—but with themselves.
“Duchess,” Rowan murmured against her mouth, his hands sliding to her waist.
“Yes?” she whispered.
“Come inside,” he said. “Let us begin… trying.”
She laughed, the sound bright and, for once, entirely unafraid.
“Bossy,” she said.
“Efficient,” he corrected.
They rose, brushed grass from their clothes, and walked back toward the house.
The sun was warm on their backs.
Behind them, under the oak, two impressions lay in the flattened grass, side by side.
At Merrow Park, life went on.
Roofs still leaked.
Ledgers still needed balancing.
Ships still sailed.
But in that moment, for two people who had once thought themselves doomed to solitary usefulness, something shifted.
They were not alone.
They were, gloriously, entangled.
And whatever came next—children, no children, storms, drought—it would be faced as they had faced everything else.
Together.
***