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“Perhaps,” he had agreed, already returning his attention to his letters, and Anna had left his study with the distinct, uncomfortable sensation of having been quietly but firmly shut out of something.

She told herself it was simply his nature reasserting itself – the same careful, controlled distance he had worn like armor for the better part of his life before he had ever allowed her past it. She told herself this was not a step backward so much as a momentary retreat, and that perhaps soon, they would retrieve the familiar comfort that once dwelled within their midst.

She was not entirely successful in convincing herself of it.

Even Miss Hill had noticed, though she was too discreet to say so outright.

“His Grace seems rather preoccupied of late,” she had observed carefully, while helping Anna sort through a fresh delivery of linens for the nursery. “I do hope nothing troubling has occurred.”

“I hope so as well,” Anna had admitted, before she could stop herself, and Miss Hill had given her a look of such quiet sympathy that Anna had found herself blinking back an unexpected sting of tears, startled by how deeply the housekeeper’s simple kindness had affected her.

“He has always retreated inward when something weighs on him,” Miss Hill had said gently. “Even as a boy, I recall it well. He would disappear into his father’s library for days at a time whenever something troubled him too greatly to speak of. It is not a reflection of you, Your Grace, whatever it might feel like from where you stand.”

Anna had wanted to ask what, precisely, Miss Hill knew of Hudson’s boyhood troubles – there had been a weight to the way she said it, an implication of old wounds Anna had not yet been permitted to see the shape of – but something in the housekeeper’s expression had suggested it was not her story to tell, and so Anna had let the moment pass, filing the small revelation away alongside all the other fragments of Hudson she had gathered these past weeks, still hoping that one day they might assemble themselves into something whole.

She did not know what had transpired at the club with Cornelius. Hudson had mentioned little of it beyond the barest facts during breakfast the day after he had met with his brother – that the conversation had occurred, that it had not gone entirely as he hoped – and Anna, respecting the rawness she could see beneath his careful composure whenever the subject arose, had not pressed him further.

Perhaps that had been the wrong choice. Perhaps he needed pressing, needed someone to draw the trouble out of him rather than allow him to retreat into silence the way he so evidently preferred. But Anna had her own experience with grief that curdled into distance, and she understood, better than she might have liked, the particular exhaustion of being asked too many times how one was feeling when the honest answer was simply that one did not know.

So, she waited, and hoped, and told herself that patience would see them through this as it had seen them through so much else already.

Her patience was tested rather more severely when Phoebe and Rowland arrived for their promised visit that afternoon.

She had been looking forward to it all week – Phoebe had brought little Rebecca along, now old enough to toddle unsteadily between the furniture in pursuit of anything shiny or forbidden, and Anna had hoped, rather foolishly perhaps, that the sight of another man’s daughter causing gentle chaos through the halls might coax Hudson out of whatever quiet distance had settled over him.

It did not.

Hudson greeted them in the foyer with perfect manners, bowing over Phoebe’s hand and exchanging the calm pleasantries with Rowland, which her brother had responded to with thinly veiled irritation.

“And who is this?” he questioned softly as she tugged at his trousers slightly.

“My niece, Rebecca,” Anna informed as he leaned forward and permitted Rebecca to grip one of his fingers with her small fist for a moment, a faint, involuntary softness crossing his face at the contact.

“It is lovely to meet you, little lady,” he had nodded sagely all her with a slight smile as the girl giggled and ran off.

Anna had hoped he would stay, but within a handful of minutes, he had excused himself on the grounds of correspondence requiring his attention, leaving Anna to entertain her siblings alone.

“Is everything quite well?” Rowland asked, the moment the study door had clicked shut behind their host, his brow furrowed in suspicion.

“Everything is fine,” Anna replied, perhaps too quickly, leading them both toward the drawing room.

“You did not used to lie to me so poorly,” Rowland observed, settling into a chair with easy familiarity. “Has something happened between you and the duke?”

“Nothing has happened,” Anna insisted, though even to her own ears, the words sounded thin. “He has simply been occupied of late. He met with Cornelius a few days past, and I gather the conversation did not go smoothly. I believe he is still turning it over in his mind.”

Phoebe, seated beside their brother, regarded Anna with the particular perceptiveness of an older sister who had spent a lifetime learning to read past Anna’s careful reassurances.

“Are you certain that is all it is?” she asked gently.

Anna hesitated, and in that hesitation, both her siblings seemed to find their answer regardless of what she said next.

“I believe it is better than it was a few days ago,” Anna said finally, choosing her words with care. “We have grown closer since his return – closer than I expected, if I am honest. But these past few days, he has become rather distant again, and I do not know the cause of it. I do not know if it concerns me, or Cornelius, or something else entirely that he has not seen fit to share.”

“Perhaps it is simply a great deal for one man to carry at once,” Phoebe suggested. “A brother’s anger, a wife he is only beginning to know properly, children he did not expect to have so suddenly thrust into his care. Grief and guilt do not always announce themselves plainly, Anna. Sometimes they simply make a man quiet.”

“I know that well enough,” Anna murmured, thinking of her own long silence in the months after her scandal, the way she had retreated so thoroughly into herself that even Phoebe had struggled to reach her.

“Be patient with him,” Phoebe advised, reaching over to squeeze her hand. “But should things worsen – should his distance become something more troubling than simple grief – you need not manage it alone. You have us, Anna. You have always had us.”