“From the mouths of maids,” Marcus murmured.
The Duchess closed her eyes. She wondered if she should tell Maggie that she was flushed with utter delightful anger. But she didn’t. To her surprise, she felt fatigue wash over her. She was asleep within moments.
Marcus was true to his word. That evening after solicitously seeing her to her bedchamber and handing her over to Maggie, he took himself to his own bedchamber. He opened the adjoining door a half an hour later.
She was sitting in an overly plump chair in front of the small fireplace, staring into the sluggishly burning flames.
“Hello,” he said. “Here I am just as I promised.”
She spared him a glance. “Go away, Marcus.”
“Oh no. I only just wrote to Celeste this afternoon. She won’t be arriving for another four days. I will have to make do with you until then.”
“You’ve been warned,” she said, nothing more, just that. Then she folded her hands in her lap and ignored him, an enraging, indifferent, aloof act that the old Duchess would have performed.
He gave a martyr’s sigh, leaned down, and scooped her up in his arms. He kissed her as she turned her head and touched her neck. “You smell wonderful, but then you always do.”
“Thank you. Go away, Marcus. I will not be your vessel of the moment. I won’t suffer the boredom of you in my bed. Go dream of Celeste.”
“ ‘Vessel of the moment.’ That sounds mighty odd, Duchess.” He set her on her feet beside her bed, then, without fuss or more words, stripped off her dressing gown and nightgown. He set her away from him. “The good Lord constructed you quite nicely,” he said, stroking his fingertips over his chin as he looked her up and down. “He had me in mind, obviously, for the size of you, and the shape of you, is just to my liking.”
She looked indifferent, merely standing there, looking away from him, not moving. She sucked in her breath when he reached out his hand and lightly caressed her left breast. “Yes, you’re made of beautiful shapes. This is very intriguing, Duchess. You are silent as the Duchess of yore, then you’re not. I never know what to expect from you now.”
“You never will know, Marcus, you damned sod.”
He laughed even as his hand stroked over her ribs and her belly. She took a step back, then gave a sharp cry. She looked at him, her eyes wide and bewildered. Then she turned and ran from him.
“Duchess.” He took a step after her, then frowned himself in consternation when she dropped to her knees and retched into the chamber pot. He went down on his knees beside her, holding her steady. “This is familiar,” he said, pulling her hair back from her face. “I don’t like it. You were ill this afternoon and now you’re ill again. There is a physician in Darlington who has a fine reputation. I believe I will have him come here to the Park now, tonight in fact.”
She was shuddering, huddling in on herself. He rose and fetched her dressing gown, wrapping it around her. He put her in bed, then said, “You lie still. I mean it, Duchess. Just lie still until I return.”
He did return and in only five minutes. With him were Spears, Badger, and Maggie, wearing a gown of teal-blue satin with a décolletage that would send a vicar into shock. Marcus was saying as he entered the bedchamber, “She vomited this afternoon and again now. I know of this physician in Darlington. I want you, Badger, to go fetch him.”
Badger cleared his throat and stared at his pale huddled mistress in the large bed.
Spears closely studied the small clusters of grapes carved into the edges of the mantel.
Maggie smoothed the luscious teal-blue satin over her hips.
Marcus frowned. “What the devil is going on here? Badger?”
Spears said to the Duchess, “Maggie will fetch you a biscuit to nibble on. It will help settle your stomach.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Now, my lord,” Spears said in an odious avuncular voice, “there is naught to worry about. We have all discussed the situation and there is nothing to concern us and therefore nothing to concern you. Her ladyship is performing a natural function.”
“What bloody natural function? Do you so conveniently forget that she was struck down not two weeks ago?”
Badger said, “The Duchess is breeding, my lord. She is carrying the heir. The nausea and vomiting are natural. It will pass within a short time. Mr. Spears says another three weeks and she’ll be perfectly fine again. Well, perhaps longer, but we know she’s superior and thus the three weeks will apply to her.”
There was utter silence in the room. From a great distance, Marcus heard the Duchess say, “I am fine, Spears. Please, Badger, Maggie, please leave now. It’s important. Please leave.”
The three marched out, but their pace was slow.
Marcus very slowly closed the bedchamber door. He then turned the key in the lock. “Are you going to be ill again? Do you need something to eat?”
She shook her head.
It was then he realized that she was utterly without color, her eyes dilated, her body hunched over itself.
“Did you know?” he asked, his voice as quiet as a leaf quivering in a breeze.
“No.”
“How can I believe you?”
“You can’t. You said yourself that all Wyndhams were excellent liars, myself included.”
“You are carrying my child. That isn’t possible. The three meddling idiots must be wrong. You vomited because of that blow to your head.”
“Very well, it isn’t possible. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s true. Now, is it to be an immaculate conception or have I cuckolded you? Ah, don’t forget my generous lover at Pipwell Cottage.”
He sliced his hand through the air. He looked bewildered, disbelieving; he looked like a man who’d just been shot but didn’t yet feel the pain. “I don’t understand this. It’s true I took you a few times, a very few times, and I didn’t have the fortitude to withdraw from you as I do now, but it takes much longer to impregnate a woman, surely it must take many, many times and many, many months.”
“Evidently not.”
He began to pace. She looked at his flapping dressing gown, his black hairy legs, his bare feet. He was beautiful, this man who didn’t want her to have his child. Ah, she was pregnant. Her body had accepted his seed. On their wedding night? That second night he’d come to her? She wanted to sing and shout and dance. Instead she felt a stirring of the nausea and began to breathe deeply and slowly.
“You didn’t have your monthly flow after we were married in Paris?”
She shook her head.
“You’re a damned woman. Didn’t it occur to you that something might be different? Namely, me, the man who spilled his seed inside you?”
“I’m not always as predictable as many women.”
“You mean in that oblique way of yours that your monthly flow doesn’t occur necessarily when you expect it to?”
She nodded, staring him straight in the eye.
“I don’t want this child and you damn well know it!”
She held silent, though the words were near to breaking through, but she was concentrating too hard on not throwing up to speak.
“You did this on purpose.”
Ah, he’d finally swung his axe. The look on her face was bleak and accepting, then just as quickly shifted to utter red-faced rage. Even then the old Duchess peeked through as she shrugged saying, “I wondered how long it would take you to fix the blame firmly on my head. My mother told me several times that a man couldn’t bear to be in the wrong. She said a man would say whatever he had to say in order to put the woman in the wrong instead.” Then, miraculously, even the rage disappeared. She actually smiled at him. “You will be a father, Marcus, and I will be a mother. I am pregnant with a child, our child.”
“I refuse to accept that your bastard father has won. Forgive me. You’re the bastard, but only by birth. He is one in mind and in act. I won’t accept it, Duchess. Do you hear me? I don’t accept that you’re pregnan
t.” He slapped his palm to his forehead. “I have done nothing to deserve this, nothing, dammit. I was quite happily going about my life when your father died and I had to be the heir, there was no choice for anyone. Then because he’s bitter and twisted, he unleashed his venom on me. He hated me and he proved it, stripping me of all means to maintain and support all the Wyndham estates and properties, unless I married you, his precious bastard. You, the one woman in the bloody world I never wanted, or if I did want you from the time I was fourteen years old and randy as a young stoat, I wouldn’t have any longer than it took him to humiliate me to my soul. And yet you forced me to take you.
“I want my life back in my control. I want you and your damned child out of it.”
He stomped toward the adjoining door, only to draw up at her quiet voice. “I see. Do you wish me to leave tomorrow, Marcus?”
“I would that you leave tonight, right this bloody instant, but that would be cruel. You would probably faint on the front steps.”
He slammed the adjoining door behind him.
She stared for a long moment at that closed door. Then, slowly, she lightly touched her stomach. She was flat, but inside her womb was her child, their child.
She was lying there, staring up at the ceiling, when there was a knock on the door. She rose and unlocked it. Badger, Spears, and Maggie stood there, Maggie with a small covered plate in her hands.
They said nothing, merely came into the bedchamber when she stepped back.
“Here, Duchess, eat there,” Maggie said as she guided her to the chair in front of the fireplace.
The three of them took position about her, saying nothing until she began to nibble on one of Badger’s fresh scones.
“I made them with small apple slices,” he said. “And fresh cream. It is my Aunt Mildred’s recipe.”
“They’re delicious.”
“Your stomach is settling?” Maggie asked.
The Duchess nodded and continued to chew slowly as she stared into the fire.
Spears cleared his throat. “His lordship is a passionate man. He is a natural leader, a man of action. He despises dithering about. In all the battles he fought, his men trusted him above God. He protected them, drove them relentlessly, and they knew he would willingly die for any of them. They knew this and gave him their best.”
Badger continued, “He is hotheaded, always has been, Mr. Spears tells me, even as a boy. Besides a leader, he is a man who is loyal to his bones. Sometimes, however, he isn’t a cool thinker, not what you would call a measured scholar of philosophy. He reacts, then thinks. He can curse some of the most amazing composites I’ve ever heard. Then he’s calm again and laughing.”
“They say that we women are the ones to lose our calm and spit out whatever comes into our minds,” Maggie said, hands on her silk-covered hips, “but it isn’t necessarily true. Just look at you, Duchess, quiet and still as a clam. You never lose your head and scream foolishness. You’re just the opposite of his lordship.” Maggie frowned, then shrugged. “At least you used to be his opposite. It’s strange, you’re different, all of us have noticed it.”
Spears said, “It is true that his lordship occasionally loses his temper and thus control of his tongue, but he will come around, Duchess. Even though you appear to have lost your magnificent reticence, at least when you now choose to lose it, you can’t come near to his lordship in sheer undignified temper. He isn’t an unfair man, he’s just—”
“I know,” she said. “He’s just passionate and hotheaded and easily driven over the brink. But know this, all of you. He doesn’t want the child. He’s said that often enough, it isn’t just something he decided tonight.”
“He is a man. However, he isn’t stupid,” Maggie said, frowning. “Well yes, he is, for he is a man, after all, and all men must . . . well, that’s not important here and now, is it? Now, his lordship must realize that babes follow lovemaking. Even as he cursed and ranted, he knew it would be natural for you to become pregnant, for his lordship is a lusty man—”
“Exactly,” Badger said. “His temper, his insistence that he doesn’t want an heir doesn’t make sense. As Maggie said, he isn’t stupid.”
The Duchess became utterly white and still. “You don’t understand.”
The three of them looked baffled.
“You don’t understand,” she said again, slowly, then clamped her mouth shut.
“Well, regardless,” Maggie said, “I know men, Duchess, and his lordship may be proud to the point of you wanting to strangle him, but he will come around. He will come to understand what is right.”
“He will moderate his stand,” Badger said.
“He will moderate his stand, or we will have to take action,” Spears said, and Badger and Maggie nodded.
She looked at each of them in turn. Finally, she said, “Yes, perhaps we will have to take action.”
“You won’t run away, will you, Duchess?” Badger said.
She looked at him thoughtfully.
22
MARCUS CAME TO an abrupt halt at the bottom of the huge staircase that spilled onto the grand entrance hall of Chase Park. There in front of the front double doors were three valises and beside them stood Maggie, all trimmed out in a flaming red bonnet with a curling ostrich feather curving around to her chin and wearing a dark blue cloak. She was tapping an elegantly shod foot, tap, tap, tap. She was obviously waiting.
She was waiting for the Duchess.
He bellowed, “Where the hell is she, Maggie?”
Maggie turned very slowly and gave the earl a deep curtsy. “My lord, who the hell is she?”
“Don’t you twit my nose, girl, or I’ll—”
“That is quite enough, Marcus. Actually, I am here, but for just the next moment, then Maggie and I are away from Chase Park.”
“You aren’t going anywhere, damn you.”
“But you were quite clear in your wishes. You wanted me gone immediately, but were afraid your consequence would suffer if it became known that you kicked out your pregnant wife in the middle of the night.”
“It wasn’t the bloody middle of the night. Now—”
“Thus, in the spirit of bonhomie, I waited until this morning. Good-bye, Marcus.”
She turned on her heel, her chin in the air, as regal as the damned duchess he’d named her so long ago. Then, she tripped on one of the valises and went crashing down on her side.
He reached her in an instant, hauling her into his arms. “Are you all right? Say something, you damned scourge.”
“I’m all right. How very embarrassing to be felled in the midst of such an excellent exit.”
“Yes, that’s what happens when your chin is in the air. However, I won’t laugh, at least not just yet. Now heed me, Duchess. You aren’t going anywhere. This is your home and here you’ll stay.” He shook her. “Do you understand me?”
“I’m not certain, Marcus. Perhaps you’d best shake me again. It makes me think more clearly.”
He hauled her to her feet and stared down at her, his look as black and brooding as one of the quixotic Lord Byron’s heroes.
“Why is Chase Park now my home? Why are you singing a different tune this morning? Truly, I don’t understand you, my lord.”
“It is your home until I tell you it is not, and even then perhaps it will still be your home, as arguments follow from the night unto the morning and things change in the hours in between. Do you now understand?”
“I will never understand you.”
“I am a man. Men are not easily fathomed. Our feelings aren’t sitting in the middle of a plate for all to comment upon and taste, not like you bloody women.”
Maggie snorted behind him.
“Oh dear,” the Duchess said in that tone of voice he now recognized very well, and he let her go without any hesitation whatsoever.
She ran out the door, down the deep wide marble steps, past a startled gardener who dropped his spade, fell to her knees, and vomited in the rosebushes.
<
br /> Maggie looked him up and down. “You shook her on purpose to make her sick. I spent a good twenty minutes brushing her cloak from all her trips to that wretched abbey where she grubbed around on her knees looking for that wretched treasure, and now just look. Black dirt, worms, and God knows what else.”
“I did not shake her for that purpose. However, the result just might be a dollop of common sense in that woman’s brain of hers. Sampson! Ah, there you are, just behind me. You’re becoming a lurker, just like Spears and Badger. Have her ladyship’s valises removed back to her room. Do not delay. Once she is on her feet again, her brain just might be swayed again to perversity.”
Maggie snorted.
Marcus went outside into a beautiful summer morning. The sky was a light blue with white clouds dotted here and there, the smell of cut grass heavy in the air, and his wife was retching on her knees in the rosebushes.
He waited until she was done, then picked her up in his arms and carried her back upstairs, not pausing to say anything at all to any of her cohorts. He passed Aunt Wilhelmina, who raised a brow and said, “Perhaps she has finally cocked it?”
“No, she hasn’t. Good day to you too, Aunt Wilhelmina.”
“Mama!” he heard Ursula say. “Really, you shouldn’t say such awful things. She’s the duchess and she’s the mistress here.”
“I? I said nothing at all untoward. I merely wondered if she had merely knocked herself up with all her activity.”
“I could do better than that,” Marcus said under his breath. She wanted to smile at that but she felt too wretched. “I don’t like this, Marcus.”
“No, I shouldn’t like it either. Now you know that you must be calm and placid as a cow, and do exactly what I tell you to do.”
He reached her bedchamber, frowned a maid out of the room in a near dead run, and laid her on her bed.
She took sips of the water he handed her. She groaned, grabbing her stomach.
He left the room and she heard him shout, “Maggie, get her some biscuits. Doubtless you packed dozens. Go, quickly!”
Not three minutes later, she was chewing slowly on a biscuit flavored with cinnamon. She sighed, finally relaxing.
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