A small silence spread at the table, a thoughtful and perhaps not unfriendly silence.
“We want her happy, as well,” Westhaven said, his glance taking in both brothers. He ran his finger around the rim of his mug twice clockwise then reversed direction. “When I wrested control of the finances from His Grace, things were in a quite a muddle—I hope I don’t have to tell you that bearing the Windham family tales would not be appreciated?”
In other words, it would earn him at least that beating Lord Val had referred to.
“I can be as discreet as my brother.”
“One suspected as much.” Another reversal of direction. “I gradually got the merchants sorted out, the businesses, the shipping trade, the properties, the domestic expenses, but the one glaring area that defied all my attempts at management was the pin money allocated for my mother and sisters.”
From Westhaven’s tone of voice, this had been more than a mere aggravation. Pin money by ducal standards for that many women could be in the tens of thousands of pounds annually.
“Her Grace likes to entertain,” Lord Val observed. “Monthlong house parties, shoots in the fall, a grand ball every spring. Gives one some sympathy for our dear papa.”
And don’t forget the Christmas parties, Vim thought darkly.
“And bear in mind,” St. Just said, “we have five sisters of marriageable age. Five. Most of whom are quite social, as well.”
“Dressing them alone was enough to send me to Bedlam,” Westhaven said. “I’d end up shouting at them, shouting at them that even a seven-year-old scullery maid knew not to overspend her allowance, but then Her Grace would look so disappointed.”
This was indeed a confession. Vim kept a respectful silence, wondering where the tale was going.
“Sophie does not overspend her pin money,” Westhaven said. “Not ever. She did not want to offend me, you see, but she saw I was far more overset to be shouting at my sisters than they were to be shouted at—His Grace is a shouter—and she intervened. She asked me to turn the ladies’ finances over to her, and a more grateful brother you never beheld. She passes the ledger back to me each quarter, the entries tidy and legible, the balances—may all the gods be thanked—positive. I don’t know how she does it; I haven’t the courage to ask.”
“I’m a grateful brother too,” Lord Valentine said after a short silence. “I got my year in Italy thanks to Sophie.” His lips quirked into a sheepish smile. “I play the piano rather a lot, though composition has my interest these days, as well. His Grace does not—did not—approve of the intensity of my interest in music but was unwilling to buy me my colors with both Bart and St. Just already on the Peninsula. I was climbing the walls.”
“I’m sorry I missed that,” St. Just said.
“You should be glad you missed it,” Lord Val replied. “Shouting doesn’t begin to describe the rows I had with His Grace. Sophie sought me out one day after a particularly rousing donnybrook and jammed a sailing schedule under my nose. She’d researched the ships going to Italy, the conservatories in Rome, the cost of student lodging, the whole bit. Paris was out of the question, thanks to the Corsican, but Rome was… Rome was my salvation. She offered to give me her pin money. Not lend, give.”
“Did you take it?” Vim had to ask, because a moment like this would not present itself again, of that he was certain.
“Of course not, but I took her idea, and for the first time in my life found myself among people who shared my passion for music. You cannot imagine what a comfort that was.”
Yes, he could. He could well imagine wandering for years without any sense of companionship or belonging, then finding it in perfect abundance.
Only to have it snatched away again.
“I suppose I’ll have to add my tuppence,” St. Just said. He didn’t look at anyone as he spoke, but stared at his empty plate. “I was not managing well when I came home from Waterloo.”
“When I dragged you home,” Lord Val interjected.
“Dragged me home kicking and screaming and clutching a bottle in each fist.”
Vim had to stare at his plate too, because St. Just was the last man he could picture losing his composure. Westhaven was polished, Lord Val casually elegant. St. Just was a gentleman and no fool, but the man was also had the bearing of one who was physically and emotionally tough.
“I was quite frankly a disgrace,” St. Just said. Westhaven looked pained at this summary but held his peace. “I’d left a brother buried in Portugal and seen more good men…” He took a sip of his ale, and Vim saw a hint of a tremor in the man’s hand.
“I went to ground.” He set his ale down carefully. “I holed up at my stud farm in Surrey, where I consumed more good liquor than should be legal. I could not sleep, yet I had no energy. I could not stand to be alone, I could not stand to be around people, I could not—”
“For God’s sake, Dev.” Lord Val glowered at the mug he cradled in his hands. “You don’t have to—”
“I do. I do have to. For Sophie. She came tooling down to Surrey after a few months of this and took in the situation at a glance. She rationed my liquor, and I suspect she put you two on notice, for you began to visit periodically, as well. She called in my man of business and chaperoned a meeting between him and me. She had a stern talk with my cook so I’d get some decent nutrition. I hated her for this, wanted to wring her pretty, interfering neck, and contemplated it at length.”
“Gads.” Westhaven ran a hand through his hair. “I hadn’t known.”
“She didn’t tell anybody. She was off visiting friends, supposedly, so you see there’s precedent for her little detours from the agreed-upon itinerary. She stayed two weeks, and when she judged I was sober enough to listen to her, she pointed out that I had five sisters who were all in want of decent mounts. I owned a stud farm, and did I think my business would prosper if my own sisters could not find decent horses in my stables?”
Westhaven looked intrigued. “She lectured you?”
“She bludgeoned me with common sense, and when I told her to have His Grace pick out something from Tatt’s she… she cried. Sophie hates to cry, but I made her cry. I was so ashamed I started selecting my training prospects that very afternoon.”
“You made her cry.” Westhaven smiled ruefully. “Rather like my shouting at our sisters.”
“Or hollering at His Grace over my music,” Lord Val observed. “I wanted to make beautiful sounds… and there I was, carrying on like a hung over fishwife.”
“And Sophie put you all to rights?” Vim had siblings, he’d had parents and a loving stepfather, a grandfather and several grandmothers, cousins, and an aunt and uncle. Family interactions were seldom quite this dramatically simple, but clearly, in the minds of Sophie’s brothers, the situation was not complicated at all.
“Sophie put us to rights,” Westhaven said, “and my guess is we’ve never thanked her. We’ve gone off and gotten married, started our families, and neglected to thank someone who contributed so generously to our happiness. We’re thanking Sophie now by not calling you out. If she wants you, Charpentier, then we’ll truss you up with a Christmas ribbon and leave you staked out under the nearest kissing bough.”
“And if she doesn’t want me?”
“She wanted you for something,” Lord Val said dryly. “I’d hazard it isn’t just because you’re a dab hand at a dirty nappy, either.”
Vim didn’t want to lie to these men, but neither was he about to admit he suspected Sophie Windham, for reasons he could not fathom, had gifted him with her virginity then sent him on his way.
“She lent you that great hulking beast of hers,” St. Just pointed out. “She’s very protective of those she cares for, and yet she let you go larking off with her darling precious—never to be seen again? I would not be so sure.”
Vim had wondered about the same thing, except if a woman as practical as Sophie were determined to be shut of a man, she might just lend the sorry bastard a horse, mightn’t she
?
“I proposed to my wife, what was it, six times?” Westhaven said.
“At least seven,” Lord Val supplied.
St. Just sent Westhaven a wry smile. “I lost count after the second hangover, but Westhaven is the determined sort. He proposed a lot. It was pathetic.”
“Quite.” Westhaven’s ears might have turned just a bit red. “I had to say some magic words, cry on Papa’s shoulder, come bearing gifts, and I don’t know what all before Anna took pity on me, but I do know this: Sophie has been out for almost ten years, and she has never, not once, given a man a second look. You come along with that dratted baby, and she looks at you like a woman smitten.”
“He’s a wonderful baby.”
“He’s a baby,” Westhaven said, loading three words with worlds of meaning. “Sophie is attached to the infant, but it’s you she’s smitten with.”
All three of Sophie’s brothers speared him with a look, a look that expected him to do something.
“If you gentleman will excuse me, I’m going to offer to take the baby tonight for Sophie. She’s been the one to get up and down with him all night for better than a week, and that is wearing on a woman.”
He left the room at as dignified a pace as he could muster and considered it a mercy Lord Val hadn’t barked anything at him about leaving Sophie’s damned door open.
* * *
“That is just famous.” Westhaven scowled at the empty basket of rolls, wanting nothing so much as to summon Sindal back into the room—but for what?
“Yes,” Valentine said, though his expression was more puzzled than thunderous. “If Sophie and Sindal were in separate bedrooms several doors apart, how does he know she was getting up and down all night with the child? I slept in one of those bedrooms for years and never heard Sophie stirring around at night.”
St. Just smiled a little crookedly. “Because you sleep like the dead and snore accordingly. One wonders if Sindal has told Sophie about the debacle in his past. I don’t think the man’s forgotten it.”
“She wouldn’t hold it against him,” Val said, frowning. “We don’t hold it against him, do we?”
“His Grace thundered about it for weeks,” St. Just said. “You two were more concerned with getting back to school, but Sindal is only a couple years older than I am. It isn’t something a man would quickly forget.”
Westhaven got up and crossed the room to hunker near the fire. “Like we can’t forget he took liberties with our sister. His Grace will be calling for his dueling pistols if the truth should reach him.”
“I don’t think so.” Val kept to his seat and rearranged the cutlery on his empty plate. “I’ve come to realize His Grace picks up a lot more than we thought he did, and he chooses to overlook it.”
“Perhaps.” St. Just shifted in his chair and crossed his legs at the ankle. “That leaves us only with Her Grace to worry about.”
Westhaven rose from poking up the fire and regarded his brothers’ unhappy expressions. “’Tis the season, you lot. Cheer up. At least the man can change a dirty nappy. If he and Sophie have anticipated their vows, he’ll need to be handy in the nursery. Now, shall I beat you at cribbage seriatim or both at the same time?”
“And what if there are to be no vows?” St. Just asked.
Valentine answered as he crossed his knife and fork very precisely across his plate. “Then he’ll need to learn how to disappear from Sophie’s life and never show his miserable face in the shire again. We won’t have him trifling with her.”
Westhaven resumed his place at the table.
“But his family seat is in Kent,” St. Just said. “He can’t very well avoid that for the rest of his life, particularly not after he inherits.”
Westhaven smiled, not a particularly pleasant smile. “Exactly so. Valentine, fetch the cards; St. Just, we’ll need decent libation. As I see it, we really don’t have very many options.”
Fourteen
A quiet knock sounded on Sophie’s door, no doubt one of her infernal, well-meaning brothers come to check on her.
Come to make sure she hadn’t knotted her sheets and eloped with a stable hand to dance on café tables in Paris.
She opened the door and stepped back.
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be awake.” Vim didn’t come into the room, just looked her up and down from where he stood in the drafty corridor.
“Come in, please. We’re letting in the cold.”
He advanced exactly three steps inside the door and still made no move to touch her. “I’ve come to spell you with Kit. I can take him tonight, and you can get some rest.”
And wasn’t that just fine? Vim would come for the baby but not to see how she fared or to speak with her privately.
“I’ll let you take him. I must accustom myself to being without him, mustn’t I?”
“Not necessarily.” He shifted half a step as Sophie closed the door behind him. “You can raise that child, Sophie. You’re a duke’s daughter, and your reputation has no doubt been spotless until now. Your family is of sufficient consequence you could take in a half-dozen children and nobody would take it amiss.”
“You’re wrong.” She rummaged in her traveling bag for some clean nappies and a rag. “They would say: Like father, like daughter. They would say: Like brother, like sister.”
“What does that mean?”
“Anna and Westhaven anticipated their vows, as did St. Just and Emmie. The proof is in their nurseries. I expect Val and Ellen did, as well, but time will tell. His Grace raised two bastards in the Moreland Miscellany, though I love my brother and sister dearly. I’m even named for the royal princess whom all believe to have whelped a bastard, though nobody will say it in public.”
“Sophie, what’s wrong?”
Now, he’d moved. He’d crossed the room silently to stand at her elbow. The bergamot scent of him, the Vim scent of him, tickled her nose.
“I’m tired,” she said, shifting away to sink onto the raised hearth of her small fireplace. “Seeing my brothers is wonderful, but under the circumstances…”
He lowered himself to sit beside her. “Under the circumstances, I’ve ruined your holiday.”
“Christmas is not my favorite time of year.”
“Mine either, and hasn’t been since a certain holiday gathering almost half my lifetime ago. I expect your parents will acquaint you with the details if your brothers haven’t already.”
This was news. She lifted her head to peer at him. “Is this why you dread coming to Kent? There is some scandal in your past?”
“My sisters were the victims of scandal, though I started the tradition well before they did, and I was not exactly a victim. I was a fool.”
“Soph?” Valentine’s voice called softly from the corridor. A moment later, a knock sounded on the door, and a moment after that, Val pushed the door open. Slowly—slowly enough she might have hastened to an innocent posture if she’d been, say, kissing the breath out of her guest. “Is the prodigy asleep yet?”
“You were a prodigy,” she said, rising from the hearth. “Though now you’re just prodigiously bothersome. Lord Sindal was coming by to collect Kit for a night among you fellows.”
“We fellows?” Val’s brows crashed down. “We fellows took turns the livelong freezing day, carrying that malodorous, noisy, drooling little bundle of joy inside our very coats. You should be missing him so badly you can’t let him out of your sight for at least a week of nights.”
“Ignore your brother, my lady.” Vim rose off the hearth, and to Sophie’s eyes, looked very tall as he glared at Valentine. “We will be pleased to enjoy My Lord Baby’s company for the night, won’t we, Lord Valentine?”
Valentine was not a stupid man, though he could be as pigheaded as any Windham male. Marriage was apparently having a salubrious effect on his manners, though.
“If Sophie says I’ll be pleased to spend the night with that dratted baby, then pleased I shall be. Coming, Sindal?”
And th
en, then, Vim kissed her. On the forehead, his eyes open and staring at Valentine the entire lingering moment of the kiss. “Sleep well, Sophie. We’ll take good care of Kit.”
He lifted the cradle and departed. Sophie pushed the nappies at Valentine, ignored her brother’s puzzled, concerned, and curious looks, and pointed at the door without saying one more word.
* * *
“Westhaven sent us a pigeon.” His Grace waved the tiny scrap of paper at his wife. “Says they’ve retrieved Sophie, and all is well. The four of them are on their way.”
Though it didn’t say precisely that.
“In this miserable weather too,” Her Grace replied. “I don’t worry about the boys so much, but Sophie has never enjoyed winter outings. Come sit and have some tea.”
He sat. He did not want tea, but he did want to share his wife’s company. She was the picture of domestic serenity, plying her needle before the fire in their private sitting room.
“They’re traveling in company with Rothgreb’s nephew,” His Grace said, flipping out his tails. “Is that a new piece?”
“A blanket for your grandson. Anna will be showing him off this spring in Town, and he must be attired to befit his station.”
“Mighty small fellow to be so fashion-minded,” His Grace remarked. “Have we seen the Charpentier boy since that awful scene all those years ago?” He’d tried to keep the question casual, but Her Grace was as shrewd as she was sweet.
And she was very, very sweet.
“We have not.” She looked up to frown at him, the only manifestation of her frown in the corners of her lips. “The viscountess has mentioned him passing through from time to time, but he hasn’t socialized when in the neighborhood. If he’s going to be underfoot this year, we really must invite him to the Christmas party.”
His Grace accepted a perfectly prepared cup of tea from his wife and made a show of putting the teacup to his lips. Insipid stuff, tea. Its saving purpose was to wash down crème cakes, of which there were exactly none in evidence, bless Her Grace’s heart.
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