“I’ll fix you a plate too, shall I?” A sandwich, then two, as well as two cakes were piled onto a plate by her busy, noisy hands.
“An orange will do.”
She looked at the full plate as if surprised to find all that food there, shrugged, and set it aside. “I’ll peel it for you, then. A lady has fingernails suited for the purpose.”
She set about stripping the peel from the hapless orange as effectively as she was stripping Christian’s nerves, though in truth, she wasn’t gawking, she wasn’t simpering, she wasn’t smiling. The lady had business to transact, and she’d dispatch it as efficiently as she dispatched the peel from the orange.
And those busy hands were graceful. Christian wanted to watch them work, wanted to watch them be feminine, competent, and pretty, because this too—the simple pleasure of a lady’s hands—had been long denied him.
He took a sip of his nursery tea, finding it hot, sweet, soothing, and somehow unsatisfying. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to state the reason for your call, Lady Greendale?”
“We’re not to chat over tea, even? One forgets you’ve spent the last few years among soldiers, Your Grace, but then the officers on leave are usually such gallant fellows.” She focused on the orange, which was half-naked on the plate in her lap. “This is just perfectly ripe, and the scent is divine.”
The scent was good. Not a scent with any negative associations, not overpowering, not French.
“You are welcome to share it with me,” he said, sipping his little-boy tea and envying her the speed with which she’d denuded the orange of its peel.
Peeling an orange was a two-handed undertaking, something he’d had occasion to recall in the past three days. This constant bumping up against his limitations wearied him as Girard’s philosophizing never had. Yes, he was free from Girard’s torture, but everywhere, he was greeted with loss, duress, and decisions.
“Your orange?” She held out three quarters of a peeled orange to him, no smile, no faintly bemused expression to suggest he’d been woolgathering—again.
“You know, it really wasn’t very well done of you, Your Grace.” She popped a section of orange into her mouth and chewed busily before going on. “When one has been traveling, one ought to go home first, don’t you think? But you came straight up to Town, and your staff at Severn was concerned for you.”
Concerned for him. Of what use had this concern been when Girard’s thugs were mutilating his hand? Though to be fair, Girard had been outraged to find his pet prisoner disfigured, and ah, what a pleasure to see Girard dealing with insubordination.
Though indignation and outrage were also human traits, and thus should have been beyond Girard’s ken.
“You’re not eating your orange, Your Grace. It’s very good.” She held up a section in her hand, her busy, graceful little lady’s hand. He leaned forward and nipped the orange section from her fingers with his teeth.
She sat back, for once quiet. She was attractive when she was quiet, her features classic, though her nose missed perfection by a shade of boldness, and her eyebrows were a touch on the dramatic side. A man would notice this woman before he’d notice a merely pretty woman, and—absent torture by the French—he would recall her when the pretty ones had slipped from his memory.
“Now then, madam. We’ve eaten, we’ve sipped our tea. The weather is delightful. What is your business?”
“It isn’t my business, really,” she said, regarding not him, not the food, but the fire kept burning in the grate at all hours. “It’s your business, if you can call it business.”
Something about the way she clasped her hands together in her lap gave her away. She was no more comfortable calling as darkness fell than he was receiving her. She’d barely tasted her orange, and all of her blather had been nerves.
Lady Greendale was afraid of him.
Perhaps she’d heard the rumors about the lost duke’s madness; perhaps she hadn’t recalled he’d be a good foot taller than she; perhaps she hadn’t expected the staff to leave them so very much alone.
In any case, he didn’t like it. Next to hope, fear was the tormentor’s most effective weapon.
“Lady Greendale, plain speech would be appreciated.” He spoke not only quietly, but gently, the way he might speak to a child or the elderly. “I’m sure you’d rather be home at such an hour, and I would not detain you unnecessarily.”
Unfortunate word choice. An English civilian caught in France when war broke out was a détenu.
“You should have gone home to Severn first, Your Grace, and then it would not fall to me to remind you of your duty, but here we are.”
She was stalling rather than scolding, suggesting the lady was quite unnerved. He waited her out. He was a master at waiting, and at silence. Girard’s ill-treatment had bequeathed a legacy of patience, in addition to scars.
And she apparently had some passing familiarity with silence as well. All her fluttering and shifting about ceased. A few beats of quiet went by, and Christian abruptly missed her blathering.
“It’s your daughter.” She turned limpid blue eyes on him, a world of worry shining out of them, but the worry, for once, wasn’t for him, and that was a curious relief. “I am very concerned about your daughter.”
***
Gilly had gathered up the last of her courage to get her to this elegant, toasty London parlor, for what she recalled most clearly about Mercia was that he was tall. Her husband had been tall.
Tall men had self-possession and reach. Neither was a good thing.
Thin as he was, Mercia looked even taller now than he had when he’d danced with Gilly upon the occasion of his wedding to Helene. His eyes, the famous Severn blue eyes, were sunken, and his blond hair was pulled back into a loose, old-fashioned queue. Helene had been uncomfortable with what she called her husband’s cool intensity. She’d said he was too serious by half, and much taken with himself.
Coming from Helene, who’d been taken with herself indeed, the comment had lodged in Gilly’s memory. Greendale had been nothing, if not taken with himself.
“Tell me about my daughter.”
His tone was encouraging, and he’d asked the right question—or given the right command—but Gilly had the sense he couldn’t recall the name of his only surviving child. Or maybe he could, and saying that name pained him too much.
“Lucille will be eight this summer,” Gilly said. “She’s very bright, she reads well, shows some talent at the piano, and is much loved by her governess and nursery maid.”
Also by her mother’s cousin, or Gilly would not be bearding this gaunt, quiet lion in his den.
Though how many lions drank nursery tea and folded a lady’s wrap as if it held precious memories?
“And yet,” His Grace said quietly, “the girl suffers some problem, else you wouldn’t be calling upon me at such an unusual hour.”
He made a simple deduction, rather than delivered a scold, so Gilly gave him an honest answer. “I was told you sleep during the day, Your Grace, and you’re refusing all callers.”
Which admission would alert the duke to the fact that his staff was more concerned about him than about discretion. Gilly felt a spike of protectiveness toward her host, in part because everybody needed privacy, and in part because he was so quiet. He spoke quietly, his movements were quiet, and his eyes were the most quiet of all.
Greendale had seldom been silent for long, and all his tirades had had the same focus.
“And now,” His Grace said, putting down his empty teacup, “you will have the more daring among my peers calling upon me at night.”
Was he making a jest? “Not if you come down to Severn with me.”
And again, silence fell between them, filled only with the soft roar of the fire. The lack of conversation should have unnerved Gilly, but the quiet moments allowed her to truly study him.
Thank God.
“I intend to remove to Severn,” he said, “but not until the bankers see that I live, have possession of the relevant faculties, and have returned my duchy to good financial health.”
They’d likely said that to his face, too, the rotters, and held his own money clutched away from him as they said it.
“Bother the duchy’s financial health. You are clearly competent to administer your own affairs.” Gilly reined in her temper by fixing him another cup of his nursery tea. She would not have minded a cup herself, insomnia being a widow’s frequent burden. “Your daughter’s health is precarious, and that should take precedence over all.”
“If she is ill, I will certainly retain physicians to examine her.”
“I already have.” She passed him his tea and then had nothing to do with her hands.
“Perhaps you’d peel me another orange?”
Excellent notion. He’d eaten his already, steadily ingested one section after another, and yet, his hands weren’t sticky.
Taking a small plate, Gilly peeled the fruit and tore it into sections, wiped her fingers using the finger bowl and a serviette, then passed him his orange. The whole process took several minutes, which allowed Gilly to organize her thoughts.
“You are capable of silence,” he said, taking the plate of orange sections. “I had wondered.” He might have been mocking her, in that soft, musing voice. Or he might have been trying to communicate something else entirely.
“One doesn’t usually make a call to sit without speaking like a pair of Quakers at meeting.”
He saluted with his teacup. “You were telling me about my daughter.”
“Lucille, yes. She grew quite withdrawn when her brother died, and we feared she might fall ill as he did.”
“He was ill, then?” A quiet question, the inflection coming across as almost…French?
“He was colicky, then started running a fever. Not typhoid or lung fever, that we could tell. Influenza, most likely.”
He rose and went to the window, keeping his back to her, which struck Gilly as rude, until it occurred to her nobody would have discussed his son’s death with him, and Helene’s letters had—if she’d written any, if he’d received any—been no doubt worse than useless.
Gilly was in the presence not only of a duke—a tall, quiet duke, with silent eyes and clothing that fit him far too loosely—but also a grieving father and husband. She nearly envied him that grief, which suggested her grasp of reason had become tenuous.
“Evan did not linger, Your Grace. He was ill seven days and nights.”
“You were with him?”
Still the duke kept his back to her, and his voice was the same. Soft, aristocratic, no emotion whatsoever, as if somebody gravely ill slept elsewhere in the house.
“I stayed for the duration, and for a few days afterward. Even Greendale understood my place was with my cousin at such a time.”
“And this was hard on the sister?”
The sister? Lucille, his daughter, but Evan’s sister.
“Very. Helene did not cope well. Greendale would not let me linger at Severn indefinitely.”
“Coping was not Helene’s greatest strength.”
Diplomatically put, but what did the man find so fascinating beyond the darkened window?
“With her mother’s passing, Lucy became even more withdrawn. Losing her mother and brother was difficult, and she hasn’t known what to make of your situation.”
No small child could have made sense of a father imprisoned, far away, and unlikely to return.
“I was hard put to make sense of my situation myself.” This observation bore the quality of an admission, not a joke. By no means a joke.
Gilly let the silence stretch, not knowing what to say. She studied the lines of his evening attire that hung on him like so much damp, oversized laundry. Perhaps his situation still made no sense to him?
“What are Lucy’s symptoms?”
“She speaks very little, and she does not leave the schoolroom unless forced to do so by me or her nurse. Her appetite is poor.”
He turned, his expression for the first time yielding to an emotion—consternation. “She has gone into a decline. I did not know children could.”
Gilly’s opinion exactly, but the doctors had scoffed. “She has lost weight. She no longer plays, but rather, dresses and undresses her dolls by the hour, sits and stares, or draws.”
“What do the physicians say?”
“That she is being stubborn and willful and attempting to dictate to the adults around her.” Stubborn and willful were apparently the most frequent complaints men made against females of any age, and yet, where would Gilly have been without a full complement of stubbornness to see her through her marriage?
“What do you say, Lady Greendale?”
Gilly was so used to keeping her opinions to herself, every one of her opinions, regardless of the topic, that His Grace’s question caught her off guard.
His expression suggested he truly wanted her view of the matter. Mercia was tall, and he was male, but if his question was any indication, his resemblance to Greendale ended there.
“Lucy has lost her family, Your Grace. She needs family, and until recently, I could not oblige.” And Greendale had enjoyed ensuring it was so.
Mercia ran his hand over her jacket, which he’d folded across the back of a chair. “Your bereavement is recent?”
Whatever else Mercia was doing, he wasn’t catching up on gossip. “More than a month past. Lord Greendale succumbed to an apoplexy, according to the official inquest.”
He twisted the gold signet ring about the middle finger of his right hand, an unusual location for such a piece. “My condolences. Perhaps you’d like more tea?”
His Grace had not yet addressed the problem Gilly had brought to him, and the hour grew later. “Bother the tea.”
He was not offended by her lapse in manners. Maybe after wintering with the French, little offended him, and yet, Gillian was a guest in his home, at a peculiar hour, and clearly, His Grace was not faring well.
She extended an olive branch, for the child’s sake. “We’re family, Your Grace. You are welcome to call me Gillian. To Lucy, I am Cousin Gilly.”
More consternation shone in his remarkable blue eyes, as if to whom and when familiarities might be granted had been misplaced on some French mountainside, along with the roles of husband and father.
And the ability to appreciate a strong cup of tea.
And the ability to sleep through the night.
His Grace resumed a place beside Gilly on the sofa, settling carefully, like an old fellow who had not enough padding on his bones to tolerate even a short tenure on a hard chair.
Or perhaps the duke was too exhausted to stand for more than a few minutes?
“I am inclined to take your suggestion that I remove to Severn sooner rather than later. The curious and inconsiderate have been leaving their cards by the dozen, and I am summoned to Carlton House several days hence for a private audience with the Regent. My health is not much better than precarious, and I am loath to subject myself to the remaining weeks of the Season. At your prompting, I will repair to Severn at week’s end.”
“Thank you.” She nearly told him he should observe mourning for Helene—Evan had been too young—because mourning kept the curious and the inconsiderate away for a few months.
“I have a condition.”
With men, every concession came at a price, and yet, Gilly did not a
nticipate an onerous request from the weary, soft-spoken duke. “Name it.”
“You will accompany me, and until I go, you will act as the lady of this house. You will deal with the invitations, you will deal with the squabbling, smiling housemaids. You will see to the closing up of the household, and you will assert your presence during daylight hours so I needn’t bother with housewifery all throughout my nights. If you are disinclined to meet this request, I will take that much longer to make the journey south.”
Again, he’d surprised Gilly.
His condition called to the long-denied part of her that delighted in the role of caretaker, a part of her that had shrunk to a husk under Greendale’s criticisms, that had wished even if Greendale were the father, Gilly might have had children to raise and love.
And yet, what came out of her fool mouth? “What of a chaperone, Your Grace?”
He did not smile. Gilly’s sense of his amusement was unsupported by anything save the way he turned that signet ring, played with it almost, the band loose around his finger.
“First, my lady, we are family, as you’ve noted yourself. You are Helene’s cousin, and widowed. If your own family could not provide for you, I would naturally expect you to apply to me in their stead. Second, you have apparently been a frequent visitor at Severn in my absence. As a kinswoman, you would be the logical choice for my hostess, were I to entertain. In any case, you are beyond chaperones now, are you not? Third, you are the logical choice of female to take a continuing interest in Lucy’s development, because you are the only one who might sponsor her come out ten years hence.”
Quite a speech from him. Gilly sorted through his words and concluded he was offering her a home at Severn, however temporarily. Absenting herself from Greendale represented the closest thing Gilly had to a goal, besides seeing to Lucy’s welfare.
Mercia had some ulterior motive, of that Gilly was certain, but no matter. She’d been dealing with men and their motives for years, and Lucy had no other champion.
Gilly rose, which meant the duke had to come to his feet as well, and gracious, he was tall. “I’ll collect my things and remove here in the morning, Your Grace.”
The Captive Page 4