To Woo a Widow

by Christi Caldwell

  His mother stitched her eyebrows into a single line. “Lady Winston?” she parroted back.

  He gave a tight nod and, setting his glass down, picked up his fork and knife.

  “With her family’s notorious reputation, I expect the lady, a widow,” she spoke that word with the same vitriol as she might a harlot or courtesan, “has arrived in London with wholly dishonorable intentions.”

  Miles snapped his head up. “A widow?” The young woman, with her sad eyes and two daughters, was, in fact—

  “Indeed.” Mother pursed her lips. “And you were seen carrying her about Hyde Park.” She tossed her hands up. “Is it a wonder the viscountess is outraged?”

  “Yes, it is,” he said dryly. “I would expect her to be a good deal more outraged if I’d simply left an injured lady on the ground without the benefit of help.”

  His mother continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “Regardless, you need but demonstrate your devoted interest in Sybil by dancing two sets with her at Lady Essex’ upcoming ball.”

  Two consecutive sets constituted an offer of marriage. Short of public ruin, it was an act that would send the loudest signal of his intentions for the lady. So why, given his promise to his mother to marry the lady by the time he reached thirty, did he hesitate? “I’m not yet thirty, Mother,” he said, with deliberate humor infused into his reminder.

  She swatted the air with a hand. “Oh, do not tease. You’ll be thirty the day the Season ends.” Three weeks. Three weeks until he made a formal offer to a lady he’d known as a child, who really would make him a fine enough wife. They’d played as children and grew somewhat distant as adults. But to their mothers, the expectation had always been there just the same—they would marry.

  Surely, Sybil desired more than that. He did. Or he had. Through the years, he’d been quite content in his bachelor state, with the eventual hope that there would be…more. That there would be a lady who desired more than the title of marchioness and the wealth and prestige that came with the noble position. A woman who was content with a noble gentleman, rather than a practiced charmer. Alas, there hadn’t. And a promise to his mother, given when he was a man of three and twenty, had been made. How to account for the regret that now rolled through him?

  His mother rose in a flurry of skirts, bringing his attention to the moment. “If you’ll excuse me, I am paying a visit to Lady Lovell.” She pursed her lips. “I will take it upon myself to reassure her that nothing untoward occurred. After all, the lady was injured, correct?”

  The reminder only conjured the memory and feel of Lady Philippa’s foot in his hand; the satiny smoothness of her soft skin. Had he imagined the breathy sigh as he’d run his fingers over her instep?

  “Miles?”

  “Uh…indeed, she was.” By the narrowing of her eyes, his mother was not in the least mollified. Without another word, she swept from the room, leaving him with blessed silence and the memory of the widowed Lady Philippa.

  The woman whose book he carried in his pocket. No doubt, she’d been reading the child’s tale to her daughter, Faith. And why the girl was surely missing it, even now.

  Miles climbed to his feet. Yes, the least he could do was see it properly restored to the pair.

  Except, as he took his leave, why did it feel as though his intended visit had more to do with seeing the lady than anything else?

  Chapter 5

  “My lady, let me help you,” Mary the young maid said quickly.

  Later that afternoon, servants rushed about Philippa with the same attentiveness she’d received the eight times she’d been with child. She swallowed a sigh, hating that hovering concern, preferring the privacy of her own company. Alas, to her family and servants, she’d been the weak Edgerton—the most in need of protecting, the one afraid to speak her mind. But haven’t I been? Haven’t I, with my willingness to wed a gentleman whose eyes I couldn’t even meet because he’d been touted as a good man, proven that very thing? Oh, how she despised what she’d allowed life to shape her into—an empty shell of someone she was not.

  “Are you certain you are all right?” Faith asked, snapping Philippa’s attention sideways to the too-large King Louis XIV chair where her daughter sat swinging her legs back and forth. The girl had remained at her side for the past hour, refusing to abandon her post, to return abovestairs for her lessons.

  “I am quite hale and hearty,” Philippa assured her. Hale and hearty were words very rarely uttered about her, but Philippa knew how important it was that she set Faith’s mind at ease. This was her daughter; a girl who’d known recent loss and Philippa would not allow uncertainty about her mother’s well-being to hang over her. She leaned over and brushed her daughter’s knee. “Look at me. No harm will come to me,” she promised, as a maid gently lifted her ankle and propped a pillow under it as though she were a fragile piece of china. How very determined everyone was to see her as a frail woman in need of coddling. For years, it had been that way. Too many years. A scream of frustration bubbled from the surface and climbed her throat, demanding to be set free. Philippa clamped her lips shut to keep it buried.

  “Not like Father?” Her father; healthy one day and dead of an apoplexy the next.

  She leaned over and collected Faith’s hand. “Look at my lips,” she ordered loudly. Too many times, too many words were lost in translation due to Faith’s partial loss of hearing. Her daughter had become adept at making proper sense of sentences through studying lips. Philippa waited until her daughter’s attention was fixed on her mouth. “As long as it is within my power, I will never, ever leave,” she promised. It was a promise she’d no right making; one beyond her grasp and, yet, she’d lie to the Lord on Sunday if it would erase fear or hurt from her children’s lives. But the decision of whether to subject herself to further pregnancies was now in her power.

  “You almost did.” Faith’s lower lip quivered. “A lot.”

  Yes, she had. Her fingers tightened about her daughter’s hand and she forced herself to lighten her grip. The agony of endless birthings and inevitable losses, several early, most late, which had left her weak from blood loss. The doctor had warned the late earl of the perils in subjecting Philippa to any further childbirths. She drew in a steadying breath and battled the remembered horror cleaving away at her insides. Never again. Never would she again risk leaving her daughters behind, all to give a lord that highly-desired heir.

  “But I didn’t,” she said, proud of the even delivery of those three words. “And it should give you proof that I’ll not go anywhere.” In those many times she’d lain weak, fighting to survive, she’d bartered her soul for survival, unwilling to leave Faith alone with the cold, emotionally deadened earl. A man who’d sneered at Faith’s partial deafness and who’d lambasted Philippa for never giving him a boy. In those darkest days when she’d hovered between life and death, all that had kept her alive had been her daughter.

  Faith slipped off her chair and perched on the edge of the sofa Philippa occupied. “Do you promise?” she asked, taking her mother’s face between her small hands.

  Philippa crossed her heart. “I promise,” she murmured, battling back the ever-present maternal guilt in making a pledge she couldn’t truly keep in their uncertain existence.

  Frantic footsteps sounded in the hall and they looked to the entrance as the Dowager Marchioness of Waverly entered, with Chloe rushing at her heels.

  “Philippa,” her mother cried as she stopped beside her sofa. “What is this I heard of you falling?” She looked to the maid hovering at the opposite end of the chair. “Has the doctor been—?”

  “It hardly merits a visit from the doctor,” Philippa reassured in placating tones. Then, hadn’t that always been her role in the Edgerton family? To be soft-spoken and constantly assuring everyone that all was well. Even when her heart was wrenching with the agony of the brutality she’d known at a vicious father’s hands and her husband’s relentless indifference. Because ultimately, everyone had their own demons t
o battle and hadn’t the time to take on hers, as well. “It hardly hurts anymore.” And it didn’t. The ache, though present, had dimmed.

  “Whatever happened?” Chloe asked, in her always-curious tones, as she propped her hip on the back of Philippa’s seat.

  “Mama stepped into a rabbit hole,” her daughter helpfully supplied. “Because she was looking back at Miles,” she added. Unhelpfully.

  Silence resounded in the large parlor and Philippa’s cheeks blazed hot. With her daughter’s reduced hearing, Philippa had long believed Faith had honed other skills. One being her ability to see everything about her and, in this particular instance, she’d witnessed and now shared Philippa’s improper regard of the marquess. “I was not staring at him,” she said softly. Rather, she’d been staring after him. Entirely different things. Weren’t they?

  Of course, Mother broke the tense quiet blanketing the room. “Who is Miles?” she blurted. When no one was quick to reply, she looked between her daughters. “Who is—?”

  “He is the Marquess of…” Faith wrinkled her brow. “Milford? Or was it Guilford, Mama?”

  “Guilford,” she said weakly. For the course of her daughter’s five years, Philippa had quite celebrated in Faith’s willingness and ability to freely speak. Having long had her voice quashed by a cruel father and an unkind husband, she’d appreciated the joy and beauty in Faith’s garrulousness. This moment, however, was decidedly not one of those times.

  “The Marquess of Guilford?” her mother parroted back.

  Warming to the curious stares trained on her by her grandmother and aunt, Faith puffed her chest proudly. “He carried Mama.”

  Once more, silence reigned. Only this time, it came with probing, piercing stares. And the last thing Philippa wanted, needed, or desired was a probing, Edgerton inquiry.

  “Who carried your mama?”

  She swallowed a groan as Gabriel stepped inside the room. Blast and double blast.

  “The Marquess of Guilford,” Chloe supplied.

  Philippa leaned forward and touched her daughter’s cheek. “Faith, run abovestairs to the nursery,” she urged.

  Her daughter opened her mouth to protest, but Philippa gave her a lingering look that ended the request. “Very well,” she said on a beleaguered sigh and skipped around the furniture. She paused in the doorway alongside Gabriel, the Marquess of Waverly.

  “Uncle Gabriel,” she said, dropping a proper curtsy.

  “Hullo, Faith.” He ruffled the top of her black curls, in a gesture so at odds with the coolly removed brother he’d been through the years. Then, the man she’d come back to live with, now married and so blissfully happy, had been transformed. Something tugged at Philippa. Something ugly and dark. Something that felt very much like envy. “Did you have a nice time at the park?”

  “Oh, yes,” she called up. “I picked flowers with Miles.”

  Which only earned Philippa further probing stares; this time from the eldest Edgerton sibling. She managed a smile. Of course, there would be questions. There always were with the Edgertons. Ironically, those same kin had failed to ask the most important questions about her hopes and dreams of a future. Faith slipped from the room and Philippa collected the until-now forgotten embroidery conveniently resting on the table beside her. To give her fingers something to do, she proceeded to drag the needle and thread through the white fabric.

  “Well?” Gabriel drawled. Striding over, he claimed the seat directly across from Philippa. And just one additional probing Edgerton stare pricked her already burning skin.

  “I fell,” she said under her breath. At the protracted silence, she paused in her work and glanced up.

  The trio of Edgertons stood, mouths agape.

  “You mumbled,” Chloe said with the same shock of one who’d first discovered the world was, in fact, round.

  Philippa shook her head. “No.” She didn’t mumble or mutter. Ever. She was always proper.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said with a faint grin. “You did.”

  “He is correct,” Chloe continued. “And you know, it pains me to ever admit Gabriel is correct about anything, but in this, he is.” She paused. “You mumbled.”

  “I hardly think whether or not I mumbled merits a discussion,” she said between tight lips as she dragged the needle through the frame once more. Then, what she had thought, wished, or wanted, had never truly mattered. She jabbed the tip of the needle into her thumb. She gasped, as the frame tumbled onto her lap…and was met, once more, with that damning, telling silence. Philippa stuffed her wounded digit into her mouth.

  Her mother clasped her hands at her throat. “Did you…stick your finger?”

  Given that she even now sucked on that same finger, Philippa opted not to respond.

  “You never make a mistake,” Chloe matter-of-factly observed.

  How very wrong her sister was. She had made the very worst mistakes in her life; ones that moved beyond a silly scrap of linen with flowers embroidered upon it. She curled her toes into the arch of her feet and winced as pain shot up her injured ankle.

  “I believe we were speaking about the Marquess of Guilford?” her mother encouraged, because, inevitably, all matters came ’round to unwed gentlemen.

  “Were we?” she asked, picking up her small wooden frame, once again. He could be very happily married, or more, unhappily married, as she’d been for six miserable years. After all, what did she know about the gentleman? Except, would a gentleman who’d bothered to collect flowers with her daughter and took time to search for said child’s mother be one of those nasty sorts that Lord Winston had been?

  “He’s unmarried,” her mother offered.

  Of course.

  Every conversation invariably came back to that important detail about a gentleman:

  Would you like sugar and milk in your tea? Lord So-and-So is married.

  Do take care to not walk outside, lest you be caught in the rain. It wouldn’t do for an unmarried gentleman to see you without a care…

  “It hardly matters whether the marquess is wed or not wed,” she said in smooth, even tones, still attending her work. She’d no intention of marrying again. Ever. There was no need to spend the remainder of her days as nothing more than a body to give a lord his beloved heir and a spare while his female issue was forgotten. When her family still said nothing, she filled the void. “Lord Guilford was gracious enough to help me to my carriage.” Carrying her as though she’d weighed nothing in his strong, powerful arms. Her breathing quickened and she prayed the three now studying her didn’t note her body’s telltale response. “That is all,” she finished weakly.

  The butler, Joseph, appeared at the front of the parlor, a silver tray in his gloved hands. He cleared his throat. “The Marquess of Guilford has arrived…” He looked to Philippa. “…to see Lady Winston.”

  Her lips parted and questions tumbled around her mind. He was here? What…? Why…?

  At the protracted silence, the butler glanced about. And though she knew this surprising turn would only bring with it further Edgerton questions later, the oddest fluttering danced in her belly at the unexpected visit.

  “You may show him in, Joseph” she said “Now, please excuse me,” she ordered her family. “I have a visitor to attend to.”

  Chapter 6

  As Miles was led through the Marquess of Waverly’s townhouse, one thing became very apparent—he was being watched.

  A small figure, a familiar figure, came racing down the corridor. “Miles!”

  He smiled as Faith skidded to a halt before him. “My lady,” he greeted, sketching a deep bow.

  She giggled. “I’m not a grown lady, I’m just a girl.” Nonetheless, she sank into a flawless, very mature curtsy. Had life taught the girl that maturity?

  “Have you come to see my mama?” she asked with the guile only a child was capable of.

  “I have,” he answered, snapped out of his musings. “Though I expect you’ve seen she is well-cared for.”

&n
bsp; Faith gave a solemn nod. “Oh, yes.” She wrinkled her nose. “She wouldn’t let the doctor come and check her foot. She says she is fine.” Yet again, images of Philippa’s delicate slip of flesh in his hands, the satiny softness of her skin, burned in his memory. I am going to hell. There is nothing else for it. “She sent me abovestairs,” the girl was saying.

  He furrowed his brow.

  “To the schoolroom,” she said by way of explanation.

  “Ah, of course.” As a child, he’d chafed at being shut away in those miserable nurseries, preferring the invigorating Sussex air to the closed-in rooms every previous Marquess of Guilford had lost countless days to.

  “Lessons on reading,” she said with the same dejected tones of one who’d been deprived of a year’s worth of dessert.

  His lips twitched. With her flair for the dramatics she called forth memories of his now married sister, Rosalind. “And what does your governess have you reading that has you avoiding your lessons?”

  “Lessons on propriety and decorum,” she said in a high-pitched, nasal tone which, he’d wager these last three weeks of his bachelorhood, was a rendition of the nursery governess responsible for her tutoring. Then, the girl flared her eyes. “But I heard you had come for a visit and I sneaked away,” she whispered and then stole a glance about.

  Miles dropped to a knee and leaned close to her right ear. He spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “I was known to avoid my own lessons,” he said with a wink.

  She blinked and shook her head. “What did you say?”

  Miles creased his brow. “Uh…”

  Color rushed to Faith’s cheeks and she glanced down at the tips of her toes. “You said it against my right ear. I cannot hear out of my right ear.”