Page 41 of The Captive
The duke’s lips twisted in an expression Gilly recognized not as distaste so much as impatience.
“What?”
“I feel as much guilt as grief where the child is concerned,” he said. “For various reasons, but in part because the little fellow needed me more than my duchess did—the best person to show the next duke how to go on is the present version. And yet, my presence in the nursery was barely tolerated, and the army seemed like a good use of an extraneous duke.”
He was confiding in her, and Gilly was equally dismayed and touched. Damn Helene for her selfishness anyway, and English dukes numbered only several dozen in a good year. How could even one be extraneous?
“You are not extraneous, Your Grace. Not to Lucy, not to your tenants and staff.”
“What about to you, Countess?” Despite the gravity of the question, his blue eyes held humor, and maybe something else—curiosity?
“You are not extraneous to me, either. I am the one imposing on your household.”
“You will disabuse yourself of that notion.” He rose and drew Gilly to her feet. “When Vicar comes to call, you will pour. When Lucy needs her first habit, you will supervise the creation of it. When the tweeny steals the underbutler’s attentions from the first parlor maid, you will intervene, or civilization throughout the shire will cease.”
“While you do what?”
“Wait for my daughter to speak and try to address what needs addressing regarding my past.”
He gave her a little bow, touched his finger to the flower Gilly still held, and took himself back up toward the house.
Leaving Gilly to wonder, if in his questions and confidences the duke might—without any conscious intent to do so—have been flirting with her, just a little.
***
To Christian’s great pleasure, in response to inquiries regarding Girard and Anduvoir, a letter arrived from Devlin St. Just. Out of the pile of otherwise trivial social correspondence, that one was saved back, to be read in the solitude of the library at the end of the day.
The volume of good wishes from Christian’s peers and neighbors quite honestly surprised him. Each day brought more letters, some from people he’d never met, congratulating him on his safe journey home, thanking him for his service to the realm “above and beyond the call of duty,” wishing him well in light of his “noble sacrifices.”
Platitudes, all of them, and they made Christian at once furious and humble—though nobody had any word regarding Girard.
“Will I disturb you?” The countess in her dark bedclothes stood in the doorway, her hair a golden rope braided over one shoulder.
“Of course not.” Christian rose, for she was a lady. An increasingly kissable, holdable lady. “Sleep eludes you?”
“I’m hoping not.” She advanced into the room and closed the door to keep in the fire’s heat. “I’ve brought your volume of Blake back, lest it find its way to some trunk or portmanteau of mine.”
She was doing it again, hinting at her departure, and all the conflicted emotion he’d felt contemplating his mail transferred itself to the lady in bare feet before him.
Long feet, with high arches and pink, fetching toes. Surely, composing odes to a widow’s feet indicated inchoate loss of reason?
“Shall you choose another volume? And what can you be thinking, my dear, to wander about unshod?” He hoped she washome, where such lapses were not a privilege but a right.
“I wasn’t thinking.” But she smiled, that same wan smile that he often saw her turn on Lucy. He suspected that smile signaled a lack of children in her life to love, which lack she ought to lay squarely on Greendale’s no doubt tidy grave. “A want of regular, rational processes is my besetting sin, according to my late spouse.”
“Whom you have the sense not to mourn overmuch. Come here by the fire, then, and be warm, despite your lack of forethought. I’ll choose another book for you.”
“Kind of you.” She advanced to the hearth and took a seat on the bricks. “You’ve had the fire going all day. The bricks are warm.”
“I want one room in the house where the constant chill in my bones must do battle with a decent fire. I know it’s summer, but…”
Before he could bluster his way into some ducally appropriate explanation, she stroked a hand over the bricks.
“The warmth helps,” she said. “Someone should make it a rule that spouses die only in spring, so the warmth of the summer is available in first mourning to provide the simplest comfort of all.”
And to think Greendale had tried repeatedly to call her stupid.
Christian brought her another volume of poetry. “An anthology, perfect for browsing at the end of the day.”
