Page 17 of The Captive Duke
He left her just like that. A slight bow, and he was gone, the remains of his scone forgotten on the desk. Gilly shifted around to his side of the desk, sat in his chair, and started to pour herself a cup of tea, only to find the pot was filled with hot water, not tea.
An unpeeled orange sat near a plate of crispy bacon and an artful pile of translucent slices of ham.
No eggs, no toast, no kippers.
Eccentric, then. Lucy’s poor papa had become eccentric.
Gilly ate the orange and half the bacon, which was every bit as good as bacon could be, and spent twenty minutes each with the housekeeper and the butler explaining that His Grace would be removing to the country early for the summer. Next she organized the invitations by date and collected the household sewing kit.
When Gilly knocked on the door to the ducal sitting room, she heard nothing granting her permission to enter, so she pushed the door open a few inches.
“Your Grace?”
“I said come in.”
“I didn’t hear you. You might consider speaking above a whisper, you know. My goodness, you have dropped some weight.”
“In the neighborhood of four stone.”
He stood near his dressing-room door, barefoot in white satin knee breeches and a white linen shirt, both of which were turned inside out. The shirt was cut to billow gracefully about his arms and looked merely very loose, but the breeches were in danger of falling off his person.
What had those dratted French done to him?
“Whatever you do, please do not allow your pins to pierce my flesh.” He spoke with an odd, measured cadence, as if the same words, spoken by a lesser man, might have escaped through a clenched jaw.
Did tailors have so little understanding of their thimbles?
“I will not stick you,” she said, unwilling to bait him when he was so obviously dreading the exercise. “We’ll start with your breeches, because they’re the more complicated.”
He paced off to the window, his shirt billowing, one hand on the waistband of his breeches. “Now? Don’t you want to measure something, or consult your pattern cards first?”
“Now,” she said, slipping a pincushion onto her wrist. “All you need do is stand still.” She dropped to her knees and patted the rug before her, as if she were coaxing a puppy out from under the sofa. Even though it was early summer, he had a fire in his hearth, and Gilly was grateful for the warmth.
He crossed the room and fisted and flexed both hands, like a pianist preparing for an opening cadenza, or a prizefighter about to step into the ring and put up his fives. Gilly slipped two fingers under the hem of the right leg of his breeches, her knuckles sliding along the skin of his bony male knee.
His Grace inhaled as if she’d jabbed him with a pin.
“What do you recall of Lucy?” she asked, because conversation was all she could offer him by way of distraction.
“Very little. She seemed a bright child, but Helene was not well pleased to have produced a girl, at first. I rather liked my daughter. She was a baby, nothing more, but she was my baby.”
Had Helene ever called the child “my daughter” or“my baby”? The girl, Lady Lucille, her ladyship, our firstborn—Helene had used any of those—but not “my daughter.” And Gilly was certain Helene had never admitted to liking the child.
Though Gilly liked the girl—had liked her ferociously at first sight and still did.
“Who chose her name?” Gilly pinched up the outside seam of the breeches, appalled at how much extra material there was. Did charging around after French infantry cause a man to drop nigh sixty pounds?
“I chose her name, for Lucifer, bringer of light. Her mother hated it.” His Grace reported a dispatch from the marital past rather than a regret or a boast.
“But Helene doted on the girl.” Rather than turn him, which would require touching the duke or ordering him about, Gilly scooted around him on the floor.
“That came later, and I am convinced Helene’s attention to Lucy was mostly because Helene was jealous of the baby.”
“Jealous of her own child?” Gilly rose on her knees to gather the seam over his bony hip. At his sides, his hands flexed again.
“I took to stopping by the nursery at odd times during the day. Lucy was a jolly child, and I enjoyed her company. Helene got wind of—whatare you doing?”
“Taking in the waistband, lest your breeches come down when you bow before your sovereign.” She slipped her finger inside his waistband and gathered a substantial tuck of fabric.
