Page 24 of Ne'er Duke Well
“Er,” he said. “Lu. Freddie.”
They glanced up at him, and he wasn’t exactly sure what to say.Best not to act like barbarians in front of these important people? Good Christ, surely they were old enough that he didn’t need to teach them table manners, weren’t they? He had no blasted idea what he was doing.
Thomasin cleared her throat and gave a rather studious nod toward the silver and linens beside them. “Just in case you find that you need them, my darlings.”
Freddie went red to his ears, and he grabbed up a fork so quickly that he dropped it again. It clattered off his plate of chicken and came to rest on Lady Judith’s neatly spread indigo sarcenet skirt.
“Oh,” he said. “So sorry. Let me just—”
He grabbed for the fork, but it had somehow become entangled in the embroidered fabric, and when he picked it up, Lady Judith’s skirt lifted with it. They were all treated to a flash of white petticoat.
Freddie dropped the fork as if burned. “Oh monkey,” he said miserably. “That’s gone wrong.”
“Thank you, Master Nash,” said Lady Judith blandly. “I was hoping for an additional utensil. Allow me to secure you one of your own.”
But Lu was already there, handing a fork to Freddie and glaring up at Lady Judith like an angry terrier. “Don’t tease him,” she said. “Leave him alone.”
“Lu,” Peter started to say, but now she too had flushed deeply, and she fixed her gaze furiously on her own lap. Her small bare fingers were in fists at her sides.
Selina laid a hand on his arm, and her expression was gentle when he turned his head.
Give her time, Selina had said.
But how much time did they have?
He had to get this right.
They ate their picnic, Lu and Freddie in disconsolate silence. Even Peter felt not quite up to the task of polite conversation, and when Thomasin asked the children if they fancied a walk with her to the cake house, he hated that their escape felt like relief.
“I’m sorry,” he said when they were out of earshot. “About Freddie and Lu.”
He hated this. He hated apologizing as though there were something wrong with them, when really there had been something wrong with their goddamned father who had abandoned them. With Peter, who didn’t know how to raise them now.
But to his surprise, Lady Judith was regarding him with a hint of a smile. “I like a spirited child,” she said. “I trust you won’t let anyone break her.”
Peter didn’t trust that about himself at all. These Ravenscrofts—with their sturdy confidence, their obvious affection for one another—were outside his realm of experience. When he thought about family, he thought about fear and grief—his father who had gone and his brother who had died. He had no frame of reference for what it could be like to bring up a child like Lu and protect her from the harsh realities of their world.
But he wanted to. He wanted better for her than to wake up each morning gripped by the unpredictability of her future. He wanted to be steady and certain. And he did not know if he could do it.
Selina watched Peter watching his siblings as they scampered off with Thomasin. His face was almost impassive, but she could see the tension in the set of his shoulders. The faint flush at his cheekbones.
When Lu had taken Aunt Judith to task, Selina had felt a rush of tenderness so powerful that she’d wanted to cry.
It was her family that she saw when she looked at them, she realized. She saw her brother Nicholas in Peter—so determined to do what was right. She saw her twin’s sweetness in Freddie, and in Lu, brimming with stubborn pride, she saw herself.
She’d felt that same protective ferocity toward her own little brother. Will, seven minutes younger, and now impossibly far out of her reach.
He’d fractured apart when Katherine and the baby had died, and Selina hadn’t been able to fix it. He’d purchased a commission six months later and sailed, hard-eyed, away from her. Away from all of them. She wrote him every single day, and perhaps it was madness—perhaps he hated getting dozens of letters from her at a time—but he’d never complained.
He also hadn’t come home.
And perhaps this was more madness, seeing them in Freddie and Lu, but she didn’t care. They could be a family, Peter and his siblings, and she would help Peter make it so.
Chapter 7
.…
—from Selina’s private journal, page titledPROPOSED TOPICS OF CONVERSATION FOR STANHOPE AND GEORGIANA
