Page 57 of The Duke's Last Dance
“Will you be all right here while I do that, Mother?” He questioned.
His mother simply nodded.
“Yes. I believe I will be. If I am not, I have lungs well enough to call for you or for a housemaid, Nicolas,” his mother replied. “I will be fine. Go see if we have the paper you need.”
“Thank you, Mother. Of course.” He nodded slowly, and then he left his mother to her own devices.
Nicolas wanted to hope that she was going to go see his father sooner rather than later, but that was nothing he could do anything about. He was worried that seeing his father in such a state would cause his mother grief, but then again, they had been doing this for months now and nothing had got any better.
He shook those thoughts away as he approached the study. It had been his father’s study for when it was absolutely necessary that he do work from Gracemere. He was a duke, so it was not always needed, but it was there when it was needed.
The familiar smells of oak and mahogany filled his nose. Nothing had changed here in the three years he had been gone, and that was a comforting thing to find out. There was something about the fact that there was nothing to have changed here that made Nicolas’s shoulders relax, dropping from where they had been tightly held by the stress.
Dealing with what his father had come to had been so stressful, and he had never even realized that he was holding all that stress in his shoulders. That was not good.
Regardless, he took in a deep breath, and started towards the desk. His father had always kept a large stack of paper in one of the drawers. Now that he needed to find it, he could not remember which drawer so he looked in all of them.
Sure enough, true to his mother’s word, there was still a large stack of paper in the drawer. That was all he needed to know, for now.
Chapter Twenty-Five
She sat at the dresser, staring aimlessly into the mirror. Two months had passed since Nicolas had left for the countryside, and she had not heard once from him. She had kept her promise, and every week she had mailed out a letter. This time, it was not as if she had no idea where he was. She knew exactly where he was, and she knew how to reach him if she needed to.
With Gracemere being a week’s journey away, she had thought about going to the manor unannounced, but she had decided, in the end, that it would not be worth it to do so. It would only cause Nicolas more strife, especially if the condition of his father’s illness had only got worse.
Perhaps that was why he had struggled to respond. But for two months? She did not understand it. She did not understand at all why she had not heard something, anything, from Nicolas, not even to tell her that things had got better or worse or to explain why she had not heard from him.
A knock at the door startled her out of her thoughts.
“Come in,” Catherine said.
She hoped with all her heart that it would be Miss Amelia with a letter. When she looked in the mirror, she saw that it was indeed Miss Amelia.
“This has come in the mail for you, Lady Catherine,” Miss Amelia said. She placed the envelope on the desk.
Catherine snatched it up, her heart beating against her ribcage faster than she had ever thought possible. A letter! A letter had finally come.
She tore it open, not paying attention to the name on the envelope. She knew who it was from. It had to be from Nicolas; it just had to be. She had not heard a thing from him in two months, and this was the only acceptable thought to her.
She began to read it aloud to Miss Amelia.
“It’s from Nicolas, oh I knew he would write!” She started. Then, she cleared her throat. “Dearest Catherine, I am having a wonderful time on my honeymoon with Miss Juliet. She is everything I had hoped she would…be…and more…” Her enthusiasm died in an instant.
“I am sorry to tell you that ‘tis from your brother,” Miss Amelia said. “Perhaps I should have stated that earlier when I set it down.”
“Yes, you should have, Miss Amelia!” Catherine threw the letter down.
Two months! Two months and the only letter she got was from her brother,on his honeymoon. Sharing his happiness with her, while good-intentioned, was not what she wanted right now. She wanted to know that Nicolas had made it to Gracemere safely. That his father was doing somewhat better and that they were not in the throes of planning a funeral.
She put her head in her hands and tried to control the welling feelings of disappointment. She should have known. He had not written to her when he went away to the Navy; he had not even told her that he was going away to the Navy.
He said he had written her, but he could not find the letter, and she had never received such a letter telling her what was going on.
A tear ran down her cheek, and Catherine took in a heaving breath. She wanted to know that she had not put her trust somewhere it should not have gone, again. That she could trust Nicolas to keep his word, to tell her that he was at least safe and sound and good. And fine. And all right… and… and that he cared about how she felt.
“What is wrong, Lady Catherine?” Miss Amelia handed her a handkerchief.
Catherine wiped the tear away with the handkerchief.
