Page 58 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
“Perhaps if you haddrunkthem rather thanbathedin them,” Lizzie snapped, “I would not find your odor so offensive.”
“Lies.” There was an amused, sing-song lilt to his voice. “Lies and slander.”
Pointedly ignoring him, Lizzie turned back to the maid. “A bath, Becky. Immediately, if you please.”
“At once, my lady.” With a hastily bobbed curtsey, Becky beat an even faster retreat, clearly not wishing to be embroiled in the conflict between her master and mistress for one moment longer than necessary.
Lizzie breathed a sigh of relief, pressing her hand to her forehead. A low snore split the silence, and she turned, all incredulity—Luke had managed to fall asleep, his legs dangling over the edge of the bed, half-swathed in a tangle of bedclothes.
Despite her annoyance, it did come as a small blessing. At least his contributions to conversation—such as they were—were kept to a minimum as an assortment of servants traipsed through the room, carrying cans of hot water to fill the tub in the bathing room adjacent to the bedchamber. Luke placidly snored through it all, with nothing more than a few grunts and twitches to suggest he was in any way aware of what chaos he had wreaked upon the household.
Stalking toward the bed once the servants had left, Lizzie reached out to shake his shoulder, and hesitated.
This was a typical occurrence for him, then. With every material resource at his disposal, still he chose to wallow in his misery. Drinking until the point of insensibility. Carousing until the early hours of the morning. Stumbling home in a stupor.
She wondered if it had ever brought him peace, or if happiness was a possibility that he had surrendered long ago. If wrecking himself in this manner made his life more bearable. If he would ever find the strength of character to pull himself out of the grave he’d thrown himself into. If hehadthat strength, or if it, too, had died along with Celia.
Pity welled within her for him. Gently, she shook his shoulder. “Luke, wake up.”
A snort heralded an arrival into consciousness once more. “Lizzie?” he croaked, eyeing her blearily. “What are you doing in my room?”
Apparently, one could experience both pityandannoyance. “In fact, you are in mine. Now, get up, if you please. It’s a bath for you.”
His head dropped back on a beleaguered sigh. “I’ll bathe tomorrow.”
It wasalreadytomorrow, but that did not seem to be a point worth elucidating upon. “You’ll bathenow. It’ll sober you up a bit, I’m certain.”
“I truly might cast up my accounts.” Still, he roused to the clasp of her hand on his shoulder, hefting himself up as if it required a monumental effort.
“It’s only your own fault if you do.” She seized his arm, steadying him by his elbow to keep him from drifting off course.
“Unfeeling wench,” he grumbled. He padded across the tiled floor of the bathing room, and the water sloshed as he shakily stepped into the tub. “Blast, the water is near scalding—did you intend to boil the skin from my bones?”
Locating a length of toweling that had been folded upon a shelf, Lizzie pulled a small stool close to the edge of the tub and settled herself upon it. “I’m sorry if it fails to meet your approval.” Her fingers closed around a bar of soap, and she tossed it to him.
He missed it, his fingers closing on empty air a full second after it had plopped into the water. “Agoodwife might offer to wash my back,” he remarked sourly, plunging his hands into the water in search of it.
“Did Celia do that for you, then?” Lizzie inquired caustically, and regretted the words as his expression froze, going cold and guarded. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, feeling quite small and petty. “That was unfair of me.”
It was strange, how smoothly his face slid from that remote expression into a dark amusement. “It’s not a secret that Celia was a poor excuse for a wife,” he said, a careless air to his words. “More’s the pity.”
“It was a secret from me,” she said. “I would have liked to know that I had had a predecessor.”
He located the bar of soap, but it slid from his fingers once more. “There was no reason you ought to know. Celia is irrelevant.”
Only my late wife, he’d said just that afternoon.Nobody important. But shewas. Simply saying she wasn’t did not make it so.
“She’s been dead three years now,” he said, rooting around for the soap once more. And then, as a lightly as if it had been an afterthought, he added, “She died in childbirth.”
Lizzie felt her stomach pitch and roll. “And the child?”
“Died with her.”
“I’m so sorry.” Horrible enough to lose a beloved wife. How much worse to lose a child along with her?
He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “It wasn’t my child.” He tilted his head back, giving up the quest for the soap, content to merely soak instead. “I hadn’t visited her bed in years. Found it a bit too crowded for my taste.”
“I’m sorry for you, then.” And for the man he might have been, if not for Celia.
