Page 54 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
Chapter Twenty
Quiet conversation whilst sharing the kitchen table had been replaced by quiet conversation whilst sharing the same pillow. Ben had never thought it was the sort of thing he would find comfortable, sharing a bed with another. And perhapscomfortablewas the wrong word, for the mattress sagged in the middle and there was hardly room enough to accommodate the two of them even pressed up against one another as they were.
But there was something of comfort in Diana’s cheek laid against his shoulder, in the easy sigh of her breath and the silky texture of her skin beneath his fingers.
“There was a bit of trouble in the village this afternoon,” she said idly, rubbing the smooth length of her thigh against his. “I fear I may have made a mistake in my handling of it.”
“Oh? What happened?”
“Hannah punched a little boy in the marketplace,” she said. “Blacked his eye, I think.”
A low rumble of laughter shook his chest. “Is that all?”
She nodded. “I think they’ve bullied her a bit,” she said. “The children in the village. Probably they’ve heard their parents gossiping about her past behavior. The little boy called her a demon child, and she planted him a facer for it.” Her fingertips grazed his shoulder. “Of course, the boy’s mother was more than a little upset.”
He’d burned bridges enough in the village already. A single punch was unlikely to do more damage than had already been done, and they wouldn’t be staying very much longer besides. “And why do you think you handled it poorly?”
“I told her I was proud of her for defending herself. Naturally, little Johnny’s mother took quite an exception to that—”
Ah. “Johnny is more a brat than Hannah ever was,” Ben said. “He’s a nasty little boy. I imagine he’s pulled more than his share of plaits and moremischief besides.” He was the ringleader of a little troupe of village children, and they tended to follow his lead, wherever that happened to be.
“Well, I think his pride took more of a beating than his face,” Diana said. “He sobbed quite dramatically—a great deal more than was deserved, in my opinion. I think he’s lost face with his friends over it.”
There was that, at least. “Serves him right,” he said. “Perhaps the rest of them will learn a valuable lesson from it as well.”
Diana sighed. “But she has been doing so very well,” she said. “Truly. When first we started making trips into the village, why, several of the shopkeepers wouldn’t even allow her within their establishments. I fear I may have set her back in their estimations by tacitly encouraging violence.”
Soon enough, those opinions wouldn’t matter. “What happened thereafter?”
“Well,” she said, in a disgruntled tone. “Johnny’s mother and I agreed that the children ought to apologize to one another—which they did. She also suggested that I take a switch to Hannah’s backside.”
Which he knew full well she had not done. “No other punishment, then?”
“No,” she said. “Quite frankly, in my opinion, Johnny earned his blacked eye.” An odd little huff escaped her. “Do you know, if it had been any other child, I could have said all the right things,” she mused. “Violence is never merited.You must turn the other cheek.But it’s different—”
It was different, he thought, when that child was your own. Or when you had begun to think of that child as your own. “Itisdifferent,” he said. And he was glad that Hannah had had Diana there to be her champion. Because there was so much cruelty in the world, and the whole of society was filled with people who would be only too eager to cut her down.
“Still,” she said, and she bussed a kiss across his chin. “It made me…think.”
“Of what?”
“Of my brothers.” She gave a wistful sigh, half-muffled against his shoulder. “I think they would protect me from the whole world if they could, and it’s not…it’s not that I am not grateful for it. It’s that I don’tneedit. What I need is something else entirely.” And she waited, in the soft, comfortable silence that followed, for him to catch the suggestion in the words.
“Ah,” he said, banding an arm about her waist. Whateverthatwas, she meant to suggest that Hannah, too, required it. “Go on, then.”
“In that moment,” she said. “Hannah didn’t need me to protect her. Ofcourse she is just a little girl, and she willneed that from time to time. But she solved her problem in her own way, and what she needed from me was notprotection from those cruel words, it was support in the face of them.” Her fingertip slid down his chest; a lazy, idle journey. “She doesn’t need to be sheltered from the world. She needs you to help her to stand on her own within it. Not to hold her up, but to catch her when she falls. That is the greatest gift you can give to her,” she said.
But he hadn’t. Instead,shehad given Hannah that gift, one that he knew she would take to heart. Probably it would serve her better even than the curtseying and the maths.
“Still,” she allowed, with a faintly sheepish smile, “I might have made some trouble for you there.”
“I think you did exactly right,” he said, and splayed his hand over the small of her back.
“She’s bruised her knuckles a bit, poor dear,” Diana said. “Perhaps I ought to teach her the art of the blistering set-down. They can be every bit as devastating as a punch, you know.”
“Do,” he said lightly, and chuckled at the thought of his little girl delivering a cutting line with all the dignified severity of a dowager duchess. “And I will teach her how to make a proper fist, and how to strike to avoid bruising herself in the future.”
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