Page 77 of Captivating the Countess
He gave his nephew—Estelle’s son, he thought—a stethoscope to listen into while he worked on the boy’s knee, and talked, letting his pent-up love grow into his voice.
“How is Drucilla?” He needed to speak with Lady Dalrymple, who had yet to ask him to look at her daughter. He had to heal the brilliant child who had so bravely helped Bell. Noticing the children around him added to his duty roster, but if he wanted to heal... Then he had to have enough love to notice them. A clinic was good. Healing was better.
The governess cuddled his nephew. “Dru is doing remarkably well, considering. She’s regaling the nursery with her tale of ghosts.”
As Rain patted the boy’s bruised knee and offered him a licorice, Alicia burst into his clinic. “She’s leaving, Rain! You can’t let her leave. Do something!”
Drawn from his intense concentration, Rain stared at his sister for half a minute, waiting for the rest of the sentence.
“Go,” the governess urged. “As long as the bone isn’t broken, the boy will be fine.”
“Who’s leaving?” he asked, washing his hands, trying to make sense of Alicia’s ranting.
“Bell! Bell is leaving! She’s looking for you to say farewell! She’s going with her sister. They’re meeting the earl at the train station andleaving!The chandeliers are swinging and the monkeys are out of their cage, and she thinks the ghost is telling her to leave, so she is.”
Panic struck his heart. Before Alicia finished, Rain was already halfway up the stairs and shouting orders. “Find someone to play a pretty waltz! Have the cook make a pudding to light on fire. I have to fetch the jewel box. Don’t let her out of the door!”
Claspingher gloved hands and fighting tears, Bell left the duke’s suite and glanced hopefully at Rain’s sister. “Did you find him?”
“Alicia is looking. You don’t have to leave today, you know. We can avoid the chandeliers for another day or so, perhaps have the workmen take them down.” Estelle blocked her path to the stairs.
Bell shook her head. “You need to help Rainford find a bride. I’m a distraction, and your grandmother is telling me so. I hadn’t realized... I never meant...” She sighed, unable to admit that the marquess might actually be distracted byherand that people were noticing. But Lady Pamela had noticed and now everyone knew. Bell dodged around Estelle and headed for the main stairs.
“Pamela is an hysteric. You can’t let her drive you away.” Estelle ran after her.
“Your guests want more séances,” Bell argued sadly. “They’re sending me notes, asking if I might speak with their loved ones. I cannotdothat.”
“I will tell them all to go home, that you only work with our ghosts,” Estelle argued staunchly.
Bell appreciated that argument. Alicia might persuade people of such a ridiculousness. But she continued downward, holding tightly to the railing.
Estelle didn’t have to hurry to keep up. “Rain still needs a steward.”
“He had a perfectly fine one. Davis was as honest and careful as it is possible for a man to be, and he’s family. He has a wife now. He could use the position and the house. Rainford simply needs to get over his snit. I’m needed at Wystan, not here.” Bell avoided walking directly under the chandelier swaying dangerously over the entry hall.
“Rain doesn’t have snits,” Estelle argued. “How can he trust a man who stole his fiancée?”
“Araminta wasn’t his fiancée. He is not heartbroken. It is a snit. Your brother isn’t an Ice King. He lives inside his head for a very good reason, but he is not made of ice. What is that music?” Bell hesitated on the lower step.
A piano and violin playing a waltz echoed through the marble entrance—a decent waltz and not Alicia’s painful pounding.
Iona waited with their bags near the door. Bell’s twin studied the swinging chandelier worriedly and looked relieved once Bell reached the ground floor.
Salina joined Estelle. “We are arranging a musicale for the evening. Some of our guests are more talented than Alicia. Really, you could stay. The footmen almost have the monkeys trapped.”
The parrot flew overhead, squawking and dropping a red feather.
“I really hoped to say my farewells to Rainford in person. Is he in the gymnasium? Might I be allowed down there?” Bell knew she was being presumptuous, but she simply could not abandon Rainford so callously. It would almost be like Araminta running away.
She wanted to make it clear that she wasn’t Araminta. She wasn’t running from Rain. She was letting him go back to the life he had before he thought the duke was dying. He didn’t need to marry now, not soon, anyway. She didn’t want him feeling obligated to marry her.
A footman wheeled a tea trolley from the back hall. On it rested the most splendiferous plum pudding Bell had ever seen, complete with a blue flame flickering across the top like magic fire. An awesome spectacle like that belonged at the end of a pleasant evening of wining and dining in good company.
“How?Why...?” Bell stuttered, unable to blame this new oddity on ghosts, although eccentricity certainly had to be involved. Plum puddings took a long time to make and shouldn’t be wasted rolling around midday with no one to observe.
“His Grace likes plum pudding on his birthday. It’s a little early, but Rainford said to light it anyway.” Victoria appeared behind the trolley along with her husband. “You could stay for the duke’s birthday, you know. We have you to thank for letting him live to see it.”
“No, I did nothing. Rain—”
