Page 20 of What's an Earl Gotta Do?
“Well, they should. I’ve got to present myself at the shoemaker in one hour, and…” Michael glanced around. “Say, where are we going?”
“We were just on our way to White’s.” Fauconbridge nodded toward the building they were approaching. “You look like you could use a drink.”
“White’s, you say?” Michael squinted at the building’s columned façade. “I’m not a member.”
“You’re the future Marquess of Redditch,” Harrington said. “Of course you’re a member.”
“I’m not. I—”
“We were both there when you were voted in, Morsley,” Fauconbridge said, steering him up the short flight of white stone steps.
They led him to a room upstairs. Michael’s impression of White’s improved considerably when he learned that he could obtain not just a drink, but a beefsteak.
He ordered three. After all, he hadn’t eaten in five entire hours.
“It certainly is good to have you back,” Fauconbridge said as they settled around a corner table.
“It’s good to be back,” Michael said.
“Your father must be beside himself,” Harrington said.
“Gad, I forgot to send him word of my return.” Michael started to rise. “I’ll have to arrange for a messenger straight away.”
“I took the liberty of dispatching someone to Ravenswell last night,” Fauconbridge said.
Michael sat back, surprised. “That was good of you.”
Fauconbridge shrugged. “He’s missed you.”
“And I have missed him.” As he said the words, Michael realized how true they were. He’d been raised to be stoic about such things, as had every man in the room, no doubt. But his father was his only living family, and Michael was suddenly struck by how good it would be to see him again after four years.
“How is my father?” Michael asked. “I’ve had letters from him, of course, but—how is he really?”
Fauconbridge nodded his thanks as the waiter set a brandy in front of him. “He’s well enough. Much the same as you remember.”
“About as well as he’s been for the past fourteen years,” Harrington said.
Michael understood Harrington’s meaning perfectly. It had been fourteen years since Michael’s mother’s death.
As horrible as it had been to lose his mother, Michael had eventually recovered in a way that his father had never quite managed. His parents had been a love match, the kind the poets wrote of, and Michael’s father showed no interest in moving on. He never remarried and, from what Michael could tell, he hadn’t so much as looked at another woman in fourteen years.
Whenever Michael walked by the family plot, he always found fresh-cut flowers lying atop his mother’s grave. And he couldn’t count the number of times he’d walked into the gallery to find his father standing before his mother’s portrait, gazing at it with unabashed longing. Once he even observed his father dabbing at his eyes with his handkerchief (an unheard-of display for an Englishman), prompting Michael to slip silently from the room. He’d known better than to say anything. Whenever Michael mentioned his mother, the marquess, who was usually the best of fathers, warm and interested in his son’s life, would rise and leave the room.
But Michael understood his father’s feelings, far better than he’d ever wanted to, because four years ago, the same thing had happened to him.
He’d lost Anne.
He didn’t like to think back on those early days, when despair had consumed his every thought, and just being awake had been a form of agony as his bleak, Anne-less existence loomed before him for the length of a lifetime. He’d eventually not recovered so much as become inured to the pain. That trite old truism that time healed all wounds was a bunch of rot. He had never gotten over Anne, and he knew with absolute certainty that he never would.
It seemed that the inability to love more than one woman in a lifetime was a family trait.
That was why he couldn’t leave anything to chance. He had to marry Anne this time. The alternative was unthinkable.
And once he did, he was going to wrap her up in cotton gauze and make sure nothing bad ever happened to her. The thought of how rough and tumble they’d been as children now made him break out in hives—what if she’d fallen out of a tree and broken her neck?
And when the time came for her to give birth, he was going to have a half-dozen accoucheurs on hand, all the best ones in England. He didn’t care if it cost him a king’s ransom.
“He’ll be so glad to have you back,” Fauconbridge said, interrupting his reverie.
