A Duke for Christmas (8 page)

“Everything is prepared, then?”

“Prepared and overprepared. One would think I was expecting the Heir of England,” Maris said, then broke off, her eyes shadowed.

Though it had been three years and more since Princess Charlotte had died in childbirth, her fate hung like a sword over the heads of young women. She’d had the best attendants, the most famous obstetrician in England, Sir Richard Croft, to deliver the child—everything, in short, suitable for the Heiress of England. She had perished nonetheless, and the child with her. The Regent had been inconsolable. The unfortunate doctor had committed suicide a year and half later, despite being absolved of all blame in the case. If such wealth and care had brought about so grievous an outcome, what chance did lesser women have?

“By all I have heard,” Sophie said, hoping to give her sister’s thoughts a more cheerful direction, “men do behave as if a baby were all their own doing.”

“Indeed, yes,” Maris said. “A rooster crowing his own glory is nothing compared with it. The number of waistcoat buttons that I have sewn on is incalculable, his chest swelled so with pride.”

“And you are no less excited about it, or so I gathered from your letter.”

Maris leaned against the bottom post of the bed. “I was excited at the beginning. And I daresay I shall be
excited once more at the end. But the months in between, my dear! So lengthy. So dull. One is advised not to ride. We went to Brighton. One is advised not to
bathe. We went to London. One is advised not to dance. One mustn’t read any invigorating literature for fear of
the harm it might do the developing mind. Improving books only—and a duller occupation I should be hard-
pressed to find. I could go to the theater, thank God, but only until my condition began to be apparent. A woman of quality, it seems, is never glimpsed when she is increasing.”

“Poor Maris!”

“Poor Ken! I’m afraid I’ve not been the easiest person to please, and he tries so hard, the poor darling.”

“He doesn’t seem to be suffering too much,” Sophie said, recalling how her brother-in-law paid the closest attention to his young wife, so much so that Maris’s cup was filled almost before it was empty and she never need stand up without his hand at her elbow. Then, too, there was the look in his eyes when he gazed at her, that brilliant light of love that had gone out so soon in Broderick’s eyes.

As if thinking of him brought him into her sister’s mind as well, Maris suddenly spoke his name. “You never did tell us what happened to Broderick. Only that one letter informing us that he had died suddenly. Were you...with him?”

Sophie hesitated. Though it would relieve her mind to discuss the facts, she didn’t know if it were right to burden another. If reading an exciting book might alarm an unborn child, what could a tale of sudden death do?

“Sophie?”

Of course, Maris did have, and always had, a wonderfully adventurous mind. Though she’d been destined for the quiet life of a gentleman’s daughter, she’d won a grand prize in the Matrimonial Stakes—a wealthy, titled gentleman, the catch of the county. She’d done it by taking risks that would have terrified a professional gamester and, in the end, by laying her cards on the table without fear. Sophie couldn’t imagine that her child would be any less intrepid.

Sophie leaned her head back against the upholstered headboard. “He took a trip to Sicily to edit his poems. A friend of his, Mr. Knox, accompanied him. Broderick was very fond of appreciating beauty firsthand. A few weeks after they arrived, Broderick fell down a rocky scree. He was picked up dead.”

“Oh, my ...” Maris groped for her sister’s hand. She pressed it between her own, tears springing to her eyes. “You must have been devastated.”

“He’d left me long before. All the same, I suppose I was appalled by the waste of his gifts more than anything else. This is a great age for poetry and I believe, truly and even now, I believe he could have been the greatest of them all.”

“Will you forgive me if I say I don’t see him like that?”

“Of course,” Sophie said with an inviting smile. “How did you see him?”

Looking off into the distance, Maris opened her mouth. Glancing suddenly at her sister, she shut it tight, her lips nearly disappearing.

“No, it’s all right I want to know.”

“He didn’t seem a very serious man,” Maris said slowly. “Serious about anything. Not even on his wedding day.”

“Oh, I think he loved me then.”

“But not later?”

“No. Not by the time he was dead. Not for a long time before then.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s easy enough. He thought he loved me enough to be married to me. He didn’t love me enough to live with me day after day, doing all the simple, ordinary things that husband and wife do for and with each other.” Sophie was surprised by the sudden stab of pain she felt. Surely there must come a day when she either stopped producing pain or stopped feeling it. Someday, this wincing flesh must be covered by a scar—an ugly remembrance of agony, but no more than a dead region in her heart.

“I didn’t mean that. I don’t understand how you can be so calm about it. If Kenton ever left me ...” The pink in her cheeks failed completely just imagining it, her hand creeping up to press against her heart.

“What should I have done? Murdered him? Jumped off Trajan’s Column?”

“Did you cry?”

“Oceans. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Red Sea, Black Sea, bays, lakes, and rivers.” She had no tears now. “I begged him on my knees to stay with me, not to abandon me in a strange country. He only laughed and told me he had fallen in love with someone else. He couldn’t do anything about it, he said. He said that people couldn’t be expected to control their feelings when feelings were, by their nature, the masters of reason and will.”

“How horrible. To talk philosophy at such a moment. It’s inhuman.”

“I don’t think he meant to be cruel. Or perhaps he did but only to make as clean and sharp a break as possible. Perhaps he thought it would be less painful that way.”

“You are far too forgiving. How can you even bring yourself to consider his feelings? It’s absurd.”

She lifted her hands and let them fall. “He’s dead, Maris. Whatever crimes he committed against me, he is absolved.”

“By you, if you like. But I am older than you and can hold a grudge for much longer. I shall pray tonight that God will let me forgive him, eventually.”

Sophie slipped her hand free from her sister’s grasp and returned to braiding her hair, changing the subject abruptly. “I’ve so looked forward to sleeping on a really good mattress. My bed in Rome was straw-stuffed and slung on ropes. Old ropes.”

“You stayed at some very good inns, if I know Dominic. He isn’t one to suffer from the inconveniences of inexpensive inns.”

“To tell the truth, I’m quite glad the trip is over. I was in a fair way to becoming the most hideously spoiled child. If you’d sent a fairy godfather to look after me, I couldn’t have been more spoiled.”

Maris traced around the line of white knots that made up the pattern in the coverlet. “Do you ... I mean you do like Dominic, don’t you?”

“Naturally. I’ve always liked him. That is, for as long as I’ve known Mm, I’ve liked him. He has the rare quality of silence. He is almost dangerously easy to talk to. Now, why are you smiling?”

“He is Kenton’s dearest friend. Of course I wish for you to like him.”

“Then you have your wish,” Sophie said lightly.

“And if I wished... never mind.”

“Don’t worry about me. You have more than enough to concern yourself with right now.”

“True, but that will be over soon. I can go on worrying about you even after two more weeks pass.”

“Then you’ll have a baby to worry over. You concentrate on her.”

“Her? Do you know something that I do not?”

“Wouldn’t you like a girl? Honestly, now. Wouldn’t you?”

“Between the two of us, and with the door closed, I’ll tell you.” She glanced over her shoulder. “I do not know what I should do with a boy.”

“I remember how terrible we thought all boys were when you and I were children.”

“Dreadful, noisy things. Always covered in dirt. In truth, men are very little different than boys. Of course, I should love it no matter what. A nice little girl, though, as nice as we were ...”

“You were nice, Maris, and still are, though I seem to remember a girl falling off a horse and coming in covered with dirt and straw. And I wasn’t much better. Do you remember when I fell out of the big oak and you carried me home because both my knees were bleeding?”

“Are you trying to tell me that my daughter will be a horrible little hoyden just as we were?”

“Just reminding you that not all little girls are prim princesses who sit happily sewing samplers.”

“Heavens no, I forgot what a wretched hellion I was.” Maris laughed. “Father liked us to be quite, quite fearless and we were, weren’t we?”

“Yes, we were fearless ... then.”

They fell silent for a moment, each busy with thoughts that ranged over both past and future. Maris spoke first, with determined lightness. “I always thought it very brave of you, Sophie, to marry and live in a foreign country. Now that I know how often you were alone, I have even more respect for you.”

“I was never afraid, not even after he left me. Well, afraid that nothing would ever change. But not afraid of poverty or of the strangers I’d meet. What had I that anyone could steal? That is why it was so strange ...”

“What?”

“A few days before I left, my rooms were broken into. ‘Broken into’ indeed. They yanked out the drawers, ripped up the cushions, even tore the pictures off the walls.”

“My poor dear! That’s why you told mother your furniture wasn’t worth taking to the secondhand shops.”

“That’s why. Odd that so terrible a thing should have happened after so many quiet days, and just before I left. It’s as though fate were confirming my decision. I couldn’t have slept comfortably there ever again, not without hearing every creak as the criminals returning.”

“Did they steal anything?”

Sophie smiled a little bitterly. “I had nothing whatever worth the stealing. My landlady thought that was why they ran riot—out of disappointment.”

“Thank heaven you weren’t at home when it happened.”

“No, I was at home very little those last days. So much to be done.” Truthfully, the attack on her home had proved to be an attack on all her memories. She’d been able to treasure a few happy ones there, like roses under glass domes, but once she’d seen the devastation left by brutal thieves, even the few happy memories left after Broderick’s desertion had been smeared and blackened.

After a moment, Maris spoke again, very quietly. “I only wish that you could have had a child or two. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could bring our children up together?”

Sophie pressed her fingers against her eyes, hoping Maris would think she was feeling nothing more taxing than tiredness. Hard as she found it to be brave in the daytime, night brought a new kind of attack against her bastions. Then to have her sister throw a bombshell over the walls, breaking them all to pieces, brought tears to long-dry eyes.

“Sophie? Oh, don’t.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, sniffing, hoping she didn’t sound as pathetic as she felt. “I daresay Broderick would have felt even more tied down and worried if
we’d had a child than he did with just me to burden him. After all, a child needs prudence and consistency and he
believed that those things were death to the creative urge.”

“I’m about to say something very rude.”

“Don’t. He was what he was. If I’d had more sense, I wouldn’t have married him. Since I didn’t have any sense, I must take the consequences.”

“But not for always. You’ll marry again. Then you’ll have a worthwhile man and children and happiness, all that you deserve.”

“Of course,” Sophie said, only to comfort Maris. In her present state, she wouldn’t trouble her
with
the facts. Eventually, as the years passed, Maris would accept that her sister had no intention of taking that long leap in the dark a second time. By then, with luck, Maris would be so busy with a large family and all their troubles, in romance and without, that her eternally widowed sister would never impinge on her thoughts.

With visible and vocal efforts, Maris leveraged herself off the bed. “I don’t know about you, but I simply crave some biscuits. There are some very special ones downstairs in the biscuit barrel. Mrs. Lemon might even make us cocoa, if we ask nicely. Want to come?” “Goodness, yes, I’m absolutely starving.”

The next morning, Sophie awoke to the perfect silence of a snowy morning. She knew, even before she went to the window, that a deep batting had fallen over all, muffling sound and lending all things a pristine beauty. She threw aside the covers and scurried across the frigid floor. Throwing open the drapes, she glanced out and saw that what she’d imagined had come true.

Standing on one foot, warming the other against her goose-pimpled calf, she gazed out with affection upon the garden. The fountain in the middle of the court looked like a tiered wedding cake with meringue-like swathes of snow hanging from the edges in the stillness of a windless morning. The stone cupid on the top looked very cold, with no covering save wings. His arrow pointed directly toward her window. Suddenly, absurdly nervous of that symbolism, Sophie stepped back, out of sight.

Quickly she skittered over the floor to the fireplace, the whitewashed wooden floor cold as marble under her feet. When she picked up the poker, it felt like an icicle. Nevertheless, she stabbed at the logs, banked and covered in black and ash, until a red glow awoke in the charred wood and flames began to revive. Then she fed it with a new log, nearly dropping it on her toes. Another jab with the poker and a bright blaze began to warm the room. Sophie watched it for a moment, to be sure all had caught, then made a flying ran across the floor to burrow deep under her goose-feather coverlet once more.

She watched the flames reaching up as if to claw back and devour the cold as her cold feet sought for the flannel-wrapped brick in the depths. Its heat was long gone. Her eyelids began to drift closed again and she did not fight the sensation. When she awoke the second time, it was to the sound of the curtain rings shaking and the scent of tea. Tea!