The Earl's Mistress (21 page)

Hepplewood could feel Lissie quivering with excitement. “
Ponies,
Papa!” she said, setting her lips against his ear. “May we go? May we watch? May Bertie take me up? Please, Papa,
please
?”

For a moment, he hesitated.

Then, as he so often had of late, he relented. “We may go, but first I must finish with Mr. Jervis. He is a very busy man these days.”

“May we go as soon as you are done?” she pressed. “I will sit here quietly.”

“Somehow, I doubt that,” he said, managing to wriggle loose his pocket watch from behind her skirts. “Besides, Lissie, it is just now three,” he said. “We will be waiting a long while.”

“I want to go,” said the girl, poking out a lip. “I want to go
now
.”

“I am so sorry, sir.” Mrs. Seawell looked as if she expected to be thrashed.

“Take her back to the schoolroom,” he said, coming round the desk to put Lissie down. “Pack up a blanket and enough toys to amuse her, and we will leave in ten minutes.”

“And bread crumbs,” added Lissie, “for the ducks.”

“Yes, poppet.” He nodded at the nurse. “Bread crumbs, please. Whatever Cook can spare.”

“Yes!” said the child, running to the nurse as soon as she was set down again. “Nanny, I would like to take Pickles, too.”

“I will help you find him in the toy chest, Lady Felicity,” said the nurse, pulling the door quietly shut.

True to his word, Hepplewood was ready to step out the front door at ten past three, a blanket hooked through one elbow, his top hat in one hand, and a muslin sack stuffed with day-old bread in the other.

Having exchanged her slippers for small, brown boots, Lissie was leading her red-and-blue dog by its string, its wooden head and tail bobbling up and down as it rolled across the glistening marble floor.

On the front steps, Hepplewood put on his hat, and they set off together toward the Stanhope Gate. As his daughter waxed enthusiastically about the ponies, he glanced down at the small, white hand clasped in his, and his heart twisted in his chest a little.

For the merest instant, he considered yielding to the instinct to snatch her up and settle her on his hip again—which he would do had they still been at home. But out in the greater world of London, Lissie had quickly come to associate that tender gesture with being
a big baby
—an aspersion her cousin Bertie, he gathered, had promptly cast upon her.

Hepplewood had complained to Anne about it, of course. But she had snappishly advised him to stay out of it and let the children sort out their own troubles. Oddly, he had listened.

His fatherly instincts thus thoroughly repressed—well,
slightly
repressed—he had stood by in silence when, just a week later, Lissie conked Bertie across the head with a battledore racquet. Anne remained calm and simply took all the racquets away.

Hepplewood had quietly observed, and learnt, perhaps, a little something. That this was how children grew up—and that it was the very reason Anne wanted Lissie here.

It was, after all, precisely how they had grown up, he and Diana with Gwen and Anne—playing and fighting and simply sorting life out with one another. Gwen—older, taller, and far more vicious—had beaten him blue more times than he cared to count. And she had, in some measure, taught him how to go on in life.

No, he did not have this business of parenting down yet, but he felt it possibly within his grasp. After six weeks of steady practice, he no longer felt so thoroughly overwhelmed by it as he once had.

More importantly, it was slowly dawning on him that Lissie was something more than just a fragile miniature of his dead wife; she was her own person—and far more forceful and spirited than Felicity had ever been.

The park was fairly quiet at this time of day, most of the nannies having already pushed their perambulators home in time for tea, and society’s horse-and-carriage set not yet out in force for the afternoon gallivant. Still, he looked for a spot well above the Serpentine, and far from the major paths.

“How is Pickles liking his life in London?” Hepplewood asked when the perfect patch of grass had been found not too far from the riding ring. “He is still happy here? He does not miss Loughford?”

“Not very much,” said the child, plopping down on the blanket in a
whoosh
of muslin and petticoats. “He misses Grandmamma Heppy. But I told him she is in heaven now, and not coming back.”

“No.” With one finger, he rolled the little dog back and forth between them. “No, Grandmamma is not coming back. I’m very sorry, Lissie.”

“It will be all right,” said Lissie, stroking the dog. “Pickles must keep a stiff upper lip. That’s what Nanny says.”

“Good advice,” he remarked.

At that, she looked up at him, her lip drawn thin and tight across her teeth, then she burst into giggles. “See?” she said, falling sideways onto the blanket. “I can do it, too.”

“You are silly,” he said, tapping the tip of her nose with his finger. “Sit up, Lissie, like a proper lady, and let’s talk.”

“Yes, sirrrr,” she groaned, jerking upright, her curls shimmering in the sunlight.

Hepplewood settled down on one hip beside her and stretched out his legs, propping himself up on his elbow. “Pickles does not miss having his own gardens to romp in?” he asked. “Or his huge toy chest and schoolroom? London is a little dirty, too.”

She stared at the blanket and gave a short, swift shake of her head. “No, he likes it
here,
” she said. “Loughford is
boorring
.”

At that, he laughed. “Is it?” he said doubtfully. “Who told you that? More of Bertie’s nonsense?”

She looked up with a wide grin, her cheeks pleasantly pink from her walk. “No, Harry did,” she said on a spurting giggle. “He says only mushrooms like living in the country.”

“Ah!” said Hepplewood. “Well, I advise you to make your own choices, miss, about what is or isn’t boring. You are a bright girl, and you needn’t listen to everything Harry and Bertie say.”

Her gaze fell to the blanket again. “I just want to stay with you,” she said more somberly. “I want to stay where you are.”

Hepplewood swallowed down a little knot of shame. “I want that, too,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, Lissie—if Pickles wants a romp in the country, we’ll take him back to Greenwood Farm. Just for a few days at a time. Then we can go up to Loughford for a long stay at Christmas. How would that suit?”

Her smile returned in full force. “I like the farm,” she said. “I like Yardley’s cow.”

He laughed and stretched out on the blanket, tipping his hat forward to shield his eyes. On her first day at Greenwood, Yardley had taken Lissie to help milk the cow—a miracle of nature that still seemed to astound her.

How could she have lived her whole life on a vast, rural estate and not thoroughly grasp where milk came from? It was in part because Lissie had been coddled by his mother, fed a constant diet of
shoulds
and
oughts
regarding how gently bred girls should behave and think.

His mother had been a rigid and overweening woman, full of her own consequence and more concerned with what people thought than with happiness or anything remotely like spontaneity.

She had not always been that way, he did not think. Life—particularly those last miserable years of her marriage to his father—had made the Countess of Hepplewood bitter.

Nonetheless, he was at fault here, too. He had left his daughter too long in that frigid, judgmental world, telling himself Lissie was just a baby. That she needed a mother’s touch—and absent a mother, a grandmother. Which had been true, to a point.

But Bertie, perhaps, had the right of it; Lissie was not a baby any longer.

And Isabella was right, too. His daughter needed him, for he truly was all she had now that her mother and grandmother were dead. Not unless he let her go to her Grandmother Willet, and that he could not bear to do. It would break his heart—and under no circumstances would Lissie be permitted beyond his sphere of protection.

So it was up to him. And in that, Anne had been right.

Isabella. Mrs. Willet. Anne. Perhaps even Bertie . . .

Did everyone see him for the inadequate father he was?

Lissie, apparently, did not. She appeared to love him unreservedly. It seemed he had only to let her do so; to let down his guard and his guilt and accept that, in someone’s eyes, at least, he was neither inadequate nor selfish.

Suddenly, he felt Lissie tugging upon his coat sleeve. “Papa, look at that girl!” she said urgently. “That girl has
ducks
! They are all coming up! May I go?”

He peeked from beneath his hat brim to see a line of ducks marching up the hill from the Serpentine to surround a girl who, seen from this angle, might have been Lissie’s twin, save for ringlets a little more gold than cornsilk, and a dress that was, sadly, a good deal shabbier.

He could see, too, a lady’s skirts swishing across the stubbled grass beside her as they waded into the surge of ducks. The creatures toddled all about them now, and the crumbs were flying.

“You may go so far as that bench,” he said, “where the girl is standing. If you go farther without first asking, I will have to take you home. That is a firm rule. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, leaping up.

“Don’t forget your bag,” he said, thrusting it at her.

She giggled, grabbed it, and went flying across the grass.

Hepplewood had already learned, from his near-daily forays into Hyde Park, that one little girl loved nothing so well as another—and absent that, a little boy would do.

Out of desperation, Lissie had already tried to coax Bertie into playing dolls. But Bertie, fettered as he was by one of the most pitiless creatures on earth—an elder brother—had wisely declined her every invitation.

Once or twice Lissie had managed to strike up a sort of temporary acquaintance with another girl in the park, but the same girls seemed never to appear two days running, and Hepplewood was never quite sure how to facilitate a proper introduction in any case, for the girls were invariably with nannies or mothers.

But this new girl seemed inordinately friendly and had opened her bag at once so that Lissie might take a handful of crumbs. Lissie flung them wide, and two of the ducks collided with predictably hilarious results; flapping, honking, nipping, and other acts of anatine umbrage.

The girls fell at once into peals of laughter, and soon they had emptied the other girl’s bag. Lissie offered up hers, and the pair bent over it, struggling together to unfasten Cook’s tight knot. They had an instant camaraderie, it seemed.

This time, he decided, he would simply go and make an introduction, and try to determine what time of day the girl was most apt to be in the park. Oh, perhaps the girl was not quite of Lissie’s social standing, but he had been in an oddly egalitarian frame of mind lately. He had begun to wonder if status mattered as much as happiness. His mother was almost certainly spinning in her grave over that one.

This time, however, he did not need to facilitate an introduction.

He realized it the moment the lady knelt down to help the children unfasten the knot and something besides her hems came into view beneath his hat brim.

Suddenly, his heart leapt a little oddly in his chest. His breath caught. And yet he somehow managed to lie perfectly still and let the situation unfold as he observed from beneath his hat.

Isabella was biting her lip as she worked determinedly at the knot. Soon it loosened, then slipped free. The girls ran back into the ducks, now milling about with some impatience, and Isabella stood up again, beyond his line of sight.

Good Lord, but he missed her.

It took every ounce of his determination to restrain himself from simply getting up and going to tell her so. His every instinct still urged him to go and lay claim to her. But he did not, for he now understood that Isabella was struggling to bear up beneath the burdens she already had. She did not need him to add guilt and pressure to the mix.

No, she would either come to love him, or she would not.

He would either resolve her situation, or he would not.

And they would decide, together or apart, the right thing to do for their families.

If these last, lonely weeks had taught him nothing more than the importance of having his own mind—and his own life—straight, then at least he had learned a valuable thing.

She was not carrying his child, she had said.

He told himself he was glad; glad she would not have to make a difficult decision when her life was already awash in difficulty, and glad she would not have to take the awful risk of childbirth. The thought of Isabella wracked with pain and torn quite possibly to pieces struck him with a terror so cold and so deep that he knew it was irrational.

But he was not glad. Not on some dark, primitive level. Not in his heart. And he did not know what that said about him.

That he was still selfish, he supposed.

As selfish as his father had brought him up to be.

As selfish as his mother had always accused him of being.

Almost as selfish as he had been in seducing Felicity, then taking her to Burlingame and throwing her in everyone’s faces—no, in
Diana’s
face—and setting in motion that awful chain of events that could not now be undone.

He drew a deep breath and realized that all the bread was gone, and that Isabella was looking about the park in some concern, her hand wrapped tight around Lissie’s.

Lissie pointed at the blanket, and the three of them started up the slight incline in his direction. He tossed his hat aside and sat up, using his hand to shield his eyes from the sun.

She looked more beautiful than ever today, he thought, as she waded through the grass toward him. And when recognition lit her face—along with a fleeting look of joy—something in his heart seemed to rise and almost go to her.

You are in deep, old boy,
he thought to himself.
So deep, there is no turning back.

No, it was now merely a matter of understanding how best to go forward.