Grace Burrowes - The Duke and His Duchess

Beside him, Esther’s feet twitched. She’d told him once she often dreamed of their courtship, a brief, passionate, fraught undertaking that now seemed as distant as Canada.

Percival rolled away from his wife and let her dream in peace.

* * *

Esther felt a wall rising in the middle of the Windham family, for all they appeared to be placidly consuming a hearty English breakfast.

His Grace commandeered the head of the table, of course. Esther tried to picture quiet, soft-spoken Peter in that location and couldn’t. Opposite His Grace, at the foot, the chair remained empty, though as the senior lady of rank and next duchess, the position belonged to Peter’s wife, Lady Arabella.

Peter sat at his father’s right hand, Arabella next to her husband, and Esther below Arabella. Across the table, Percival hid behind a newspaper on the duke’s left, Tony inhaled beefsteak and kippers next to his brother, and across from Esther, Tony’s wife, Gladys, took dainty nibbles of her eggs.

Had Esther wanted to, there was no way she could have nudged her husband’s foot under the table, casually touched his hand, or murmured an aside to him. When had they decided to sit as far apart from each other as possible? When had she decided to sit on the side of the invalided heir?

“You’ll be going up to London, Pembroke.” His Grace glowered at a buttered toast point while the rest of the table exchanged glances at this news. “I’ve been asked to sit on a commission to study the provisioning of the army overseas. Damned lot of nonsense, but one doesn’t refuse such a request.”

He bit off a corner of the toast while a pained silence spread. Peter hadn’t been off the property even to go to services for at least two years. A trip to the stables left him exhausted, and if he missed an afternoon nap, he had to absent himself from dinner.

Esther lifted the teapot. “More tea, Your Grace?”

“I don’t want any damned tea. If you bothered to familiarize yourself with the indignities of old age, you’d never offer such a thing.”

Gladys shot Esther a sympathetic look. Percival slowly, deliberately, folded his newspaper down and stared at his father.

Please, Percival, I beg you do not—

“I’ll thank you not to rebuke my lady wife for a proper display of table manners, sir.”

Lady Arabella laid her hand on Peter’s sleeve; Tony paused in the demolition of his breakfast.

“Perhaps I might serve on this committee?” Tony suggested. “Been to Canada, after all, and it’s not as if I’m needed here.”

“You?” Tony might have been old Thomas the footman for all the incredulity in the Duke’s tone. “It’s time you took a damned wife and stopped frolicking about under every skirt to catch your eye.”

This time the sympathetic look went from Esther to Gladys.

“Tony and I will both go,” Percival said, passing his newspaper to Peter and rising. “Scout the terrain, get a sense of what’s afoot. Pembroke can come up to Town when the decisions are to be made, and of course, we’ll keep you informed, Your Grace. Ladies, I bid you good day. I’m off to wish my offspring a pleasant morning.”

For just a moment, bewilderment clouded the duke’s faded blue eyes. Before anyone else could speak, though, he rallied. “Daily reports, if you please, and don’t stint on the details. I know not which is worse: the Whigs, the colonials, Wales’s ridiculous flights, or the dear king’s poor health. Madam”—he turned his glower on Esther—“you will stop hoarding that teapot. A man needs to wash down his breakfast, such as it is.”

Esther passed the teapot to Arabella, and nobody looked at anybody. The king had recovered from his difficult spell more than a year ago, while Esther feared the duke’s was only beginning.

Percival squeezed his father’s shoulder. “We’ll keep you informed regarding all of it.” He bowed and withdrew, while Esther tried to puzzle out what expression had been on her husband’s face during that last exchange.

Compassion for the old duke, whose confusion was becoming daily more evident, had been the predominant sentiment. Percival was pragmatic, also capable of clear-eyed understanding. That he neither judged his father nor ridiculed him warmed Esther’s heart.

Good sons turned into good fathers.

Another emotion had lurked behind the compassion, though. Esther pushed her eggs around rather than watch as Tony tucked into yet another portion of rare steak.

Percival had been relieved at the prospect of leaving Kent and biding in London with his brother over the coming winter. Esther was not relieved, not relieved at all to think of her husband decamping for the vice and venery of the capital, while she remained behind to deal with teething babies and ailing lords.

“Why is it,” Percival asked his five-year-old son, “every woman I behold these days seems exhausted?”

Bart grinned up at his father and capered away. “Because they have to chase me!”

For a ducal heir, that answer would serve nicely for at least the next thirty years. Percival caught the nursery maid’s eye. “Go have a cup of tea, miss. I’ll tarry a moment here.”

She bobbed her thanks, paused in the next room to speak with the nurse supervising the babies, and closed the nursery-suite door with a soft click of the latch. Percival did likewise with the door dividing the playroom from the babies’ room, wanting privacy with his older sons and some defense against the olfactory assault of Valentine’s predictably dirty nappies.

“I swear that child should be turned loose on any colonial upstarts. He’d soon put them to rout.”

Gayle glanced up from the rug. “He’s a baby, Papa. Nobody is scared of him.”

“Such a literalist. Some day you’ll learn about infantile tyrants. What are you reading?”

Gayle, being a man of few words, held up a book. Bart, by contrast, was garrulous enough for two boys.

“Shall I read to you?”

Bart came thundering back. “Read to me too!”

Percival glanced out the window. The morning was yet another late reprise of the mildness of summer, but to the south, in the direction of the Channel, a bank of thick, gray clouds was piling up on the horizon.

“I have to ride into the village today and meet with the aldermen, then stop by the vicarage and be regaled about the sorry state of the roof over the choir. When that task is complete, I’m expected to call on Rothgreb and catch him up on the Town gossip, which will be interesting, because I haven’t any. My afternoon will commence with an inspection of—”

Two little faces regarded him with impatient consternation.

“Right.” Percival folded himself down onto the rug, crossed his legs, and tucked a child close on each side. “First things first.”

He embarked on a tale about a princess—didn’t all fairy tales involve princesses?—and the brave hero who had to do great deeds to win her hand.

“Except,” Percival summarized, “the blighted woman fell into an enchanted sleep.”

“Then what happened?” Bart asked, budging closer.

“He…” According to the story, the fellow swived her silly—“got her with child,” rather—which was what any brave hero would do after a rousing adventure. “He kissed her.”

“Mama fell asleep.”

That from Gayle, who wasn’t the budging sort. The little fellow’s brows were drawn down, the same sign his mother evidenced when she was anxious.

“Keeping up with you lot would have anybody stealing naps,” Percival said.

“Not a nap.” Gayle sprang to his feet and went to the middle of the carpet like an actor assuming center stage. “She faded.”

He collapsed to the rug with a dramatic thump, lying unmoving, with his eyes closed for a few instants before scrambling to his feet. “Old Thomas says the ladies do that when they’re breeding. Bart wondered if we should bury her at sea.”

“I did not. I said if she died, then we should bury her. She wasn’t dead. She woke right up.”

Gayle put his hands on his skinny hips. “You did too, and then she took a nap right there on the ship.”

The ship being the picnic blanket, Percival supposed. “You saw her fall like that, both of you?”

Two solemn nods, which suggested this development was of more import to them than their inchoate argument. Percival set the book aside and held out one arm to Gayle while wrapping the other around Bart.

“Old Thomas is right.” He tucked both boys close, as much for his own comfort as theirs. “Ladies sometimes fall asleep like that when they’re peckish or their stays are too snug or they’re breeding.” Though Esther wore jumps, not stays, and never laced them too tightly.

“Mama breeds a lot,” Bart observed.

“Your mother has fulfilled her obligation to the succession admirably.”

“That means she does,” Gayle translated. “She napped a lot too, when I wanted to fly my birds.”

“Your birds are stupid,” Bart observed.

Percival squeezed the ducal heir tightly and kissed the top of his head. “Rotten boy. Your little brothers will gang up on you if you keep that up. They’ll leave Valentine’s nappies under your bed.”

Gayle smiled a diabolically innocent smile at this suggestion.

“Your mother likely needed to catch up on her rest, and she knew you two could be counted on to protect her while she did. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to join you.”

And he was sorrier still that by this time next week, he’d likely be in London, miles and miles away from his children, unless…

“Percival?”

Esther stood in the doorway, tall, slim, and elegant in a chemise gown of soft green and gold. The morning sun gave her a luminous quality, and with her standing above them, Percival was reminded that his wife was a beautiful woman.

Also quite pale.

“You’ve caught me out. I chased off the nursery maid to cadge a few moments with my first and second lieutenants. Won’t you join us?”

Bart scooted free, and Gayle followed suit. “Good morning, Mama!” They pelted up to her, each boy taking her by the hand, Gayle waiting silently while Bart chattered on. “Papa was reading us a story, but he didn’t finish. He said we can shoot down Gayle’s stupid birds on our next outing.”

When Percival expected Gayle to enter the verbal melee with a ferocious contradiction, Gayle’s gaze strayed to the door, behind which baby Valentine, King of the Dirty Nappies, held court.

Esther moved into the room, a boy on each side. “I’m sure your father said no such thing. I thought we might work on drawing tigers this morning though, and tigers might try to catch the birds as they flew away.”

“Tigers!”

Why did Bart shout everything, and why did nobody correct him for it?

Percival unfolded himself from the floor. “You’d make a very poor tiger indeed if you can’t be any quieter than that. Why don’t you creep down to the library and have a footman fetch you some paper?”

More paper in addition to whatever they’d wasted making Gayle’s birds. No wonder coin was in such short supply.

The boys crept away, growling and swiping their paws in the air, leaving Percival alone in daylight hours with his wife. His tired, lovely wife who had fainted the previous day and not told him about it. He slid his arms around her and drew her against his body.

He would not be a clodpate like he’d been the previous night.

He would ask her about her health. He would ask her how she felt about him going to London. He would compliment her on their children—a surefire strategy for happy marital relations.

The scent of roses came to him as she relaxed against him. “Madam, we can lock that door, you know.”

She pushed away, smiling. “Only to scandalize all and sundry when the boys start pounding on the other side.”

The interlude was unexpected, and Percival was glad for it. They so rarely had privacy when they weren’t both tired and full of the tensions and trials of the day. “Will you sit with me for a bit, Wife?”

She gave him a curious look and let him lead her to the table near the window.

Which would not do. He changed course and took a seat in the largest reading chair the nursery had to offer, which was quite large indeed.

He gave a tug on her wrist, and she tumbled into his lap. “Percival!”

“Hush, madam. You and I have cuddled up in this chair when you were magnificently gravid. We fit nicely now.”

She harrumphed and gracious God-ed once or twice under her breath, then settled easily enough.