“She fainted on her last outing with the boys, before the weather changed.”

“She’s breeding?”

Percival wanted to shout at his brother for leaping to the obvious conclusion. Wanted to knock him off his damned horse and pound him flat. “Possibly.”

“For God’s sake, Perce, use a damned sheath. Better some sheep give up its life than you overtax your wife. The succession is assured four times over, and Gladys and I may yet bring up the rear with a few sons of our own.”

“Sheaths can break.” Did break, with alarming frequency.

“Bloody bad luck. Condolences then, or congratulations. Both I suppose.” Tony was studying the road ahead with diplomatic intensity. “Maybe you’ll get a girl this time. Girls are”—his expression turned besotted, again—“they’re magical. I can’t describe what it’s like when a daughter smiles up at her papa or takes his hand to drag him across the nursery.”

Sweet suffering Christ.

“Esther claims she just stood up too quickly, but I asked Thomas about it. Damned old blighter had to think first—said he was sworn to secrecy and would not betray her ladyship’s confidences.”

Comet made a casual attempt to nip Tony’s gelding, proof positive nobody was enjoying this journey.

Tony nudged his horse up onto the verge beside the wagon rut. “Good man, Thomas. When nobody else can reason with His Grace, Thomas can talk sense to him. Calls him Georgie, like they were mates.”

Anthony seemed intent on providing one irritating rejoinder after another. Percival forged onward despite his brother’s unhelpfulness.

“I told Thomas I knew Esther had fainted, and wanted him to confirm particulars only. It was a protracted exercise in yes-or-no questions. I swear I’m going to pension him come summer.”

“You’re not going to pension anybody, and neither is Peter. His Grace has the staff’s complete loyalty, and well you know it.”

“Anthony Tertullian Morehouse Windham, I am well aware of the strictures upon our household.” The plaguey bastard smiled, and as much to knock him figuratively off his horse as anything else, Percival got to the heart of the matter. “My wife lied to me.”

Tony grimaced. “Not good when the ladies dissemble, though in a small matter one can overlook it.”

He was asking, delicately, if the matter had been small.

“She said she’d fainted because she stood up too quickly. Thomas had it that she’d stumbled twice on the way to the stream and had been waiting for the footmen to spread the blanket—just standing there—when she collapsed.”

“That, Percy, is not good. Not the lying, not the collapsing, none of it. What did you do to provoke her into keeping such a thing from you? Are you having a spat, because if so, the best way to get past it is behind a closed door, fresh linens on the bed, and not a stitch of clothing between you.”

Just as Percival would have spurred his horse to the canter in lieu of backhanding his brother, a coaching inn came into view.

Of course, they would have to stop. The coachy would want to water the horses and give them a chance to blow, the footmen would cadge a pint, the nursery maids would need the foot-bricks reheated, and the older children would need a trip to the jakes.

And Esther… Esther who’d been trapped in the coach all morning with their children? Percival turned his horse for the coaching yard and wished to Almighty God he knew what his wife needed.

* * *

“Look! Look right there!”

Maggie’s head was forcibly shifted between her mother’s hands, so she had to stare out the window of the coach.

“That’s him! I knew it! That’s your father, Magdalene! He’s very handsome, isn’t he?”

“Yes, Mama.” Even at five years old, Maggie knew not to disagree with Mama. This so-called papa was all wrong though. He looked more serious than handsome. His horse was brown, not white. And he wasn’t wearing a handsome wig like Mama’s gentlemen friends did. Most telling of all, this papa fellow completely ignored his daughter when she was sitting in a closed carriage not ten yards away.

Her papa, her real papa, would never ignore her like this. He’d smile at her and have treats in his pocket for her and buy her a pony. He’d read stories to her and tell her she was pretty. He would not let Mama slap her so much—Mama was a great one for slapping. Mama slapped the maids, the potboy, her little dog.

Slapping wasn’t so bad, not as bad as the yelling and breaking things, and the weeping that happened when Mama had a row with a gentleman friend.

A little part of Maggie wished the fellow on the wrong-colored horse was her papa—provided he didn’t like slapping. Miss Anglethorpe said there were men who didn’t.

Maggie knew there were also men who did.

This man must have caught sight of Maggie gaping at him from the carriage window, because he paused in the middle of his conversation with some other gentleman on horseback, raised his hat to Maggie, and winked at her.

At her.

Maggie’s knuckles went to her mouth in astonishment. She’d raised her hand to wave at him, when her mother yanked her away from the window.

“He mustn’t see you—yet. Not until the moment is right. The situation requires delicate handling if Lord Percival is to do his duty by you.”

As the carriage rolled away, Maggie sat on her hand rather than reach out the window and wave to the man. When she got home, though, when Miss Anglethorpe had taken her medicine and gone to sleep, and Mama was off with the gentlemen, Maggie would creep from her bed to the mirror in the hall.

She was going to learn to wink. She would practice until she got it right.

Just like her… like that man.

* * *

“Please, let this child fall into a peaceful slumber and wake up healthy and happy in the morning.”

Esther murmured her prayer quietly, because Valentine was not yet truly fussing. He was whimpering and fretting, sufficiently displeased with the remove to Town to be waking several times a night. The ties on Esther’s nightgown gave easily, and she put the child to her breast without having to think about it.

He latched on with the desperate purpose of a hungry infant, while Esther closed her eyes and wondered why even this—a mother’s most fundamental nurturing of her baby—should provoke a sensation of despair so intense as to be physical.

While Valentine slurped and nursed, Esther examined the feeling suffusing her body. Despair was the prominent note, followed up by… desolation. A sense of being utterly isolated, though she was intimately connected to another human being.

“Esther?”

How long had Percival been standing in the shadows just inside the playroom door?

“You’re home early.”

She wasn’t accusing him of anything—though it might have sounded like it.

“Wales overimbibed, and the footmen took him to his chambers, so the rest of us were free to leave.” Percival crossed the room and threw himself into the other chair. He drew off his wig in a gesture redolent of weariness, and hung the thing over the top of the hearth stand like a dead pelt. “Have I mentioned lately that I hate court?”

He hated the pomp and powder, which was not the same thing.

“You enjoy the politics.”

He also enjoyed watching Esther nurse their children. She’d thought that endearing, once upon a time.

Valentine having finished with the first breast, Esther put him to the second. Before she could tend to her clothes, Percival leaned over and twitched her shawl higher on her shoulders, covering up her damp nipple. He excelled at such casual intimacies, thought nothing of them, in fact. He touched her as if she thought nothing of them either.

Esther allowed it, though all that despair and desolation had been crowded back by a healthy tot of resentment borne on a rising tide of fatigue and a strong undercurrent of anger.

“I do enjoy politics,” he said, sitting back and stretching out his legs toward the fire. “I’ve been approached about running for a seat in the Commons.”

“I suppose that makes sense.” Belatedly, Esther realized Percival was asking her opinion. She mustered her focus to consider the matter, despite her bad mood, because he was her husband, and he was a good husband. “We would have to be in Town more, and the stewards and tenants are looking to you for direction at Morelands.”

“Yes.”

He stared at the fire, which meant Esther had time to study him.

He looked… not old exactly, but mature. The last vestiges of the handsome young officer had been displaced by a gravity that wasn’t at all unattractive. He was barely thirty, though she’d found a gray hair on him their first morning in Town.

She had said nothing about that.

“What are you thinking, Percival? Valentine and I will keep your confidences.”

His smile was a mere sketch of what he was capable of when intent upon charming, but it had been real. “We would have to entertain. You would have to go out and about. Tony can take on the duties at Morelands—he’s better suited to cajolery and flattery than I’ll ever be—and it isn’t as if the succession has been neglected.”

At that last observation, Percival ran a finger over Valentine’s cheek. The child released the breast on a sigh of great proportions for such a small fellow.

“He’s done carousing,” Percival said, reaching for the baby. “Ready to sleep off a surfeit of motherly love.”

Esther let him have the baby and was grateful for the assistance. Percival—veteran of many postprandial interludes with his sons—put a handkerchief on his shoulder, tucked Valentine against his chest, and patted the small back gently.

“You’re not enjoying this remove to Town, are you, Esther?”

The question was unexpected, awkward, and brave. “The children are not settling in well. Babies like their routine, and Bart and Gayle were used to rambling in any direction at Morelands. Here, we must arrange outings to the park. Then too, the servants haven’t sorted themselves out yet.”

Percival sighed, sounding much like his young son, but nowhere near as content. “I suppose it’s human nature for them to feud. I wasn’t asking about the children or the servants, though. I was asking you, Esther. You’re not happy here.”

With the part of her that loved him, Esther knew he wasn’t accusing her of anything. “I wasn’t happy at Morelands.”

For a long moment, the only sound was the hissing and popping of the fire. Percival had ordered that wood be burned in the nursery, claiming it was healthier for small lungs than the constant stink of coal smoke.

Valentine burped. A single, stentorian eruction followed by another contented-baby sigh.

“Your son enjoys healthy digestion, madam.” She expected Percival to hand the baby back to her, but he kept the child tucked against his shoulder. “And as to that, I don’t see how you could have been happy at Morelands. I doubt if anybody is happy at Morelands, save the livestock and the pantry mouser.”

Percival had not been happy at Morelands. The realization struck Esther along with a pang of guilt. She was tired, lonely, and out of sorts, and her husband—in the same sorry condition himself—was offering her understanding. When he could have fallen exhausted into bed, he’d sought her out and extended this marital olive branch.

Another silence ensued, this one more thoughtful.

“We should go to bed, Percival. You don’t often get in at a decent hour, and you need your rest too.”

She was dodging behind the mundane realities, but her husband did not accommodate her.

“Esther, I am worried about you. Organizing this trip seems to have overtaxed you, and you fainted again yesterday morning. A moment earlier, and you would have fallen to this very carpet here with Valentine in your arms.”

Esther closed her eyes against this unforeseen assault. She knew how to handle blustering and shouting. Percival’s rages against this or that governmental excess or insult to the Crown were mere display, and his frustrations at Morelands resolved themselves with regular applications of hard work.

But this… concern devastated her. “You must not trifle over female vapors. I will recover my strength directly. If you want to stand for a seat, we can entertain, attend all the necessary functions, and flit about Town from now until Michaelmas.”

Percival rose and crossed into the next room, Valentine in his arms. When he returned to the playroom, having cleared the field of noncombatants, he resumed his seat and advanced his forces again.