The Duke and His Duchess - By Grace Burrowes Page 0,12
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