Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish - By Grace Burrowes Page 0,61
connected two thoughts in His Grace’s often nimble brain.
“You’re fretting over Sophie,” he said, pushing his chair back from his desk. “This means whatever mischief she’s up to, her brothers will be yet another day in retrieving her from it.”
The slight—very, very slight—tightening at the corners of Her Grace’s mouth told him he’d scored a lucky hit. “For God’s sake, Esther, I can saddle up and fetch the girl home. It’s not that far, and I’m hardly at my last prayers.”
She gave him a look such as a wife of many years gives the man who taught her the true meaning of patience. “It is the depths of winter, Percival Windham, and you would leave me here with four daughters to keep out of trouble by myself when every home in the neighborhood is full of mistletoe and spiked punch. Sophie is the sensible one. She’s doubtless visiting elsewhere in Town, and her letter to us went astray in the bad weather.”
“Very likely you’re right.” For appearances sake, he was compelled to add, “It really would be no trouble, my love. I’ll take a groom or two if you insist.”
She turned her head, giving him a view of her lovely profile as she gazed out the window. “Sophie will be fine. Perhaps I will have a spot more tea after all.”
“Of course.”
Except by now, Sophie would have sent more than one letter regarding her change of plans. His Grace was reminded that all those years ago, when he’d been an impecunious younger son bent on a career in the cavalry, Esther had been considered the sensible daughter too. This had allowed them all manner of ill-advised leeway in their flirting and courtship, and accounted for Lord Bartholomew’s arrival something less than nine months after the nuptials.
It gave pause to a loving papa immured in the country drinking tea, and tempted him to saddle up his charger and head for Town, miserable weather be damned.
***
Sophie’s day dragged, the hours punctuated by Vim’s absence more than by the chiming of the tall clocks throughout the house.
Vim wasn’t there to help Sophie feed the baby.
He wasn’t on hand to deal with some of the soiled nappies.
He wasn’t offering the occasional opinion on the baby’s situation, leaving Sophie to fret that the child was too warm, too cold, too tired, too everything.
Vim wasn’t offering adult companionship at meals, complimenting Sophie’s pedestrian cooking as if it were the finest food he’d ever eaten.
He wasn’t there when Sophie contemplated and discarded the notion of lying down for a nap while Kit caught his midafternoon forty winks, there being memories to haunt her in both her own bed and Vim’s.
Vim wasn’t there, and he would never be there again.
“I have both brothers and sisters,” she told Kit as she laid him in the cradle near the kitchen hearth. “My oldest sister is named Maggie. She’s several years my senior and very much a comfort to me, though she’s technically a half sister.”
Would Kit have brothers and sisters? Did Joleen’s footman have other children he’d created with the same careless disregard for the child’s future? That Kit might have siblings and never know them, or not even know of them, made her chest ache.
“Maggie explained certain things to me when I made my come out,” she said, shifting the cradle to the worktable and putting it beside her baking ingredients. “Things no decent girl is supposed to know.” And how Maggie came upon the knowledge was something Sophie had wondered.
“She explained that people like you get conceived at certain times and are less likely to be conceived at other times.”
The baby kicked both feet and stuck the two middle fingers of his left hand in his mouth.
“I was hoping…”
She’d been hoping Vim would show her what the greatest intimacy between a man and a woman could be. She’d been hoping to be his lover, to know with him what she’d never know with any other man.
She’d been hoping a great deal more than that, actually, but hoping was as useless as wishing.
“I’ll deal with Valentine’s room tomorrow,” she assured the baby. “I’ll clean up the bathing chamber, and I’ll send along a cheery note to Their Graces.”
She wouldn’t lie, exactly, but she wouldn’t mention Vim Charpentier, either. Among her siblings, there was tacit acknowledgment of the occasional need to protect their parents from some unsavory detail or development. It was the kind thing to do, also the most practical, as some aspects of reality did not yield even