“My wen—” Nick’s eyebrows rose then crashed down as he stared at the ridiculously delicate teacup in his hand. “I can say with all certainty Leah has ruined me for wenching, Nana. Of that you may be sure.”
“The bordellos should hang their windows with black crepe,” Della retorted. “So what are you about, Nicholas, to abandon your wife to gossip and scorn this way? Don’t you think she had enough of that with young Frommer? Or with her own father?”
“The gossip will eventually die down, for God’s sake, but what if we have children, Nana? What in God’s name will we do if we have children?”
He sat forward abruptly, his face in his hands, knowing Della and Magda exchanged a look of concern over his bent head.
“If you have children,” Della said carefully, “you will love them.”
“God in heaven, Nana.” Nick rose abruptly to his full height. “What if my heir turns out like Leonie? She can barely read, she must print her letters, she trusts everyone who smiles at her, she wants me to read fairy tales to her when I visit, and she will be playing with dolls until I’m an old man. Bad enough my children will be taunted for their height and size. Bad enough they’ll be assumed to be stupid oafs good only for hitching to the plow, bad enough they’ll never feel they fit in…”
He spun on his heel and went to the window, shoulders heaving with emotion before gathering his composure and continuing more softly.
“I cannot consign Leah to mothering a brood of oversized idiots,” Nick informed them. “Worse by far, I will not consign my children to the ridicule and whispering and cruelties that would have been Leonie’s lot had I not intervened. Bastards may enjoy a certain anonymity, but not the heirs of a belted earl. Though you may cease your tantrums and lectures, for I have at least resolved to explain to Leah why ours must be a chaste marriage. She deserves the truth, and I deserve her undying enmity for not having shared it with her sooner.”
He regarded two old women who’d loved him since he’d first drawn breath, both looking at him with such… such compassion. Who would regard his children like this when he was dead and buried? Leah, perhaps. His entire future hung on that possibility.
“I’m going to explain to Leah what we’d risk were we to have children, and if she leaves me once and for all, I will accept her decision.”
Silence. Dumbstruck, dismayed silence, and Nick realized he’d shouted at his grandmother and his old nurse.
“My apologies, ladies.” He bowed at the waist. “You can appreciate my concern.”
Magda’s lips were pursed in thought, but Della rose and pushed Nick back toward the table.
“Sit, you,” she said, her tone commanding. “You are under a misapprehension I would relieve you of. Magda?”
Magda nodded and slid down beside Della.
“You believe Leonie’s limitations are a function of her parentage,” Della began briskly. “They are not.”
“But Papa had a brother…”
“Who fell from his damned horse as a lad,” Della interrupted. “There are many traits that run in the Haddonfield and Harper lines, Nick, but madness and mental impairment are not among them.”
“But then, how did Leonie come to be as she is?” Nick asked, a world of miserable bewilderment in his voice. “She has been like she is since I’ve known her.”
“Fevers,” Magda supplied. “You didn’t meet the girl until she was well past two years of age, and until that winter, she’d been just another darling, happy child. She walked by one year, began speaking about the same time, and put her sentences together the same as any other child.”
“So what happened?”
“Leonie fell ill with the same influenza that took her mother,” Della said. “But Leonie eventually recovered. Magda first noticed the child wasn’t coming along as she had before, though physically, Leonie has always been vigorous enough.”
His mind could not absorb all that Della said, but he could comprehend that last. “She’s been healthy as a horse, except for that flu.”
“I thought we were going to lose her,” Magda said. “She shook with the fevers and shook with them, night after night, and grew so tiny it’s a wonder she lived.”
Another silence fell, as Nick began to consider the information the old women had just imparted. He ran his finger around the rim of his teacup. “You are saying Leonie was not born simple.”
“No more than any other child,” Della said. “No more than you were,