How to Catch a Duke (Rogues to Riches #6) - Grace Burrowes Page 0,39

not have trifled with you.”

“Oh, he loved me. Said so himself, wrote the words many times. I only learned he had a wife after I’d conceived. He loved his wife too, and would never give her cause to regret their marriage. But what did it matter that he was married when he would cheerfully set me up in my own establishment and make sure the child wanted for nothing?”

“I hope you hit him, Abigail. I hope you kicked him right in his courtesy title.”

So fierce, for a man who couldn’t kick anybody. “I almost burned his letters. Mon petit agneau chéri and Mein liebstes Häschen…As if I could be anybody’s dearest little lamb or favorite bunny rabbit. I should have burned them. I lost the baby a month later. A stillborn boy.”

The words were simple, the emotions complicated. She had eventually been relieved not to face endless scandal, not to visit illegitimacy on her firstborn. But the relief had been tiny, belated, and guilty—also vastly outweighed by sorrow.

“You kept the letters to punish yourself, didn’t you?” Stephen stroked her shoulder, as if they had all the time and privacy in the world. “You kept them as a reproach, and you became an inquiry agent because you wanted to preserve other young women from having to pay for trusting the wrong man.”

Perhaps she had. Abigail had never considered her motivations, beyond keeping a roof over her head and maintaining her independence.

“Champlain died within two years,” she said, “and destroying the letters seemed overly dramatic. They are mostly travelogues of his gallivanting on the Continent. Fine beer here, excellent wine there, an impressive violinist at some comtesse’s chateau. That should have told me something.”

Stephen hugged her, a quick squeeze about the shoulders, then took up the reins. “He was a shallow, vain, overly indulged heir. They are thick on the ground and a disgrace to the peerage. I am sorry about the child, Abigail. You grieved that loss irrespective of Champlain’s stupidity.”

Nobody had consoled her for the loss of the child, nobody had even known of it until this moment—nobody except Champlain and a grim-faced, taciturn midwife.

“I grieve,” Abigail said, as the horse toddled on. “I grieve, but I don’t rage as much as I used to.”

“That’s like my knee,” Lord Stephen said. “The damned thing won’t get any better, and it probably will get worse. Bloody unfair, pardon my language, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I sulk and rage, then get on with the next experiment, not that a bad knee and a lost child are of the same magnitude. Did you name the baby?”

“A stillborn child cannot be baptized.”

The gig tooled along through the pretty afternoon, the gleaming surface of the Serpentine winking through the trees. Like Lord Stephen, Abigail had shocked herself by reposing this confidence in another.

“I named him Winslow Trueblood Abbott. Trueblood was my mother’s maiden name.” Abigail had never spoken her son’s name aloud before, never written it except on the walls of her heart.

Stephen collected the reins in one hand, and linked the fingers of his free hand with Abigail’s. “That is a fine name, very Quaker and upright. I like it. Any boy would be proud to have such a name.”

The park was deserted, save for a young woman feeding the waterfowl. Abigail was sitting too close to Stephen, clutching his handkerchief, and holding hands with him too. They might have been mistaken for any besotted couple, except the situation was worse than that.

She liked him. She trusted him, and she liked him enormously.

Chapter Seven

“I’m having my portrait done.” Harmonia, Lady Champlain, made that announcement at breakfast, the only time she was reliably in her father-in-law’s company. Lord Stapleton came to the nursery occasionally, and she served as his hostess at formal entertainments, but the marquess was a busy, busy man.

And a right pain in the arse too, to quote his late son.

“I suppose it’s time,” the marquess said, folding over the newspaper and laying it flat beside his plate. “The boy has long since been breeched. A portrait with his mama ought to be hung in the gallery. Pass the toast.”

Harmonia was the entire length of the table away from her father-in-law, but he expected her to step and fetch like an unpaid scullery maid. When Champlain had been alive, he’d been able to jolly her past her frustrations with Stapleton. Champlain had been a fellow traveler on the journey to wrest pleasure from the dull business of waiting for