in the knowledge – relieved – that I was going to outlive him. What else can ladies do? As soon as he died, I took up my maiden name. I am Amelia Munro to the world, and so I shall remain.” She bowed her head. “Where did my lovely Mary die? In an alley, you say? All alone?” She shuddered and began a low, relentless keening that made Ben leap up from the table, scattering crumbs, as he ran to Meridee in terror.
She picked up her son, holding him close, as the widow rocked back and forth and keened. “I want to go home, Mama,” he whispered into her neck. “Now!”
“Soon, my love, soon,” Meridee whispered back, chilled to her heart. Was now the time to say that the count waited outside her doorstep?
“Let me sit you beside Georgie’s mama for a moment. Shh, shh, you will be fine.” Ben wasn’t happy, but Grace gathered him close, too.
Meridee went back to the window, unsure what to do, until she asked herself what she would want, were she a widow who had lost everything in the disappearance of her pregnant daughter and despised her husband. She put her arms around Mrs. Munro, who stiffened, then rested her head against Meridee’s shoulder.
“Mrs. Munro, the count is waiting in that carriage outside your house,” she said finally, not knowing if it was the right thing to do, unsure of herself, wishing Able were here.
“He’s here?” Mrs. Munro asked, alert. She sniffed back her tears then held herself off from Meridee, the grip on her shoulders nearly painful. “My dear, I have wanted to apologize to him for years! I want to tell him that I never felt the way my husband did. I want him to know that had I the resources – oh why do women count for nothing? – I would have scoured all of Scotland until I learned something. Anything!”
“Tell me now, dear lady,” they heard from the doorway. “I could not wait another moment in the carriage.”
They turned around to see Francisco Domingo y Guzman. He opened his arms. With a cry, Mrs. Munro crossed the room and embraced him. They clung together, two comrades in sorrow so wrenching that Meridee knew she would be awake and pacing the floor tonight. She sat beside Grace, who was burping Georgie. Ben didn’t waste a moment getting into his mama’s lap. She held him close.
“Mama, what is happening?” he asked, his hands on her face, commanding her attention.
“We’re watching a family come into being,” she told him. “Our family.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
The Mercury made port in four days. Each day, Meridee sat with Mrs. Munro and the count, answering questions. It touched her heart how they wanted to know every detail of her husband’s life, no matter how minute. Ben was there to translate, but less as Francisco Domingo y Guzman’s rusty English revived. Her boy was content to eat his great-grandmama’s cream-filled buns.
Ben thought they should tell Mr. Bartleby about the buns, but Meridee thought not. “He will wonder where you have picked up such culinary decadence.”
Ben turned philosophical. “He might think I am not a loyal customer. He will think I am a gut-foundered parvenu.”
“That is it,” Meridee said, hard put not to howl with laughter at the incongruity of dockside slang mixed with French, coming from a charming lad not even two years old, a well-fed, nurtured and loved little genius.
Mrs. Munro understood her laughter. Her eyes lively now, and not dead with the bleakness of too much life still to live, she told her visitors of Mary’s quirks. “For all that she could do quadrilateral equations when she was three, even at age fourteen she got lost between our house and the church, a matter of three blocks.” She turned wistful then. “Does my grandson do better? One should hope, if he is a sailing master.”
“Actually, he never gets lost.” Meridee laughed. “What he can’t do is tie a neck cloth properly or manage the simple arithmetic of grocer’s bills. Mrs. Munro, I think their minds are too large for the simple things that never baffle the rest of us.”
In her own loneliness, Meridee discovered that she craved the chance to tell two people about the man she adored. She left the most private moments private, but found there was plenty to tell them, from her first view of him, wet from a downpour while walking to Pomfrey for a chance to work for her brother-in-law briefly as a