He felt her hands tremble in his. “Sit and just talk to me, will you? Most of my acquaintances seem to assume that I’ve either dosed myself senseless with laudanum, or that since this is my third experience with widowhood then I must be taking it comfortably in stride. I can’t decide which is most insulting.”
She led him to a sagging, aged sofa near where a curly-headed little girl was playing with a scattering of toy horses. “Come and make your curtsy to his lordship, Emma,” she told the child.
Pushing to her feet, the little girl carefully positioned one foot behind the other and bobbed up and down with a mischievous giggle. She was tall for her age, and skinny like her mother, with her father’s dark hair and gray eyes, and a roguish dimple that was all her own.
“Hello there,” said Sebastian, hunkering down beside her. “Remember me?”
Emma nodded her head vigorously. “You gave me my Aes-hop’s Fables,” she said, stumbling over the pronunciation of the name. “Daddy tells me a story every night.” A faint frown tugged at her gently arched eyebrows. “Only, he didn’t come home in time last night.”
Sebastian glanced up at Annie’s stricken face. He had brought the child the book some months before, when Rhys invited him to dinner one evening. “I could read you a story now,” he said, “if you’d like.”
“That’s all right,” said Emma with a wide smile that was more like Annie’s than that of her dead father. “But thank you.” She dropped another curtsy and went back to her horses.
Sebastian rose slowly.
Annie said, “I told her, but I don’t think she really grasps what has happened. How much of death do we understand at the age of four?” Her voice quavered again, and Sebastian reached out to recapture one of her hands.
They sat for a time in silence, their gazes on the child, who was now whispering, “Clippity-cloppity, clippity-cloppity,” as she pushed a small bronze toy horse mounted on wheels along the pattern of the threadbare carpet. Then Annie said, her voice low, “Did he kill himself, Devlin? Tell me honestly. I wouldn’t blame him if he did—he’s been so dreadfully unwell. I don’t know how he stood it so long.”
Sebastian knew a moment of deep disquiet. It was one thing to harbor such suspicions himself, and something else again to hear them voiced by Wilkinson’s own wife. “I didn’t see anything to suggest it, but it’s impossible at this stage to tell.”
Her freckles stood out, stark, against the pallor of her face. “There’ll be a postmortem?”
“Gibson is doing it. I can stop by his surgery and let you know what he’s found, if you like.”
Nodding, she swallowed hard before answering. “Yes. Please. I’d like to hear it from you . . . if it’s true.”
“Annie . . .” He hesitated a moment, then pressed on. “I know things have been hard for you, since Wilkinson was invalided out. I wish you’d let me—”
“No,” she said forcefully, cutting him off. “Thank you, but no. I’ve a grandmother in Norfolk who offered years ago to take me in, should I ever find myself homeless. When this is all over, Emma and I will go to her.”
He studied her tightly held face. “All right. But promise me that should you ever find yourself in need, you’ll let me know.”
“I’ll be fine, Devlin; don’t worry.”
He stayed talking to her for some time, of happier days with the regiment in Italy and the Peninsula. But when he was leaving, he touched his fingertips gently to her cheek and said, “You didn’t promise me, Annie.”
She crinkled her nose in a way that reminded him of the near child she’d been when they first met. “I’ll be fine, Devlin. Truly. “
He forbore to press her further. Yet as he hailed a hackney and headed toward home, he could not shake the conviction that he was somehow failing both her and his dead friend.
Chapter 6
S
ebastian lived in a bow-fronted town house on Brook Street, near the corner of Davies. The house was elegant but small. Once, it had suited him just fine. But since his marriage six weeks before to Miss Hero Jarvis, he’d been thinking he ought perhaps to consider moving to something larger, grander. Only, when he’d mentioned it to Hero, she’d simply looked at him steadily in that way she had and said, “I like our house.”