Spa, on a special trip just for her.
She missed Mama too.
“Sing it now,” he said. “Shock me, Mrs. DeWitt. Besides, you have been drinking, and this nation has a proud tradition of using drink as an excuse to sing bawdy songs. It is your patriotic duty.”
“Oh my. Well. If it’s my patriotic duty.” It did seem like an excellent idea, and she enjoyed the way he was looking at her. “It was called ‘Oyster Nan’. Um…”
She gathered her hazy thoughts and sang:
As Oyster Nan stood by her Tub
To show her vicious Inclination;
She gave her noblest Parts a Scrub,
And sigh’d for want of Copulation.
He burst out laughing, his eyes dancing with delight, and she laughed too, enjoying herself more than she ought.
“What next?” he said. “Did Oyster Nan get her—”
“Don’t say it.” She pushed her hair from her forehead and tried to remember. “There was a vintner,” she said. “And they…they sported.”
“They sported, did they?”
“But they were interrupted, and then…I don’t know. The words made no sense. Um…”
She sang again:
But being call’d by Company,
As he was taking pains to please her,
I’m coming, coming, Sir, says he,
My Dear, so am I, says she, Sir.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked. “It’s not even funny.”
But his hands covered his face and his shoulders were shaking. She imagined sliding her hand over those shoulders, his laughter rumbling beneath her palm, feeling the shape of his muscles and the warmth of his skin.
When his laughter subsided, he said, “You are a treasure.”
His expression was soft, then. His smile mingled with the brandy and made her body feel odd and delicious, like it had the night before, on her bed, when she thought he would kiss her, and maybe he would kiss her now.
But he wouldn’t kiss her. He had loved his wife. He didn’t want her. And she didn’t want him either. She kept forgetting that part.
She put the glass back on the table, and only realized she’d almost missed the edge when he lunged and caught it and moved it to the center. She could knock that glass off the table and it would break.
“She’s broken,” she said.
She glanced at Joshua. He was studying her with a slight frown.
“Lucy,” she clarified. “She’s broken inside and I don’t know why. We’ve had our fair share of tragedies, but…I don’t know how to fix it and it hurts to watch her breaking into pieces. You’re a bit broken too.”
His head jerked up. “Nobody’s broken. That’s just life.”
“I think you are trying to stop life from happening, but life keeps on happening anyway.”
She didn’t know where that thought came from, but it seemed a very good and important thought. Brandy didn’t interfere with her thinking. Her thinking was good. She understood now. She understood that…something.
But he didn’t like it. Irritation flashed in his face. “Calling me broken because I don’t paste a smug smile over everything and pretend I’m better than everyone else.”
“Are you talking about me?”
“You have no idea what it’s like to make mistakes,” he said. “You can never understand human failings.”
“How would you know what I do or don’t understand?”
“When have you ever made a mistake? When have you made a bad decision? When have you even broken a single bloody rule? Huh? Name one thing you have done that you should be ashamed of.”
The room tilted. This was what it meant to be drunk. Foxed, tipsy, bosky. Was Papa bosky when he got himself killed? The image of Papa swam before her eyes. Papa, hugging her after her wedding. Papa, explaining how the estate ran, telling her everything would be all right. Papa, lying motionless on the bloody straw in the stable. Even after his funeral, she didn’t cry. She wrote to her husband, and when he couldn’t be bothered to come, she took over running the estate, even though she didn’t need to—they had a good land steward, and she was already busy with the household with Mama unwell—but she’d had to fill every moment from morning till bedtime.
“I bribed a public official,” she said. “That’s what I did. I lied to the law and I lied to the church.”
Joshua had loved her father too. If she told him, she would hurt him. Good.
“Papa didn’t fall off his horse and break his neck,” she said. “He shot himself. And I bribed the coroner and the doctor and everyone else to cover it up so no one would know.”
Joshua had only had one glass of brandy, but his head was spinning as if he