The Duke and His Duchess

famille, though lately Percival had been absent at those gatherings more than he’d attended them. The dead leaf in Esther’s hair took on particular significance.

“Esther? I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant to dine with Arbuthnot, but the man is a font of information, and if I can get the high meadow drained, it’s excellent pasture. We need more pasture… I am sorry, though. I’ll tell the boys tomorrow morning.”

He rolled over and slipped an arm around her waist. Was she losing flesh, or had he just forgotten what she felt like when she wasn’t carrying?

“Esther?”

She twitched. In sleep, his composed, poised wife twitched a fair amount. She also sometimes talked in her sleep, little nonsense phrases that always made him smile. He kissed her cheek and rolled onto his back.

“I miss my wife.” Lying naked in the same bed with her, Percival missed his wife with an ache that was only partly sexual.

He considered pleasuring himself and discarded the notion. The flesh was willing—the flesh was perpetually willing—but the spirit was weary and bewildered. He’d blundered today, as a husband and a father. He’d blundered as a son, too, in his father’s estimation, and very likely he was blundering as a brother in some manner he’d yet to perceive.

Beside him, Esther’s feet twitched. She’d told him once she often dreamed of their courtship, a brief, passionate, fraught undertaking that now seemed as distant as Canada.

Percival rolled away from his wife and let her dream in peace.

* * *

Esther felt a wall rising in the middle of the Windham family, for all they appeared to be placidly consuming a hearty English breakfast.

His Grace commandeered the head of the table, of course. Esther tried to picture quiet, soft-spoken Peter in that location and couldn’t. Opposite His Grace, at the foot, the chair remained empty, though as the senior lady of rank and next duchess, the position belonged to Peter’s wife, Lady Arabella.

Peter sat at his father’s right hand, Arabella next to her husband, and Esther below Arabella. Across the table, Percival hid behind a newspaper on the duke’s left, Tony inhaled beefsteak and kippers next to his brother, and across from Esther, Tony’s wife, Gladys, took dainty nibbles of her eggs.

Had Esther wanted to, there was no way she could have nudged her husband’s foot under the table, casually touched his hand, or murmured an aside to him. When had they decided to sit as far apart from each other as possible? When had she decided to sit on the side of the invalided heir?

“You’ll be going up to London, Pembroke.” His Grace glowered at a buttered toast point while the rest of the table exchanged glances at this news. “I’ve been asked to sit on a commission to study the provisioning of the army overseas. Damned lot of nonsense, but one doesn’t refuse such a request.”

He bit off a corner of the toast while a pained silence spread. Peter hadn’t been off the property even to go to services for at least two years. A trip to the stables left him exhausted, and if he missed an afternoon nap, he had to absent himself from dinner.

Esther lifted the teapot. “More tea, Your Grace?”

“I don’t want any damned tea. If you bothered to familiarize yourself with the indignities of old age, you’d never offer such a thing.”

Gladys shot Esther a sympathetic look. Percival slowly, deliberately, folded his newspaper down and stared at his father.

Please, Percival, I beg you do not—

“I’ll thank you not to rebuke my lady wife for a proper display of table manners, sir.”

Lady Arabella laid her hand on Peter’s sleeve; Tony paused in the demolition of his breakfast.

“Perhaps I might serve on this committee?” Tony suggested. “Been to Canada, after all, and it’s not as if I’m needed here.”

“You?” Tony might have been old Thomas the footman for all the incredulity in the Duke’s tone. “It’s time you took a damned wife and stopped frolicking about under every skirt to catch your eye.”

This time the sympathetic look went from Esther to Gladys.

“Tony and I will both go,” Percival said, passing his newspaper to Peter and rising. “Scout the terrain, get a sense of what’s afoot. Pembroke can come up to Town when the decisions are to be made, and of course, we’ll keep you informed, Your Grace. Ladies, I bid you good day. I’m off to wish my offspring a pleasant morning.”

For just a moment, bewilderment clouded the duke’s faded blue eyes. Before anyone else could speak, though, he rallied. “Daily reports, if you please, and don’t stint on the details. I know not which is worse: the Whigs, the colonials, Wales’s ridiculous flights, or the dear king’s poor health. Madam”—he turned his glower on Esther —“you will stop hoarding that teapot. A man needs to wash down his breakfast, such as it is.”

Esther passed the teapot to Arabella, and nobody looked at anybody. The king had recovered from his difficult spell more than a year ago, while Esther feared the duke’s was only beginning.

Percival squeezed his father’s shoulder. “We’ll keep you informed regarding all of it.” He bowed and withdrew, while Esther tried to puzzle out what expression had been on her husband’s face during that last exchange.

Compassion for the old duke, whose confusion was becoming daily more evident, had been the predominant sentiment. Percival was pragmatic, also capable of clear-eyed understanding. That he neither judged his father nor ridiculed him warmed Esther’s heart.

Good sons turned into good fathers.

Another emotion had lurked behind the compassion, though. Esther pushed her eggs around rather than watch as Tony tucked into yet another portion of rare steak.

Percival had been relieved at the prospect of leaving Kent and biding in London with his brother over the coming winter. Esther was not relieved, not relieved at all to think of her husband decamping for the vice and venery of the capital, while she remained behind to deal with teething babies and ailing lords.

Two

“Why is it,” Percival asked his five-year-old son, “every woman I behold these days seems exhausted?”

Bart grinned up at his father and capered away. “Because they have to chase me!”

For a ducal heir, that answer would serve nicely for at least the next thirty years. Percival caught the nursery maid’s eye. “Go have a cup of tea, miss. I’ll tarry a moment here.”

She bobbed her thanks, paused in the next room to speak with the nurse supervising the babies, and closed the nursery-suite door with a soft click of the latch. Percival did likewise with the door dividing the playroom from the babies’ room, wanting privacy with his older sons and some defense against the olfactory assault of Valentine’s predictably dirty nappies.

“I swear that child should be turned loose on any colonial upstarts. He’d soon put them to rout.”

Gayle glanced up from the rug. “He’s a baby, Papa. Nobody is scared of him.”

“Such a literalist. Some day you’ll learn about infantile tyrants. What are you reading?”

Gayle, being a man of few words, held up a book. Bart, by contrast, was garrulous enough for two boys.

“Shall I read to you?”

Bart came thundering back. “Read to me too!”

Percival glanced out the window. The morning was yet another late reprise of the mildness of summer, but to the south, in the direction of the Channel, a bank of thick, gray clouds was piling up on the horizon.

“I have to ride into the village today and meet with the aldermen, then stop by the vicarage and be regaled about the sorry state of the roof over the choir. When that task is complete, I’m expected to call on Rothgreb and catch him up on the Town gossip, which will be interesting, because I haven’t any. My afternoon will commence with an inspection of—”

Two little faces regarded him with impatient consternation.

“Right.” Percival folded himself down onto the rug, crossed his legs, and tucked a child close on each side. “First things first.”