“What happened to your father?” he asked.
“It was camp fever,” she replied. “Imagine how strange, Mr. Duke. He had soldiered all through Spain for years and years with scarcely a scratch, and here we were, nearly at peace at last, and on our way into Paris itself . . .”
Her voice stopped and she remained in silent contemplation, swallowing hard several times, until she could speak. He wanted to reach for her hands again, but she had placed them out of his reach.
“He had a sore throat and a mild fever one night, and then next afternoon he was dead,” Libby continued. “I don’t understand it, not at all.” She made a gesture of dismissal, as if to brush away the memory. “I wanted to ask Dr. Cook about it, how a man so healthy could die so fast, but there isn’t much purpose to that now, is there?”
It was a question requiring no answer. She sat another moment in silence, in that perfect, self-contained repose that seemed as much a part of her as her boundless energy. She sighed, and Nez felt an almost overpowering urge to pull her close to him. He stayed where he was, propped up against his pillows, hands clasped together, and allowed her that moment of calm grief.
“And so we came home to Kent,” she said at last, and the spell was broken. “And we lived happily ever after.”
He looked at Libby quickly, worried for some hint of bitterness in her voice or face, but saw none. She smiled at him then and reached forward suddenly to poke his chest. “And don’t be so gloomy. I’m not entirely sure that peace would have been entirely to Papa’s liking.”
“My God, but you are a brave soul,” he said, not meaning to, but not stopping his words.
She smiled again. “You’re a goose, Mr. Candy Merchant. We Ames always take life on whatever terms it is offered to us, sir. There is nothing heroic about that. Our experiences have made us practical. You may ask my cousin, sir, and so she will say. I am a dull dog indeed.”
He laughed. “Very good, sir! You have not laughed before,” she said. She poured him a glass of water. “Now, sir, Dr. Cook said you were to drink at least four cups of water before luncheon, so be quick about it, else I shall have a great peal rung over me when he arrives this afternoon.”
He made a face, but accepted the goblet. “I will float away, Miss Ames. Does the good doctor believe in nothing but water and oatmeal?”
She considered his quiz of a question a moment in that mock- serious way that he was finding so endearing. “As to that, I do not know. I am never sick. It is Dr. Cook’s great despair, although he is vehement in denial. He so loves to fiddle with the sick.”
He would have liked for her to have stayed close by and teased him some more, but she was at the window, pulling wide the draperies and raising the window sash to let in the summer. She took a deep breath. “Don’t you just love it, Mr. Duke?” she asked.
As a matter of fact, he did. Nesbitt Duke, acting as candy merchant for Copley’s Confections, decided that he could easily lie there all day and admire her beauty. But she gestured toward the window, where June breezes played with the curtain. “Not me, silly. Take a deep breath. It’s good for you,’’ she challenged, and then grinned at him. “Better than oatmeal.”
“If you say, ‘It is good for you’ one more time, I will throw my pillow at you,” he muttered.
“Good for you,” she whispered softly, and then shrieked when he hauled back and heaved his pillow at her. Libby danced out of reach and the last thing he saw was the wave of her hand as she skipped out the door.
With one pillow gone and feeling sleepily disinclined to get out of bed and retrieve it, the duke resigned himself to a nap. He folded his hands carefully across his middle and lay there listening to his brain tick and feeling Dr. Cook’s Mystick Soother working its magic on his legs. He thought for a moment about a drink, rolling a phantom wine about in his mouth and then swallowing. There was no pleasure in it, but old habits die hard, he was discovering.
The agony of his withdrawal from alcohol had lasted for several days, and when he could make some sense of things again, he could only wonder at first at the intensity of the pain. Did I drink that much? he asked himself several times. Oh, surely not. After more days of enforced abstinence, he was compelled to admit the answer to that question was an emphatic yes.
He didn’t surrender gracefully to his sudden removal from Blue Ruin, malt, and whiskey, but his own rudeness wasn’t borne home to him until the afternoon when, his head throbbing and his stomach heaving, he swore at some commonplace tidbit of news or gossip—he couldn’t remember what—that Libby had brought his way. She had delivered it in her usual lighthearted fashion and gasped out loud when he swore at her.
He regretted the words the moment he said them because they were so rude, some detritus from army life that he never would have uttered, drunk or sober, in a woman’s presence. He inwardly cursed his impulsive tongue.
She fell silent and turned pale at the vulgarity he had uttered. The silence lay thick about the room. As he watched in sick disgust at himself, she came closer, until her face was just inches from his.
“Grow up, Mr. Duke,” she said, speaking the words slowly and distinctly so there could be no mistaking her meaning. “Grow up.”
He had not complained since that awful afternoon. She never referred to his rudeness again, but he liked to remind himself of it in moments of quiet as further guarantee that he would never repeat such impetuosity.
Then he turned to his favorite task of late, calling Libby Ames to mind and cataloging her great beauty in his brain, storing away the facts in a calm, rational manner so he could recite them to Eustace in future.
“Eustace, she is a beauty like none I have ever seen, or you either, and how many years have we been dangling after the choicest morsels on the marriage mart? I hesitate to recall. Libby Ames is just tall enough, and just shapely enough in all the appropriate places. A trimmer ankle I have never gazed upon, and I have seen a few, mind you. But I cannot adequately explain her graceful ways. You will have to see them for yourself.”
That consideration never failed to irk him, however momentarily, and changed his tune. “Eustace, I hope you never set eyes on this paragon. She is much too good for such a fop as you.”
And she was, of this the duke had no doubt. Truly, how could he describe Libby Ames’ gentle movements, her exquisite poise, particularly when contrasted—as it so often was—with the bumbling charm of Dr. Anthony Cook. Libby Ames made the clumsy physician look much better than he was. The duke had decided, after a moment’s thought, that she would make any man appear a far superior being than reality would dictate. That was Libby Ames’s particular gift to the world.
She would even make me look good, he thought, as he closed his eyes. Eustace, there are some things in life you are destined never to know. With any luck at all, you will never focus your glims upon Miss Ames, no matter how illustrious her fortune, or by virtue of whatever scheme your papa and her papa concocted so many years ago.
And then the duke would sleep, peaceful, undisturbed sleep, carried beyond dreams by the memory of Libby Ames’s beautiful face.
When he woke, later in the afternoon, his leg paining him, she would be there in his room, her chair pulled up close to his bed, busy at needlework, her tongue between her teeth in concentration, or gazing off into space, thinking her own thoughts. If his face showed any of the pain he felt, her hand would be resting on his arm, her warm grasp better than whiskey.
