“Meanwhile, you have taken on the task?”
“That’s right, but only for a few minutes. I am serious about not leaving you without a chaperone for any length of time. Do you mind?”
“No, how could I ever? Besides, this is your bed and your chamber that I have now usurped.”
“I insisted upon it. It is the most comfortable room in the house and the least drafty. So, will you eat with me?”
“Yes, I would be delighted.”
“Good.” He smiled. “Not that you really had a choice. I have already instructed Mrs. Fitch to bring our meals in here. She’ll be up shortly.”
“How didyousleep, Your Grace? I hope the butterflies-and-flowers wallpaper was not too jarring to your senses.”
He groaned. “I wound up sleeping on the sofa in my study. I’m more of a leather and wood sort of man. Flowers and butterflies are not my style.”
“I wish you had let me move into that room. Now I feel awful that you could not sleep comfortably in your own bed.”
“No, Temple. You needed it more than I. Besides, I’ve slept on much worse.”
She recalled what Martha had told her about his military service and being captured by Napoleon’s troops. He must have spent the year in squalid conditions, perhaps receiving better treatment than ordinary men because of his rank, but it still had to be a miserable experience.
She wanted so much to ask him about those war years, but it was too sensitive a topic.
However, she never hesitated to push him on matters of charity, because that was a completely different topic, and did he not have a duty to his subjects? Nor did she hesitate to prod him about his family, because he had been the one to bring her the letter he’d received. “Did you write back to your mother?”
He groaned again. “No, what is the point when it will do no good? She’ll be here within the fortnight along with my brother and an entourage of giggling geese and their families. There is no stopping her once she sets her mind on a thing. Unfortunately, I happen to be thatthingshe has now fixed on.”
“I think having family around will be good for you.”
“No, Temple,” he said, his smile fading as he turned earnest. “It is the last thing I want or need. But how can they ever understand when…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Never mind; it is not worth discussing.”
But this was just the opening she’d hoped he would provide. “Are you certain? Why should we not discuss it? I have nowhere else to be and I am a good listener. It is something I learned as I lost my loved ones…one by one, and helpless to do anything about it, although I tried so hard. Two older brothers and my parents.”
“Temple, I’m so sorry.”
She felt the sincerity in his tone and nodded to acknowledge it. “My brothers were far more adventurous than I was and both enlisted in the army to fight on the Iberian Peninsula.”
“They must have enlisted about the same time as I did,” he said.
She nodded again. “One died in the retaking of Oporto in Portugal and the other in the Battle at Talavera. The news broke my parents. They were healthy and smiling until those letters came reporting of each brother fallen in battle. I tried to keep their spirits up, but I was devastated too. Still, I tried hard to help them through the loss. Listened to them, tried to put some joy in their lives. Nothing I ever did was enough. That was it—no matter how hard I tried to unburden them, nothing worked. All those long talks. All our plans. They were done with life. So, within the span of three years, I lost all my family.”
“And came to live here with your uncle.”
“I’m glad I did. Working alongside him has given me a renewed purpose, one I sorely needed. After living through three grueling years of feeling helpless, I had received a reprieve. I vowed I would never take anything or anyone else for granted.”
“Nor do I take my loved ones for granted,” he assured her.
She pursed her lips. “But you have spent years putting them off instead of embracing them. Do you not think this hurts them?”
“Temple, I am not engaging in this conversation. They are coming out here, aren’t they? And have completely ignored my attempts to put them off because of that idiotic Silver Duke gossip. It has lit a fire under my mother that I will have a bloody hard time extinguishing.”
She struggled to contain her laughter, but was it not so ridiculously amusing that this daunting beast should be taken to task by his own mother?
“You do have a lovely touch of silver in your hair,” she remarked.
He grunted. “Perhaps I will take a razor to it and shave it all off, make myself as bald as a billiard ball.”
She laughed again. “Don’t you dare. Every woman wishes they had hair as perfect as yours.”
