She looked down at Beauty, who was trembling and yipping in the throes of a dream.
“Will there be children?” she asked. “I thought that perhaps your daughter—”
“She will need brothers and sisters,” he said. “I once thought, you know, that I would like a dozen children so that I could give them the sort of life children should have. But— Well, perhaps three or four?”
“I would like that.” Her eyes had come back to his. There was a flush of color in her cheeks.
And he dared to dream again. Tomorrow they would go to London and call upon his lawyer. Soon they would have Katy and take her home. And he would make Abby happy, and they would have more children and...
His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a footman, still in his best uniform, with the tea tray, and neither of them spoke even after he left. Abby poured and he went to take his cup and saucer from her hands and the piece of their wedding cake she had put on a plate for him.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Tell me about your childhood, Gil,” she said, sitting back in her chair, her own plate in her hand.
“I survived it.” But that answer, besides being another conversation killer, was not good enough. She was his wife now. Good God,his wife.“Thousands had it much worse. At least I always had a roof over my head and some food in my stomach and clothes to wear, even if they were often ill fitting and bore patches upon patches. I had a mother who cared for my basic needs and insisted I attend school and instilled basic good manners in me. She was not demonstrative by nature—at least, not during the years I knew her. She never showed me open love in the form of hugs and kisses and smiles and words of approval andencouragement. But love, I have learned in all the years since my boyhood, comes in many forms. She never abandoned me. And sometimes, I suspect, she went hungry so that I could eat. She was always pale and thin with red, chapped hands and forearms from all the work she did at her washtub.”
His heart ached for her in retrospect. She was probably eighteen or nineteen when she gave birth to him, though he never knew her age.
He had had no friends, and the children who occasionally played with him would do so only until their parents found out. Friends were something he had always yearned for. But children were resilient. On the whole he had not missed what he never had. The vicar had been strict with him at school but good to him too. He had taken Gil fishing with him once—ah, what a vast and memorable treat that had been—with the purpose, it seemed, of explaining to him why he needed to learn to read and write, though both skills appeared useless and boring to him at the time. Those abilities would be his escape route into a life that would raise him from abject poverty and perhaps bring him happiness and fulfillment. Gil had enjoyed the fishing, ignored the lecture, and taken two fish home for his mother to cook for their supper.
“It was the proudest moment of my life,” he told Abby. “But perhaps the advice he gave me, at which I silently scoffed at the time, bore fruit after all. It would not have been possible for me to be promoted in the army as I was if I had been unable to read and write. I have been happy in the army, especially when I was a sergeant.”
“You were not happy to be an officer?” she asked.
He thought about it. “I suppose I welcomed the new challenges,” he said. “And if I had not been an officer, therewould not be Katy.” There would not have been the disaster of Caroline and his marriage to her either. “And if I had not been an officer, I would not have come here with Harry. I would not have met you.”
She set her empty plate aside. “Is that not a strange fact of life?” she said. “Ifthathad not happened, thenthiswould not have happened, and thenthatwould not. And so on. I am glad we met. I am glad you learned to read and write.”
“Against all the odds,” he said. “I was a morose, rebellious pupil. I skipped school a few times, but my mother had a stout wooden stick she used for dunking the wash in the tub. She also used it on my backside when I skipped school. And washing clothes had given my mother strong hands and arms.”
“She wanted a better future for you,” Abby said.
“I suppose so,” he said. “I often wish my adult self could go back and sit down for a good talk with her. She had a hard life. I do not even know if I was born of a consensual encounter between her and the man who begot me or something worse. I am sorry. I ought not to have said that aloud.”
“My father went through a grandtonwedding with my mother,” she told him, “knowing full well that he was already married to someone else—Anna’s mother, who was dying of consumption but was still alive then. My father was desperately poor, and my mother’s dowry was large. We are not responsible for the ugliness surrounding our own births, Gil.”
“I like to think,” he said, “that my mother was proud of me before she died. I was a sergeant. I wrote to her a few times, though she would have had to have the vicar read the letters to her. I like to think she would have been proud of the man I have become. She always fed stray cats and dogs,you know. It used to make me furious. We had no spare food to give away.”
“I think,” she said, “you loved her.”
He found himself blinking against a stinging sensation behind his eyes. Good God, he was not about to weep, was he? What the devil would she think of him?
“I suppose,” he said, “I ruined her life the moment she conceived me. But she never, ever said so or even implied that it was so.”
“I am sure shewasproud,” Abby said softly, though there was no way she could know any such thing.
“Come to bed?” he said.
She gazed at him for several long moments.
“Yes,” she said, getting up to stack their dishes on the tray before pulling on the bell rope to summon the footman to remove it.
Beauty scrambled up, shook herself all over, and yawned hugely.
Gil got to his feet too and, after the tray had been removed, offered his arm for his wife’s hand.
Beauty trotted after them as they climbed the stairs.
