He looked almost comically alarmed. He took the blanket-wrapped bundle—Sophia gave him no choice—and held it as though terrified he would drop it.
Lady Trentham linked her arm through Agnes’s, and Viscount Ponsonby looked down into the baby’s face.
“Well, my l-lad,” he said, “when the l-ladies do not want us, we men band together and talk about horses and races and boxing mills and... well, the interesting stuff. Yes, you may well open your eyes—b-blue like your papa’s, I see. We are about to indulge in a heart-to-heart chat, just the t-two of us, and it would be ill-mannered of you to nod off in the m-middle of it.”
Sophia laughed again, and Agnes could have wept. There was surelynothingmore affecting than seeing a man holding a baby and actually talking to it. Even if it wasnothis own, and he had not chosen to hold it and probably wished himself anywhere else on earth than just here, holding his friend’s infant.
He tucked the child into the crook of his arm and made off across the grass, leaving the path to the three of them.
“Agnes,” Sophia said, her voice low, “does he have atendrefor you? What a sensible man he is, if he does.”
“I have a soft spot for him, I must confess,” Lady Trentham said. “But then, I do forallof them. Hugo is so very fond of them, and they have all suffered dreadfully.”
Agnes wondered about Lady Trentham’s limp, which did not seem to be a temporary thing. Wondering kept her mind off the events of the morning so far. Well, almost, anyway.
He still wanted to marry her—perhaps.
He had kissed her again. And more than just kissed her.
But he had not once expressed any fondness for her. Only a desire tobedher, to use his own language.
“I still have not seen any of your paintings, Mrs. Keeping,” Lady Trentham was saying, “even though we have been here longer than two weeks.MayI see some of them if I walk into the village one day before we leave? Sophia says you are very talented.”
He had reached the house ahead of them and was sitting on one of the steps outside the front doors, the baby on his lap, head outward, one of his hands spread beneath it. He was still talking.
Agnes swallowed and hoped she had muffled the gurgle of unshed tears in her throat.
10
Agnes sat in the morning room for half an hour with the ladies, enjoying her coffee and the conversation. Viscount Ponsonby had taken the baby up to the nursery, having assured Sophia that he did indeed know the way and that he would not abandon young Tom until he had placed him safely in his nurse’s care.
Agnes thought he was not going to join them, but he did so just as she was getting to her feet to take her leave.
“Ah, well-timed,” he said. “I shall escort you home, Mrs. Keeping.”
“There is really no need,” she assured him. “I come back and forth to Middlebury all the time to call upon Sophia, and it never occurs to me to bring a maid or other escort.”
She needed to be alone to think.
“But if a w-wolf should happen to leap out at you from the woods,” he said, “there really ought to be someone there to f-fight it off with his bare hands. Me, in fact.”
Lady Trentham laughed. “A hero after my own heart,” she said, clapping a hand theatrically to her bosom.
“And the woods are full of them,” Sophia added. “Not to mention the wild boars.”
Agnes looked reproachfully from one to the other of the ladies, and Sophia tipped her head slightly to one side and looked searchingly at her again.
Viscount Ponsonby escorted her home. She clasped her hands determinedly behind her back as soon as they left the house, and he walked a little distance to one side of her and talked agreeably almost the whole way on a series of inconsequential topics.
“No wolves,” he said when they were close to the gates, “or wild b-boars, alas. How is a man expected to impress his l-lady in this civilized age when he may not perform some g-grand deed of heroism in order to pluck her from d-deadly danger and s-sweep her swooning form into his strong, sheltering arms?”
Hislady?
He had stopped walking—in almost the exact spot as he had chosen yesterday to inform her that she had better marry him.
She smiled at him.
“You would like to be a knight in shining armor?” she asked him. “You would like to be that cliché of worthy manhood?”
