“Or is he perhaps—your grandfather, that is—manipulating you?” she asked.
“By hinting that his physician has given him bad news?” He sat back in his chair while one servant set two large plates of food in the middle of the table and another poured their tea. He had not even considered that possibility. Manipulative his grandfather couldundoubtedly be. But... a liar? “Anything is possible with him. But I believe him to be telling the truth about this. I do not know why else there would be this sudden haste to get me married. I am only twenty-six, and I have always enjoyed good health.”
She had not answered his question about that stern talk with his grandparents. At the very least, though, he must sit down with them tomorrow—bothof them—and insist quite firmly that they were not to harass Lady Philippa Ware. She was under no obligation whatsoever to marry him just because they had decided she was perfect for him. Perhaps they assumed she must be over the moon with delight to find herself in the running to be the bride of the heir to a dukedom—andwith the full approval of the duke and the duchess. In their minds, any single woman with half a brain in her head would be.
“When did your father die, Lord Roath?” she asked him as she set a lobster patty and two other savory delicacies on her plate and looked across the table at him.
“Eleven years ago,” he said. “I was fifteen. Jenny was twelve and Charlotte was nineteen and betrothed to Sylvester Bonham. They had already been forced to postpone their wedding once while we were in mourning for our mother. But then it had to be postponed for another year. I was taken out of my school and away from my home at Amberwell to live at Greystone Court. My education for a few years after that consisted almost exclusively of training to become the Duke of Wilby one day. I had the best of tutors, though my main teacher was always my grandfather himself. He was a stern taskmaster. If he set me to learn the names and titles of every peer of the realm and how they ranked in order from top to bottom, for example, he expected perfection. If he tested me and I made one small mistake, I would be sent to my room and ordered to remain there until I could be sure to get it right next time. I wasnot starved on those occasions. But the meals sent to my room were as bland and unappetizing as they could be without actually being inedible. Salt, apparently—or rather its lack—is a great inducer to boys to perfect their knowledge. Those meals were quite ingenious. Also they were cool if they were meant to be hot and tepid if they were meant to be cold. Poor Cook. It must have been a severe blow to her pride to be forced to send them up to me.” He chuckled.
“But you learned,” she said.
“But I learned.”
“And you were separated from your sisters while you did it after the blow of losing both your parents within a year or so.”
“I had been away at school during term times before that,” he told her. “But there were the holidays. There were scarcely any of those after our father’s death. We missed one another, my sisters and I.”
“And had to grieve apart from one another,” she said.
“Yes.” He did not want to go there. Not into that terrible, lonely darkness from which at one time he had thought he would never emerge. “But my grandparents grieved too, you know. They had lost their only son and they had loved him. My grandmother used to tell me stories about him when he was a boy. I think it comforted her a little. And me.”
Lady Philippa had lost her father too, he thought. But he could not ask her about that. Or tell her how viciously glad he was that the man was dead.
“Tell me about your family,” he said as she dabbed her lips with her napkin after eating a small sausage roll. “I know very little. You have just the one sister?”
“Stephanie, yes,” she said. “She is six years younger than I am. It is strange how that age gap seems to shrink as we grow older, though. For a long time she was just the child in the house, ofwhom I was largely unaware most of the time, though sometimes she induced me to play with her when there were other activities I would far prefer to have been doing. Now I love being with her, though she has her own life and never clings to any of us. I am not sure if that is a good thing or not. She spends a lot of time at the church—not from an excess of piety but because Sir Ifor Rhys, our neighbor, is the organist there and conducts a few different choirs and Steph loves to sing. Sir Ifor is very talented musically. He is Welsh,” she added, as though that fact explained everything. “She is the sweetest person in the world. But her expectations for her future seem to have been set very low. I wish I could do something about that, but we cannot organize someone else’s life, can we? Sometimes love hurts.”
“Why are they low?” he asked. Though he could guess. The girl was overweight, and while she was not exactly plain, neither was she obviously pretty. She had lovely hair, but she wore it in an unbecoming style. Every day of her life she saw her older sister, who was uncommonly lovely. It must seem very unfair to her. Perhaps itwasunfair. But that was the nature of life.
“She loved our father very dearly,” Lady Philippa told him. “And our older brothers too. Yet they had all left her by the time she was twelve. Ben and Devlin and Nicholas went to war when she was nine, all within a couple of months of one another, and Papa died of a sudden heart seizure three years later. Also, Steph sees herself as less than... lovely. But a mirror is not always the best conveyor of beauty, is it?”
He smiled. She was quite right. But it must not be easy for a girl of fifteen or sixteen to understand that.
“Ben, Devlin, and Nicholas are your brothers?” he asked. “You did tell me a little about Ben on another occasion. BenEllis, that is.”
“And there is Owen too,” she said. “He is the youngest. He isin his first year at Oxford. When he was born, he was intended for a career in the church just as Nicholas was intended for the military. But Owen quickly became the mischief of the family, and Mama and Papa abandoned their plans for him. Now I am not so sure they were right to do so.”
“He may end up in the church after all?” he asked.
“It does seem unlikely,” she said, smiling. “He is still full of fun and energy. For the past year Mama has been in daily expectation that he will be sent down from Oxford over some foolish prank. He is also intelligent and serious about his studies, however. He is a complex character. It is hard to predict what he will make of his life.”
“And Ben?” he asked. “How does he fit in?”
“For a number of years after he grew up he was my father’s steward at Ravenswood,” she said. “He did not have to do it. He was treated just as the rest of us were, as a full member of the family. It was a career entirely of his own choosing. After he returned from the wars with Devlin, he did not resume his duties. He had recently been widowed and brought a young daughter home with him. His mind was set upon making a home and life of his own with her. He is still officially living at Ravenswood, but he does have a new home, Penallen, on the coast not terribly far from Ravenswood. He is having it renovated before he moves there later this year. We will miss both of them dreadfully.”
But perhaps she would not be living at Ravenswood herself by that time, Lucas thought. Surely she would be betrothed before the Season was over and married by the end of the year. She had been besieged tonight.
“Nicholas is still a military officer?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “He is a major in a cavalry regiment. I am worried about him. So are Mama and Stephanie, though we do not talk much about it. It was such ahugerelief last year when we heard thatNapoleon Bonaparte had surrendered and been exiled to the island of Elba. We thought the wars were finally over and the three of them were safe. But now Nicholas isnotsafe. There is almost bound to be war again.”
He might have pointed out to her that there was always war somewhere in the world, and that much of it would inevitably involve England. She would not be consoled. She and her family were never going to be able to relax and stop worrying about the military brother. But they must know that. He reached across the table and set a comforting hand over hers before realizing what he was doing. He gave it a quick squeeze and withdrew his hand.
“The Duke of Wellington is in charge over there,” he said. “He is a brilliant general, though many people here would argue that point, I know. The whole of Britain needs to trust him, however, and the Prussian general Von Blücher too. Though that is easy for me to say, I know. I have no one close to me fighting over there. You have a brother.”
“So do thousands of other women,” she said. “And fathers and sons and husbands.”
“And you have the one other brother,” he said. “Stratton.”
