And just like that, in the way of children, he was asleep.
Anne sat beside him until Davy and Alexander came tiptoeing in a while later.
One day soon David was going to think of the questions he had not asked tonight, and she was going to have to give him answers. She was going to have to tell him about Albert Moore. His father.
She shivered.
Glenys, sniffling just as if they had been mistress and maid for years, had insisted upon doing her packing for her. There was nothing to do now, then, except go downstairs to the drawing room to be sociable for an hour or two. And sociable she must be. No one must suspect that the visit to Ty Gwyn had been anything more than a pleasant afternoon’s outing.
But just so many hours ago—she counted them off on her fingers—she had lain with Sydnam Butler and it had been good. Sheknewit had been good. Perhaps if it could just have happened again her body would have known that as well as her mind.
She ached with a sudden longing to have it happen again.
Was she quite, quite mad to have refused his offer of marriage?
But how could she have said yes? What did she have to offer him?
And what did he have to offer her but a dutiful willingness to take the consequences of what they had done?
If you wish, Anne, we will marry.
“This really must be one of the loveliest places on earth,” theDuchess of Bewcastle said with a contented sigh, tipping her head sideways to rest on her husband’s shoulder. “You were quite right about that, Wulfric. The sight of the moon on the water like this makes me almost weep with awe.”
“It is to be hoped, my love,” his grace said dryly, “that you will resist the urge. I have already got my boots wet this month, not to mention my unmentionables. I was hoping to save my neckcloth from a similar fate.”
She laughed and he tightened his arm about her shoulders.
They were walking along the beach close to the water’s edge as they sometimes did late at night after James had been fed and everyone else had retired and they might be assured of some private time for themselves.
“Nevertheless, I will be quite happy to return to Lindsey Hall,” she said.
“Will you?” he asked.
“It is home,” she said with a sigh. “I will be glad to go home.”
“Will you?” he said again, and he paused for a few moments in order to kiss her with unhurried thoroughness.
“Will you sell the white house to Mr. Butler?” she asked him as they walked on.
“It is not really a white house, my love,” he said. “I ought to have taken you over there and shown it to you.”
“But that is what its name means in Welsh,” she said. “Willyou sell it?”
“My grandfather bought it as a young man,” he told her. “Apparently the rumor was soon making the rounds of fashionable drawing rooms that he was housing his mistress there, but it turned out—though not before my grandmother had blackened both eyes of the man who was foolish enough to drop a malicious word of warning in her ear—that it was her particular friend, a severely battered wife, who had taken sanctuary there. My grandfather killed the husband when challenged to a duel over the matter—an incident that was quite efficiently hushed up, by the way, as such matters usually were in those days. He was a colorful man, my grandfather—and my grandmother no less so. The Bedwyn men, of course, never ever employ mistresses after they are married.”
The duchess laughed softly. “I daresay,” she said, “they gave it up as a hazardous practice after a few of them acquired wives like your grandmother.”
The duke uttered one of his rare barks of laughter.
“I suppose I will sell Ty Gwyn to Sydnam,” he said after they had strolled in silence for a few minutes. “In fact, I undoubtedly will, since I know it will be passing into very good hands. But I am not expected to give in too easily on such matters, you know. I will tell him before we leave here.”
“I have been so very disappointed,” she said, “that nothing seems to have developed between him and Miss Jewell after all our efforts. I was convinced that they were made for each other. We all were.”
“I shudder,” he said, “at the realization that a whole generation of Bedwyns and their spouses have descended to the ignoble sport of matchmaking. It is enough to make me seriously wonder where I went wrong with them. They even appear to hold the extraordinary conviction that they had a hand in bringing us together, Christine.”
“He needs someone,” she said as if she had not heard him, “and so does she. And whenever I have seen them together, they have always looked right. Has it struck you, Wulfric, that she might have been the Marchioness of Hallmere if Joshua’s cousin had married her, and that Joshua might have been plain Mr. Moore?”
“I do not imagine,” he said dryly, “that Freyja would have liked being plain Mrs. Moore.”
