“Of course. That will be all for now.” She rose and dipped into a formal curtsy as if he had not just shagged her silly hours before and torn her nightdress into shreds. “Will I see you at dinner?”
No, he wanted to say, for it would be far safer to keep his distance.
He stood and offered her a cursory bow in return. “Yes.”
Sin opened thedoor to the large, private apartments where his mother lived and stepped over the threshold, closing the door hastily at his back. There was a large sitting room, where she almost never sat any longer, and an adjoining bed chamber overlooking the small gardens where she had once tended roses. These days, she was often in her bed.
A quiet, withered shell of her former self.
The nursemaid was seated in his mother’s favorite chair, working on a piece of needlework. She stood at his entrance.
“My lord,” said Miss Wright, dropping into a passable curtsy. “I was not expecting you to visit today, so soon after your nuptials.”
“I wish to see my mother,” he said coolly.
His dislike for Miss Wright was palpable, crawling up his throat, clenching his gut. Already, he had begun undertaking the task of finding a more suitable replacement. She was tall and broad, but spare of form, rather like a wizened oak. And although she was calm and composed in his presence, he had seen bruising in the shape of fingerprints on his mother’s wrists not long ago that had sent him into a fury. He had warned her.
Miss Wright had claimed she knew nothing of the bruising, that perhaps his mother had gotten them during one of her nighttime wanderings. She had suggested he install a lock on the inside of his mother’s apartments so that she could not leave without the key. But he had balked at locking his mother inside her apartments like an animal in a menagerie.
“Of course, my lord,” Miss Wright said. “She was just napping now. I gave her a touch of laudanum to calm her about an hour or so ago. She was in another one of her fits.”
He searched the nursemaid’s eyes, wondering if she had tippled from the laudanum herself as well. He had no proof that she was consuming his mother’s laudanum aside from the rapidity with which it disappeared, according to his ledgers, and the alacrity with which Mama found her way out of the apartments in the evenings.
“I will not wake her if she is asleep,” he said. “Thank you.”
Miss Wright inclined her head and dipped into another curtsy, this one more abbreviated than the last. He stalked past her, for the first time in a year or more noting the disparity between his mother’s apartments and the rest of his home. Toward the end, he had forbidden Celeste from visiting Mama for more than one reason. Her blatant thievery had been chief amongst them. His mother’s apartments were cheerful and decorated with the pastoral landscapes she preferred, along with many pictures of the Shropshire countryside, the place she had spent much of her girlhood.
Everything that would comfort her.
Nothing that would further upset her.
Anything for his mother.
He opened the door to her chamber and found her sitting up in bed, propped against pillows, her snow-white hair unbound and wild around her face. Her sky-blue eyes seemed far away at first as she took him in. But then she held out her hands.
“Ferdy, my love, is that you?” she asked, sounding confused.
His heart broke as he stepped forward and took his mother’s hands, seating himself in the chair alongside her bed. He had learned long ago not to correct her unless it was an absolute necessity. She grew confused and disconsolate when anyone tried to separate the past from the present. Sin no longer existed to his mother on most days, and it was something he had been forced to accept.
“How are you, my dear?” he asked instead of answering her question.
Pretending to be the German archduke who had most likely sired him gave Sin no pleasure at all. But for Mama, he would do it if he must.
“I am well, Ferdy,” she said, sounding like a breathless girl in spite of her advanced years and the toll her illness had taken upon her. “I do so miss dancing with you. What was it we danced that night?”
“The mazurka?” he guessed, for it was a dance she had oft mentioned.
“Oh yes.” Her gnarled fingers tightened upon his, and a beautiful smile lit her face. “The mazurka! How could I forget? I dare say my feet scarcely even touched the floor. I have never felt as at home as I have felt in your arms, Ferdy.”
Sin swallowed against a rush of pain that his mother more often than not no longer recognized him, not even on her good days. Instead, she mistook him for a former paramour.
“How is Miss Wright treating you?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Not well,” his mother pronounced grimly. “I hope her cunny falls off.”
Sin battled his shock. His mother had always been a quiet and polite woman. One of the first signs of her ailment had arrived in her inability to control her tongue. Suddenly, she had been cursing and muttering oaths at dowagers and spouting all manner of vulgarities, without qualms.
“What has she done?” he pressed. “Has she hurt you in any way? Has she handled you in a rough manner?”
