Primrose paused, meeting her stare in the looking glass. “He seems an honorable man. Belowstairs, they’ve nothing but good to say. His Grace looks after his people well, including his tenants. They tell me he is fair and considerate. When the old cook was no longer able to do her duty on account of her gouty foot, the duke provided her a cottage and a generous retirement.”
“How kind of him.”
A troubling thought occurred to her. If she had spent the last five years believing the worst of the Duke of Northwich, and if none of that had been true, then she had maligned him greatly. She had denied his suit, had thrown him over for George, had married before his return from America, and had believed him capable of terrible deeds.
Deeds which, in truth, had been committed by the very man who had persuaded her that Northwich was a scoundrel and a villain. What a fool she had been, to believe in the integrity of George Shaw. To believe his words of love, his ardent courtship. He had never loved her.
“My felicitations to you on your marriage, madam,” Primrose said, replacing the brush on her toilette and moving to place the Morgan sapphires in their cases.
“Thank you.” She was uncomfortable with the congratulations, partially because of the unseemly haste with which her second marriage had occurred, and partially because she did not feel particularly certain about it herself.
When she had married George, she had been thrilled.Stupid girl.
But she must cease comparing this marriage to her last, for the two could not be more different. And nor, it increasingly seamed, could be the men themselves.
“Miss Charlotte seems quite happy here,” Primrose ventured.
“Yes, she does.” Pippa’s smile was not forced as she thought of her daughter’s unabashed joy throughout the day.
From the moment they had arrived at the train station, until she had been squired off to the nursery, there had been a wideness in Char-char’s eyes and a bounce in her step. Everything had been an adventure. Pippa’s darling girl had marveled over the impressive architecture of the St. Pancras station. She had been astounded by the movement of the train, the sights passing beyond their window. The countryside and its abundance of grass had pleased her immensely, as had all the birds.
“Wisten, Mama!” she had exclaimed. “Pretty songs!”
Pretty songs indeed. After spending so much time in London, even Pippa had noticed the astonishing quiet of the park. No carriages rumbling, no drivers calling, no clatter of tack and horse’s hooves. Neither omnibus nor train. There was nothing but the softly swaying fauna in the breeze, and the calling of birds overhead.
“Will you be needing me for anything else this evening?” Primrose asked.
“No,” she said, staring at her reflection in the looking glass, seeing a stranger staring back at her.
Who am I?
Who have I become?
More importantly, who was I, once? Before George.
“That will be all, thank you,” she added to her lady’s maid.
Primrose quietly took her leave for the night. Pippa was alone with the silence, in the immensity of the chamber.
A wife once more.
There was a knock at the door joining her chamber to Northwich’s. The sound startled her out of her reveries. Sent something skittering down her spine. Not unease, precisely. But she could not quite be certain what.
“Come,” she called just the same.
The door opened to reveal the man she had married that morning.
The man who had once kissed her so sweetly beneath the Oxfordshire stars.
The man who had spun stories about a Wish Fairy to her daughter. Who had fretted over feeding her on the train ride and fussed over Charlotte after their arrival.
She did not know what to make of this man.
She rose to her feet, gathering her dressing gown about her as if it were armor she might use to gird herself against the effect he had upon her. But part of her understood that no armor would be enough. He would pierce it every time.
“Hullo, Pippa.” He sent her a small, almost shy smile, hovering in the doorway, casting a tall shadow over the thick carpets.
The lights behind him in the shared dressing area between their bedrooms blazed. Her lamps were low in comparison. He was wearing a dressing gown of his own, looking relaxed and handsome and so veryintimate, standing there in his bare feet.
