“Wife, then. He must have loved her when this was painted.”
“Or done the conventional thing.”
Kitty was tilting her head to try to make out the features of the brown-haired woman in the miniature. “It might be of his mother when young. Is there a painting of the dowager here?”
“A family group over here.”
The large painting showed a seated young woman with a boy at her knee and an older man standing behind. Though they were dressed finely, they were presented outdoors, with the park and house behind them. Lady Dauntry was plump and pretty, with dark curls, but not at all like the woman in the miniature. Lord Dauntry had rather heavy features and wore an old-style gray wig.
“They look content,” she said.
“I see them as smug. Prosperous, satisfactorily married, and with a healthy young heir. Within three years,” he added, “the fourth viscount will be dead and she will raise the fifth alone.”
“In the midst of life we are in death,” Kitty murmured, quoting from the funeral service. She turned away from the disturbing painting. “Are there any later pictures of her?”
“One. She keeps it in her boudoir.”
“I assume she’s gray haired by now?”
“Somewhat. She wears ostentatious mourning caps, so it’s hard to tell.”
Kitty looked around at generations of Braydons. “I suppose you’ll have to have your portrait done.”
“And you. We could wait until we have a son and reproduce that one.”
“No.”
“No,” he agreed. “Portraits are odd things, aren’t they? They show sitters like flies in amber, oblivious of the fate stalking them.”
Kitty thought of the painting of Marcus. “Some people lead tranquil lives,” she argued. “Consider Ruth and Andrew. They could be captured in contentment now, and there’s every chance it could happen again in twenty years and then forty.”
“We’ll pray for that.”
“You doubt it?”Has he, too, detected trouble there?
“The future is a mystery to everyone. My father died when a wall fell on him.”
Surprised by a personal revelation, Kitty sat on a cushioned window seat, ready to hear more. “How?”
“Pure ill luck,” he said, strolling to sit beside her. “He was walking along a London street toward his Whitehall office. Some building work was being done, and an old wall crumbled down on top of him. A young lad nearby was killed at the same time.”
“In life we are in death, indeed. A lesson to enjoy the moment we have.”
“I agree. How did your parents die?”
“In a fire. A stove kept the chill off the bookshop in winter, and it somehow set fire to the books. They lived above. The smoke killed them. I was scarcely out of mourning when Marcus died. And now Princess Charlotte. Women do die in childbirth, but it was such a shock. Perhaps because she was a princess?” she asked.
“We believe that royalty are immune to cruel fate?” he asked. “History hardly bears that out.”
“We might at least believe that they receive the best medical attention. Many are blaming her doctors.”
“Perhaps with cause. But I suspect the universal grief is for a belief that innocents are safe. Whereas fate is a malign old crone.”
“Not for us.” She said it in instinctive reaction to his bitter tone. “Many people are fortunate, and we will be of that party.”
“By force of will?”
“If necessary. Consider this—how often have royal women died in childbirth?”
