“At eleven,” Nathaniel said without looking away from his half-sister’s furious glare. “I shall accompany you.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Pickford sounded taken aback. “That’s not necessary, Your Grace.”
“Again,” Nathaniel said softly, turning his gaze upon her. “I wasn’t asking.”
Her lips thinned but she dropped her gaze to the tablecloth. Nathaniel’s stomach felt tight, but he doggedly kept eating.
The dinner devolved from there. Lucy, with some innate understanding of how best to annoy him, talked of nothing but her mother. By the time dessert was served, he had heard more about his father’s mistress-turned-wife than he had since the happy newlyweds packed him off to Eton at age eight.
Determined to regain his equilibrium, Nathaniel bore it as impassively as he could. His mind turned inescapably to one of his earliest memories of his own mother during his daily visit with her in the drawing room.
He had his mother to thank for his odd, indefinite eye color, Nathaniel knew, and that day her gaze had appeared the gray of a summer storm cloud as she regarded him gravely upon the carpet.
Nathaniel had been upset about something, he could no longer recall what, and he’d hoped for a hug and a kiss from Mama, though she was not as soft or as prone to cuddles as his nursemaid, who was perched upon the settee opposite with Nathaniel’s father, ostensibly there to manage any unruly behavior on Nathaniel’s part. Of course Nathaniel always did his best to behave, and not to do anything that would get him sent out of the drawing room before the teatime visit was over.
But that day, he’d been crying. And instead of a kiss, his mother had produced a pristine white handkerchief and told him to stop crying and to wipe his face clean.
When he’d done so, she’d let him come up into her lap as a reward. Leaning close, all her attention on him, she had said quietly, “Try not to feel things so deeply, my love. It can only bring you pain.”
It was sound advice, Nathaniel had always found. He’d forgotten it once or twice as a young man, and always to his detriment. But Lucy’s presence at Ashbourn House—his mother’s home—brought all those early memories, and their attendant feelings, close to the surface. For the first time in years, Nathaniel felt himself at the mercy of his emotions.
He did not care for it.
When Lucy dug her spoon savagely into her tasse à glace of pistachio ice and remarked that Henrietta would have loved to taste it, Nathaniel finally broke.
“Enough,” he snapped. “I see that I shall need to engage a tutor in the fine art of conversation if you are to have any success on the Marriage Mart. No man wants a woman who can talk of nothing but her mother.”
Lucy’s eyes narrowed. “I hate you.”
She threw down her napkin and stalked out of the dining room, leaving Nathaniel to face the narrow-eyed censure of Mrs. Pickford.
“You are fortunate enough to still have a family,” she said in a voice that seethed with emotion. “How can you treat them like this?”
Did that mean she had lost all her family? Nathaniel distracted himself from his inappropriate curiosity about Mrs. Pickford’s circumstances by taking another bite of his ice. “My half-sister has been allowed to run wild. If I don’t take the trouble of correcting her behavior, who will?”
“Lucy is a young girl.” She paused, her gaze fathomless, consuming him. “A young girl who feels lost and alone here, and misses her mother.”
There was nothing she could have said that would have made him feel like more of a villain. He, of all people, knew what it was to be without a mother’s care.
The ice turned to ashes in Nathaniel’s mouth. Swallowing as best he could, Nathaniel took a sip of wine to clear his throat. “You are right. I should not have spoken so.”
He thought her expression softened a bit. A trick of the candlelight, perhaps. “When we took our leave of the dowager duchess at Charlotte Street, before she went home, she told me she understood why it would be so hard for you to see her. She admitted you might have some cause for the grudge you hold against her. But if you could only see that your behavior makes it impossible for Lucy?—”
Nathaniel felt as though his heart had turned to solid rock, caving in the walls of his ribs around it. “I hold no grudge. It would not be ‘hard’ for me to see her. I feel nothing for her, one way or the other.”
“Of course. From time to time, don’t we all threaten to burn down our ancestral homes rather than open them to someone to whom we are perfectly indifferent.”
He stared at her down the length of the table. Apparently unconcerned, she took a serene bite of her ice.
“Perhaps I cannot claim indifference.” He picked up his glass of claret for something to do with his hands. “I’m sure you think I should have allowed Henrietta to accompany her daughter here. But I wonder if you recall, at all, the whirlwind of gossip that attended my father’s decision to marry my nursemaid.”
“Gossip.” She shrugged. “I don’t care much for gossip. And I care even less about gossip that is twenty-odd years out of date.”
He smiled faintly. “Then you are unique. Twenty years is as nothing when it comes to a scandal as titillating as a duke marrying a servant girl less than six months after his duchess’s death. The Ton has a long memory in such cases.”
Mrs. Pickford looked as if she would like to roll her eyes. “I suppose there would have been a few tongues set to wagging if Henrietta had joined her daughter here at Ashbourn House?—”
He couldn’t let that stand. Impatience bit his words off sharply. “Nothing so simple. Or benign.”
