“It never fails to shock me, somehow, when families are cruel to one another,” Bess said. “You should be able to rely on your family.”
“I never thought I could. But recently, as it happens, I’ve been spending more time with a family member from whom I’ve long been estranged, and…it hasn’t been the punishment I would have assumed.”
“A ringing endorsement.” Bess couldn’t help but be amused. He and Lucy were so alike, at times.
“She is not what I thought,” he said gruffly. “Against all odds and my own stubborn wishes, I like her. And I realized I should not have been blaming her, punishing her, for wrongs that were committed long before she was even born.”
Wrongs like his father daring to marry so far beneath himself, she thought with a pang. But still, her heart lifted at his admission that he had grown fond of Lucy.
“It makes me very glad to hear that. And yet you still find it bewildering, that I should expect a family to care for one another?”
He shrugged and looked away, and Bess felt her heart clench at how solitary he looked.
“When I was a girl,” she said slowly, “my family was taken by illness. All of them at once, in one fell swoop of a tragedy that touched every corner of our little village.”
She’d told him bits of this before—both as herself and as masked Elizabeth. She would need to take care.
Spying a chipped marble bench further up the path, Bess walked over and sat down, spreading out her skirts like the petals of one of the vibrant pink rose campion flowers that were in the process of overrunning every corner. She was in no great hurry to step inside the crowded, rollicking party. It was lovely in this forgotten garden in the moonlight.
Nathaniel followed. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“It was hard,” Bess acknowledged. “But it was a long time ago now.”
“Time doesn’t always make as big a difference as we may hope.”
She dipped her head in agreement. “It’s been a fair few years. The memories are faded, but sweet.”
“Tell me.” He moderated his abrupt demand. “If you wish.”
Bess closed her eyes and let herself remember. “The smell of bread baking in my mother’s kitchen. The flash of my father’s tired smile when he came in for dinner. My grandmother’s finely embroidered flowers, the prettiest to ever grace a handkerchief that was only to be carried for church.”
Grief, her lifelong companion, squeezed at her chest, achingly familiar. “My little sister, Kitty, was a bright, joyous giggle. And the baby, Martin…the softness of a rounded cheek, warm and milky.”
He sat beside her on the bench, his solid thigh a line of reassuring warmth along her own. “Was this the same illness that took the boy you loved? Your first lover?”
Bess nodded. “David Cooper. My Davy. We had such dreams, the two of us, of coming to London and making our way; I’ll always be sorry he didn’t get the chance to try for them. That we didn’t get the chance. And I’ll always feel a responsibility to live my life well, for him. For all of them, that didn’t get to grow up or grow old.”
“That’s why you came to The Nemesis, the first time.”
It wasn’t a question. His voice was sure. But Bess nodded anyway. “I want to live, not merely exist. And it ought to be my life—not a life hemmed in by expectations and lived by another’s leave, at someone else’s whim.”
Bess stopped, startled by the vehemence of her own words. She thought of her conversation with Lucy earlier that day, and vowed silently to sit her down for a long talk about the future, and what Lucy owed to herself as she contemplated what hers might be.
Nathaniel offered her his gloved hand, palm up, and patiently waited for her to take hold of it. So she did, and let herself feel the comfort of it all the way to her bones.
“It was hard to lose my family,” she said, pulling herself back around to the point. “But the hardest part came afterward, when I had to learn how to live without them. Quite literally—everything I thought my life was going to be changed in an instant when I lost them and had to leave my home.”
“You…weren’t able to stay in your home?”
“We didn’t own our home.” She gripped his hand a little tighter, more sharply aware of the gulf between them than she had been in a long time. “My father was a tenant farmer, you see. Working someone else’s land. And when he died, I couldn’t keep it up by myself. I was lucky to have an aunt willing to take me in.”
Beside her, Nathaniel was very still. Bess couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She stared straight ahead at a patch of cheerful poppies and tried not to think about the gulf between a duke and a farmer’s daughter.
To someone who hadn’t lived it, there might not seem much difference between the social standing of a tenant farmer and a cook at an inn. But a tenant farmer was always at the mercy of his landlord, beholden to the whims of a distant, uncaring landowner who might or might not take any interest in the welfare of those who depended on him. The previous Dukes of Havilocke had mainly been interested in how to exploit their tenants to pad their own bank accounts.
But a cook, in her own kitchen? She was independent. The mistress of her own fate, even if it wasn’t the fate she’d dreamed of as a young girl.
Not that a duke would have anything to do with a cook either, in the normal way of things. Particularly this duke, whose worst childhood memories were all bound up in the scandal of his father marrying a servant.
