“Good heavens,” said the dowager duchess in a voice still thick with slumber. “Bess! And dear Nathaniel, too!”
“Oh Henrietta,” Bess cried, holding her hands out beseechingly. “I have something terrible to tell you. Oh God. Perhaps I ought not come straight out with it. I don’t want the shock to overburden your nerves!”
Henrietta was sensitive; she’d come to Little Kissington last year deeply mired in a grief it had taken months to emerge from. What was Bess thinking, dumping this news on her in the middle of the night, without Gemma there to provide support?
Panicking, Bess turned to see what Nathaniel thought, cursing herself for not having spent the past hours of their desperate flight across the downs in preparation for this moment.
When she caught sight of him, though, his face was set in marble. Carved and cold and utterly unreadable.
Belatedly, Bess realized that this was quite a fraught meeting for him. Henrietta was the woman he blamed for seducing his father and sending him away to boarding school. The woman he’d said would never set foot in his home again—that he’d rather burn the place down, in fact, than see her in it.
How would he behave toward Henrietta now?
But instead of standing in stiff silence or freezing Henrietta with open contempt, Nathaniel said, “Perhaps we ought to sit down, Your Grace.”
The distant formality made Bess wince a little, but the consideration was genuine and brought a lump of gratitude to Bess’s throat.
Opening the door wider, Henrietta said, “You poor things, you look positively done in. What time is it?”
Henrietta blinked her blue eyes, so wide and dark, the same blue as her daughters’ though somehow far more guileless, and Bess stepped forward to take the older woman in her arms.
She clutched Henrietta’s soft shoulders, crushing the ruffles of her wrapper with the vehemence of her embrace. The rows of lace that edged Henrietta’s sleeping bonnet tickled Bess’s ear.
Henrietta had been so kind to Bess, and after this, she never would be again. Bess’s throat closed over, it was too awful, but she had to get the words out.
Before she could manage to croak out the horrible truth, however, Henrietta said, “Is this about Lucy? Because I’m sure she’ll be asleep by now, tired as we all are after yesterday’s excitement, but if you’d like to wake the little scamp and see for yourselves that she’s all right, I certainly understand and have no objections at all. What a trial that girl can be, I am sure!”
Bess staggered back from Henrietta’s concerned face and would have fallen, if not for Nathaniel’s strong arms coming around her and holding her up.
“Lucy is here? She’s all right?” Nathaniel confirmed.
Henrietta blinked. “Why, yes, dear, of course.”
Bess burst into tears.
Chapter Twenty-Three
More tears. Nathaniel was in torment.
But the relief of knowing his youngest sister was safe and well and sleeping across the hall outweighed everything else.
Well. Everything except the absolute imperative of taking Bess into his arms and holding her close while she cried out the overwhelming emotions of the past hours into the front of his white shirt. He tried not to mind the knowing look in Henrietta’s eyes as she observed their embrace.
When the storm of Bess’s tears had passed, after much fluttering from Henrietta and ringing for tea, and remembering that there was no servant here to bring her tea in the middle of the night, they did in fact all troop across the hall together to roust Lucy out of bed and shout at her.
Or at least, that was what Nathaniel wished to do. There were a lot of feelings he’d like to release, and if he couldn’t knock down a bareknuckle boxer at his fight club, he could at least do some very loud talking.
But then, Lucy popped up in bed, startled to be suddenly surrounded by her mother chattering away, Bess still sniffling, and Nathaniel glowering down at her, and promptly burst into tears herself.
At which point, Bess threw her arms around Lucy and began to sob on her shoulder, and Henrietta sat on the bed to embrace them both.
When the dowager duchess began to look distinctly red about the eyes and nose as well, Nathaniel had had enough.
He took himself downstairs to the taproom and rooted around behind the bar until he came up with a half-hidden bottle of French cognac and a clean glass.
Leaning against the smooth, polished wood of the bar, he sloshed a healthy amount of brandy into the glass and took a sip. The liquid was silky on his tongue, full and round with the flavors of caramelized peaches and cinnamon. Nathaniel rested his elbow on the bar and tilted the glass to study the contents.
The brandy looked dark in the dim light of the public taproom, but he knew it was the exact color of Bess’s pretty brown eyes, shot through with amber and gold, warm and sweet.
