Henry turned and strode to a window and looked out, unseeing.
“The child’s name.”
“Wilhelmina Kirby, my lord.”
Wilhelmina. It would be a mistake to attach any importance to the name, to think it significant that his own name was Henry Charles William Delamere and his first son had also been Henry and his second son was Charles and his first grandchild bore a feminine form of his thirdname. The girl’s name would have been chosen by her mother, not by his son. The name was mere happenstance.
“Her age.”
The sound of papers being shuffled. “Two years, my lord.”
Two years.
“Her mother was my son’s mistress for some time.” Henry spoke the words slowly, as if he were testing the notion by saying it aloud. He had never doubted that his handsome, hale son had known pleasure with women before his death, but perhaps Hal had also known something more, something Henry never had.
“Yes,” Mr. Crompton answered although the earl had asked no question. “Miss Louisa Kirby. You might have heard of her? She was an actress.”
Henry shook his head. He had not been to the theater in the last twenty years. Worse, he had not spoken to Hal in the last four. Neither of his sons had wanted anything to do with him after their mother’s death.
The sun came out from behind a cloud, and a beam struck the window. Henry closed his eyes. The light warmed his face and turned the insides of his eyelids a golden-pink-orange.
“The family of Miss Kirby are making no claims on the child.” He willed it to be true.
“My lord, it is my understanding that Miss Kirby was quite alone in the world.”
Quite alone. Until she and Hal made a child. Who was now quite alone in the world, too.
No, Lord Ashthorpe refused to sit and wait in the visitors’ parlor of the foundling hospital. He would be taken to his granddaughterimmediately. The earl was armed for battle, issuing orders that would brook no delay. He had not been a colonel in the 53rd Regiment of Foot for nothing.
He recognized her before she was pointed out to him. She stood in a corner of the nursery, her thumb in her mouth, watching the other children. Her brown hair and eyes must have come from her mother since the Delameres were all fair-haired and blue-eyed going back several centuries, but the dimple in her chin, the set of her ears, the broad span of her forehead were pure Hal, his beautiful boy turned dead man, rotting away in the Delamere mausoleum.
The director of the hospital said something, and one of the nurses went and took the girl by the hand and led her to Henry.
The nurse curtsied. “My lord.”
A pair of nut-brown eyes stared up at him. A pair of round cheeks sucked away at her thumb. A shiny upper lip indicated a cold or recent tears.
“Good afternoon, Wilhelmina,” Henry said.
Head tilted back, she stared, she sucked.
He stared back.
They were at a nonplus.
God almighty, this won’t do.He descended into a crouch, his knees creaking. When his face came even with hers, he said, “I am your grandfather.”
The brown eyes blinked.
“Your father’s father.”
The cheeks sucked.
“Will you not greet me, Wilhelmina?”
The thumb came out of her mouth. “Mina,” she said. The thumb returned to her mouth.
She had spoken to him, given him her name. It was a minor victory, but one deserving of fanfare and parades, so great was his relief.
