Chapter 1 #2
“No. No, I won’t. I’m going to let Thomas do it.” Harry opened her eyes. “He agreed. So if the child is a badly behaved scamp, it will be all down to him. I can’t be blamed.”
Thomas as a disciplinarian? Given the adoration Catherine had already seen the earl lavishing on his wife, this roost was going to be ruled by a much-indulged baby.
“I expect you will have to resort to a fearsome nurse or governess then, or your child will never learn the true consequences of mischief.” Catherine leaned forward. “May I touch?”
“Yes.”
Catherine ran her hand over Harry’s protuberance. “You’re so large. And the doctor doesn’t think it’s twins?”
“Alasdair says even though I stick out very far, he’s fairly sure it’s only one child. And Thomas was told he was an enormous baby, so . . .” Harry shrugged.
“I’m glad you’ve let me come to be with you, at the end. I didn’t want to miss it. I want to be with all my daughters when they have their babies.”
Harry lurched out of her slouch to grab Catherine’s hand. “I didn’t come to be with you when you were having Sebastian. I came later.”
“No, but that’s all right,” Catherine said soothingly. “Mothers are meant to be with their daughters, not the other way round.” She laughed. “I wouldn’t have wanted to put you off having babies with all my moans.”
Harry let go of her hand, relaxed back. “I’m not fond of carrying the baby, it’s true. But I would never tell Thomas that.” A sly look stole over her face. “I did like making the baby, though.”
Catherine spoke quickly. “That’s natural, but—”
“Don’t worry, I don’t go around announcing it to all and sundry. I do have more sense these days, and I know people don’t speak of such things.” Harry grazed her belly with her fingertips. “Before I got married, I told you I would never like fornication. I wanted you to know I changed my mind.”
“Well, since you very rarely do things you don’t like and are now heavy with child, I had already deduced you had changed your mind. I’m capable of puzzling a few things out on my own, you know.”
Harry assessed Catherine for a moment before her eyes wandered away. “Yes, you’re quite clever despite not liking mathematics.”
“There are many ways to be clever, Harry.”
“Yes.” A pause. “Thomas is clever about me.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“I’m a good deal less clever about him.” Harry shrugged once more. “As you’ve seen. But he forgives me.”
“You were clever enough to know you two would suit when I thought you wouldn’t.”
“Yes. You were wrong about me and Tommy.”
“Yes, I was. And I’m so happy I was.”
Something suddenly seemed to occur to Harry, and she narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t bring Sebastian with you.”
“No. Because of Arabella and Jamie’s sisters! They adore Sebastian and playing with him and carrying him about and barely let the nurses do anything. They pleaded with us to leave him. So with all of them and the nurses, I have no worries.”
Catherine also hadn’t wanted her attention divided between Sebastian and Harry. And if something heartbreaking happened during the birth, having a baby in the house would only make any loss even more terrible.
“Now, tell me. Do you hope for a girl or a boy?”
“Tommy says he doesn’t care. But I want a boy. It’s horrible to be a girl.” Harry must have seen something in Catherine’s face. “You know what I mean. It’s a man’s world.”
Yes, Catherine knew.
“And if the baby is a girl?” she asked softly.
“I’ll do for her what you did for me. Fight for her. Help her make the best of it. Like all Lovelock women do.”
Catherine squeezed Harry’s hand and quickly released it.
Harry shifted her weight. “And her father will spoil her to no end.”
“I have no doubt. And what are the names you have been thinking of for the baby?”
“Richard, if it’s a boy, of course—”
Catherine had no idea why a baby boy was, of course, to be named Richard, but she was sure it was due to some peculiar logic of Harry’s.
“—and Tommy wants— Well, he thinks if it’s a girl, the name should be . . .”
“Yes?”
“Elizabeth.”
For a moment, Catherine was just as lost and befuddled as if Harry had tried to explain modular arithmetic to her for the hundredth time. Then it came to her why her stepdaughter had been hesitating.
Harry was trying to protect Catherine’s feelings. How far her insensitive genius had come.
“Elizabeth is a beautiful name,” Catherine said.
Harry darted a look at her and then, just as quickly, looked away again. “His mother’s name. And it was my mother’s name.”
“Yes.”
“I remember her but not much. So when I think of mothers and mothering, I think of you.”
Catherine bit her tongue and held still. Her impulse was to embrace Harry, but so many of her impulses with Harry were wrong.
Harry went on, “I don’t think I’ll be as thorough a mother as you were to me, but I’ll try.”
“You’ll be your own kind of mother. ”
“Yes,” Harry said and shuddered. She clenched her jaw and closed her eyes once more, putting an end to their discussion of motherhood.
Catherine couldn’t help but feel Harry was utterly terrified of what lay on the other side of childbirth.
Harry was pleased by the relaxed set of Thomas’ shoulders when he returned from his ride with James.
And, yes, he still fussed over her at dinner, making sure she got all the best bits of the joint and the biggest portion of the pudding, but some of his attention was also on James and Catherine.
He laughed at James’ stories and told one or two of his own.
In the drawing room after dinner, his cheeks were flushed pink from the merriment and the wine.
Company at Sommerleigh was good for Thomas.
At dawn, she put on a wrapper and waddled to his bedchamber and roused him.
“No.” She cut him off before he could ask the inevitable. “No. Nothing’s amiss. The baby is not coming. I want you up and on Octavius before breakfast. We’ve both let our normal lives be overcome by sloth.”
He blinked and sat up, the counterpane puddling around his waist. “You’re shivering, Harry.”
“It’s cold.”
He patted the mattress next to him. “Come into the bed where it’s warm.”
“My lord,” she said warningly.
“Get under the covers with me for just a few minutes,” he coaxed. “Then I’ll get up and go for a ride. I give you my word.”
He held out his hand to her, and weak woman that she was, she found a way into the bed and under the coverings and into his arms.
She fell asleep as soon as she stopped shivering. How could she not? There was no intoxicant as potent as the combination of her husband’s heated skin and a nest of blankets and sheets and pillows, full of his scent.
But her bedwarmer was gone when she woke for a second time that morning. Good. He had done as he had promised.
She heaved herself out of his bed and went back to her own bedchamber where her lady’s maid Smythe was waiting to dress her for the day.
“Did you rest well last night, my lady?”
Even though the question was worded in a completely innocent manner and Smythe’s expression was as prim as ever, Harry was provoked. She was so tired of being pregnant, of having this lump between her and her work, between her and her husband.
“Don’t give me that knowing look, Smythe. I’m far too big to be up to anything indelicate. I just went to wake the earl, and he tricked me into going back to sleep.”
An unruffled Smythe curtsied, long inured to Harry’s fits of pique. “Yes, my lady. And will you be wearing the blue woolen dress with the black velvet ribbon trim today? And your gray shawl?”
“Whatever you think best,” Harry grumbled.
After some frustrating and fruitless work in the library, she broke with her habit of breakfasting alone and ate with Catherine and James.
The two of them had an ease together that eased her own mind, and before she knew it, she had eaten two extra pieces of toast, both slathered in unholy amounts of butter and marmalade.
As she stuffed herself, she watched her stepmother laugh and talk with her husband at the table. Catherine seemed younger, somehow. She had a gaiety about her now that had never been present before, even when Harry’s father had still lived.
What trouble Harry had caused her stepmother.
What an onus it must have been for Mama Katie to join their family and take over the mothering of two little girls.
Well, Harry’s older sister—the patient, equable, accommodating Mary—wouldn’t have been a bother, but she was sure she, Harry, had been extremely bothersome.
An unshaven Thomas came in partway through the meal, looking invigorated and smelling of cold and the out-of-doors. He filled his plate, and before he sat, he briefly pressed his cheek to hers. He knew how much she liked the prickle of his morning whiskers.
“What plans for today?” James asked when Thomas had slaked the first bit of his hunger with two slices of ham and three eggs.
“Plans?” Thomas looked up. “I—”
“No sitting around waiting for the baby. A watched pot never boils. Some savage colonist with spectacles once said that.” Catherine laughed.
“They call themselves Americans now, chuck,” James said, also laughing.
“I’m going to work in the library,” Harry announced. She was far more likely to fall asleep after this huge meal than to delve into the vexatious conjecture, but Thomas didn’t need to know that.
“It’s a fine day, so after I clean up, I suppose I could take you on a walk over the grounds?” Thomas directed this to James and Catherine.
“I’ll stay with Harry,” Catherine said firmly.
The creases went out of Thomas’ forehead with that. Yes, it was good Catherine and James were here. James to distract Thomas, and Catherine to watch over Harry so Thomas didn’t worry.
The two of them being here, it was entirely for Thomas. Harry didn’t need anybody around for something as trifling as giving birth—it was the bit afterwards that would have Harry up against it—but she must make allowances for her husband’s needs.
An hour later, Harry had given up pretending to work, and she and Catherine were on sofas in the library, Harry sprawled inelegantly on the softer one and Catherine in a far more ladylike posture on the newer one.
“I’m sorry I’m not energetic enough for a tramp about the gardens,” Harry offered, not sorry in the least but knowing it was a polite thing to say.
“You needn’t entertain me. I should be entertaining you. Shall I tell you all the news?”
“Yes,” Harry said and closed her eyes. “Start with my baby brother.”
“Sebastian is so plump now, you wouldn’t believe it.
And he’s always babbling and smiling. He has Jamie’s sweet temperament, and his blue eyes have just gone gray like Jamie’s, which delights me to no end.
And I think he is about to start crawling.
He’s already pulling himself around the nursery floor on his stomach. ”
“Tell him he must learn to crawl. He’ll be an uncle soon and will be tasked with showing how it’s done. Now, Arabella.”
“She made quite a fuss when she heard we were planning to come to Sommerleigh for your confinement, said she wanted to come, too. But I persuaded her it just wouldn’t be the thing and she should stay in Middlewich.”
“She and the Cavendish bevy are not in London for the Season, going to balls?”
“Lady Anne is in town with a chaperone, but everyone else is at the castle because there are no balls, just now. The Season has been delayed.”
“Why is that?” Harry asked, not really caring.
“Harry.” It was an admonition, but a teasing one. “Surely, you’re not so buried in your numbers you didn’t hear the king died in January?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“But there will be some social events next month. Lady Huxley must have her ball, no matter who has died.”
“Ah.”
“Remember? Her ball is where we both met our husbands.”
Harry made a vague noise of agreement.
“And where Mary received her proposal from David. Yes, Lady Huxley’s balls have brought our family a great deal of marital felicity. I would say I hope Arabella might meet her future husband there, but . . .”
Harry cracked an eye open. “But?”
“She has been a great deal less interested in meeting young men since Jamie and I married. Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t someone to whom she has already formed an attachment?”
Was Catherine fishing for something? Harry considered voicing her suspicions about Arabella but decided it wasn’t her secret to tell. She let her eyelid fall shut again.
Catherine went on talking. Her voice was sweet and smooth.
She said more things about Middlewich. Sebastian.
Jamie’s sisters. Her worries about finding matches for all of them, despite their large dowries, and how Lady Anne said she was too old for Seasons now and needed to settle to finding something else to occupy her life since she would have no husband or children.
A slow, viscous flow of information that coated Harry’s mind but did not penetrate. These things had nothing to do with her. She would have been able to drift off now, afloat on the ooze of Catherine’s honeyed monologue, if only she hadn’t eaten such a big breakfast. It had given her dreadful wind.
Then Harry heard something that did have something to do with her, and she opened her eyes.
“Great-Aunt Lucy?” she interrupted. Rudeness was mandated in this case.
Catherine twisted her hands in her lap. “Yes, in the last several months, she’s been writing about wanting to visit Middlewich, wanting to make amends. I can only assume it’s because of the title.”
Harry grimaced. A terrible gas twinge. Great-Aunt Lucy. And she was confused. Three very bad things.
“Title?”
She had the title ready, had dreamed it up years ago. Simple, straightforward. A Compleat Proof of Fermat’s Conjecture As Formulated by Miss Harriet Lovelock. No. She must change that last bit. It should be Harriet Drake. Or maybe H.L. Drake. Or the Countess Drake.
Blast. But she could decide on which name to use once she was less woolly-headed and her belly had stopped cramping in pain.
Cramping in pain.
“Jamie’s title,” Catherine said. “Suddenly, I’m acceptable as a duchess when I never was before as her nephew’s wife, and when I think of what that woman put me—”
Harriet clawed at the upholstery of the sofa. “Mama Katie?” But her voice was weak and quavering.
“—never let her around any of you—”
Catherine’s brow was fierce, and she was practically baring her teeth. Vixen guarding her litter.
Harry tried again, louder.
“Mama Katie, I think you had better fetch Tommy and send for Dr. Andrews. In that order.” Harry winced. “Or we’ll never hear the end of it.”