Chapter 8
Adam’s mother didn’t usually follow him home.
She had her own abode, a beautiful house that he had bought for her in one of the most sought-after squares. He had, over the years, lived in a way which would not make it conducive to have one’s own mother live with him.
He was a bachelor, after all, and even though he was no longer on the wild path of debauchery, he still liked to have his space.
He did allow his younger brother, Philip, to live with him, as he was out on the town and needed a steadying male hand.
Their mother visited daily. They often dined together and discussed the state of the world and which artists and scholars to patronize.
His mother was a wonderful woman, but he didn’t need her always about, especially with his desire to find a way to bring Miss Allen…
No, he would not think it. Not at present. Not with his mother staring up at him. Her burgundy gold-embroidered cloak was still over her elaborate coiffure and wrapped about her shoulders, for she had stormed past his butler and shoved her way into his study.
“What are you doing?” she demanded as she yanked her gloves off, looking like she wished to slap something with them. “And pour me a drink.”
“Happily, Mama. It will steady your nerves.”
She snorted. “My nerves have been and always will be perfectly steady, my boy, no matter how hard you and your brother might try to send them amok.”
Lips twitching with a dose of amusement and affection for the fierce woman who had raised him, Adam crossed to the sideboard with the silver grog tray upon it and poured her out not a sherry, but a good stiff brandy.
His mother was made for sterner things.
She had seen enough over her lifetime to warrant that beverage rather than a thimble full of syrup.
He poured himself out a glass too and turned to face her.
“What is it?” he asked, though he knew all too well.
“You did not ask Lady Hortense to dance twice,” she stated. “Does that mean you do not like her?”
He tsked. “You don’t want me to like her. Remember?”
She tugged at the ribbon of her cloak, swept it off her shoulders, and tossed it onto a gilt-edged chair, then seized her glass from him and tossed the entire contents back in one go.
“Again,” she declared, handing the glass back to him. Her jeweled fingers glimmered in the firelight.
“Oh dear, Mama,” he said. “Do you require Bacchus’s assistance so entirely this night?”
“After that debacle?” she drawled. “Most definitely.”
He couldn’t argue. He knew in her eyes it was indeed a debacle. Even perhaps by his own usual standard, it was a debacle. “Fine then,” he said, pouring out another drink, the crystal drinkware clinking against each other as the amber liquid filled the glass.
“I am sorry that I have put you in such a terrible state.”
She squared off with him in the firelight, not with rage but surprisingly calm intensity.
“It is one thing, my dear, to see one’s entire work of the last year and careful conversations with another family thrown away, all because one’s son decides to act like an impulsive idiot.
It is another thing entirely when one’s son is not and has never given signs of idiocy before. ”
He took a drink of his own brandy, allowing the soft burn and flavor of oak and cherries to fill his mouth.
He cocked his head to the side. “Perhaps I am succumbing.”
She gave him an unyielding look as she swirled her beverage around the bowl of the glass. “No, Adam. You are not. You will go and you will visit Lady Hortense in the morning, and you will let the young lady know that she’s still very much in the running to become your bride.
“Her mother is likely eating her own feather pillow this night in a fit of fury. Language for marriage contracts was already being considered by our solicitors. Thank God, we did not send them or this might be considered breach…”
“I don’t know that I will visit her,” he said. “I felt nothing when I danced with her.”
His mother shook her head. “Wonderful. That is the point.”
“Yes, Mama, but…”
The words wouldn’t pass his lips.
“But what?” she challenged.
Instead, he chose other more suitable words, words he knew she would still hate. So, he turned to the green marble mantel of his fireplace and looked up at the painting of Athens that hung above his fire. “You are going to invite Miss Agatha Allen and her mother to visit.”
“You can’t be serious,” she returned carefully.
He looked back over his shoulder. “I am very serious, Mama.”
“She won’t do for a wife, and everyone will assume that you are considering her if I invite her and her mother to tea.”
“Perhaps I am considering it.”
His mother’s face drained of color, almost as if he had told her someone had died. “Do you know anything about that family?”
“Of course I know about that family.”
What was there to know? Truly? Except for the fact that they weren’t particularly important. She would bring nothing of import to the marriage. Except herself.
The Allens were very, very far beneath his family, but maybe that was just what he needed. Maybe he desperately wanted something that was far away from him, even though he had been educated his entire life to want someone from another family like his own.
His mother drew herself up, took a deep drink, then said, “I will, of course, do as you ask, but this is absurd. Lady Larkin’s daughter is the one for you. I have spent the whole year going through families. She is the most advantageous and the one who will make you happy, my dear.”
A groan tore from his lips. “How is it possible that someone I won’t like will make me happy?”
His mother let out an exasperated sound.
“She will give you no trouble. She will do her job.” His mother hesitated, eyed her brandy, then the window and said, her voice low, “If you are acting on passion, just find a way to have the girl and be done. Get her married quickly and make her your mistress.”
He whipped away from the fire, indignant, though he knew he was foolish to be so. “Mama, did you truly just say that?”
She shook her head, refusing to be shamed. “Don’t you play naive with me, my boy. You know how things are done in the ton. Find her a husband quickly and then make her yours, if that’s what you want, but she can’t be the Duchess of Westfort.”
“What if I told you that I could never use her thus?”
But the truth? The real truth? He knew Agatha would say no. And her father? Though he hadn’t met him? Given how irregular Agatha was, he rather suspected her father would kill him on the spot. No duel. Possibly a poker. And if he was honest, he wouldn’t be able to blame the man.
Agatha wanted love. She’d never agree to a marriage of convenience in order to be some man’s mistress.
“Then you are indeed an idiot, my darling,” his mother said. “Because you are chancing misery for the rest of your life.”
She gestured with her elegant hands, somehow ensuring the remaining brandy stayed in its glass. “She doesn’t belong here. She’s too…free to be a duchess.”
And then he realized something. His mother liked Agatha. No… She envied her.
All her life, she’d done her duty, and she’d never had the freedom that a young lady like Agatha had. To marry as she pleased.
“I essentially told her that,” he confessed.
She jerked her chin back, stunned. “I beg your pardon?”
“I told her that I didn’t think she’d be very happy as a duchess and that she shouldn’t want to consider being my wife.”
“And yet you are asking me to invite her to tea,” his mother mused, clearly working through her confusion. “Was she so enamored of the idea of a coronet?”
“Mama,” he said, “I don’t think she could give two figs for a coronet.”
“Then why are we even discussing this?”
He hesitated, feeling foolish. “Because she gives two figs for me.”
His mother stared at him for a very long time. “You danced with her once.”
He said nothing.
“Oh, dear God, you didn’t just dance with her once. You have met her before.” His mother’s eyes flared with horror. “Worse, you met her somehow in private.”
He swallowed, unable to deny it. But he didn’t want to affirm it because he could see how it upset his mother, and he understood why.
Especially now. Gentlemen were generally dissuaded from talking with young ladies without chaperones, because if they did, they might actually get to know the person, and getting to know one’s future spouse could, it seemed, be a dangerous business.
“Please don’t do this, my darling,” she urged, taking a step towards him. “You are setting yourself up for a world of pain, and her too. Let her marry some low-level little knight somewhere. She will be happy in the country chasing children and dogs.”
His mother paused, then said gently, “That’s all they care about.”
Children and dogs.
He contemplated his brandy and the fire and thought that sounded rather lovely. What would life be like in a house with six bedrooms filled to the brim with children of varying ages, and dogs barking and yapping and romping through the forest and mud and fields with the children in tow?
It sounded like a bloody good life to him.
He wouldn’t have any of that.
Of course, he couldn’t claim “pity, poor me” with his ducal estate in the country, which had so many rooms in it he could house a vast number of the ton, plus his ten other manors. But when he was in his ducal house, he’d be lucky if he knew his children were even there, let alone his wife.
He wagered that Miss Allen’s parents even slept in the same bed.
His mother and father, as far as he was aware, had not slept in the same bed except to get their children. And even then, they’d likely not shared the bed for the night.
They had entirely separate wings of the house, and he knew he was expected to have entirely separate wings of the house with his wife, because the Crawfords believed that that was the best way to stave off disaster.
Maybe he didn’t want to stave off disaster any longer. Maybe he didn’t want to meet his father’s fate, lying on his deathbed with wild eyes, wishing, regretting his life, desperately ranting that if he had just done things differently, he might not have felt so empty.
The idea of reaching the end of one’s life and feeling so much regret?
Acid burned in his throat.
He looked at his mother, a bitter taste filling his mouth. He couldn’t tell her the truth.
He couldn’t tell her what had caused the change, and so he had to just let her think he was perverse. “Invite Lady Larkin and her daughter over,” he said at last. “I will talk to her.”
“So,” she ventured, “you are still considering the marriage.”
He ground his teeth, unwilling to lie, and so he said, with far too much vagueness, “Something has happened to me, Mama, and I can’t ignore it.”
“Please,” she all but begged, a difficult thing for a woman of her standing, “for my sake, do not do anything rash. Promise me. Otherwise, I might have apoplexy in this very room.”
He smiled gently at the woman who had shown him how strong women could be. “Mama, you’re about to have apoplexy as much as I am.”
“All right then,” she relented before pursing her lips and declaring, “I shall throw a fit and run wild through the town.”
“I believe that more,” he teased, though as far as he knew, his mother had never once lost control of herself.
She was silent for a long moment, then crossed to him and took his hand in hers. She stared down at their hands as she had when he was little. Only now, it was his hand that dwarfed hers.
“Just because I believe that you should marry someone who’s appropriate,” she whispered, before lifting her eyes to his and teasing, “doesn’t mean I think that we should all be boring.”
He laughed. “I could never accuse you of being boring, Mama.”
And that was the truth, for even though his family believed in obeying the plan of the Westfort dukedom, they were not boring people.
Most of the people in his line had lived wild, irrepressible, quite eccentric lives. They just didn’t believe in marrying for love.
Love was for mistresses, love was for lovers, but it certainly was not for husband and wife.
She pulled her hand back and took another drink of brandy, satisfied but still suspicious.
“I can at least tell you that I will not act too rashly.”
“You already have,” she countered, “by asking me to invite them over. What have you done?” she asked again, this time her voice full of unease.
“I don’t know, Mama,” he said honestly. “I think I just have to do things differently at last, for…”
Again, he could not say the thought, and his throat clenched, swallowing the word father.
“Who?” she prompted, her eyes darting over his face, a hint of fear there for the very first time in all his life.
He couldn’t say it. He never would, because he loved his mother, and he knew his mother loved him, and he did not want to break her heart.
She drew in a long breath, drank the last of her brandy, and handed him the glass. “Well, at least I have gotten this promise from you.”
“And Miss Allen and her mother?”
Though her mouth twisted as if she’d drunk bad wine, she allowed, “I shall invite them, and you’ll quickly see that it is a mistake. You’re going to have to help find the girl a husband because after the way you noticed her? There’ll be gossip. A great deal of it.”
There was a gleam in her eye as if she had an idea. One that she clearly wouldn’t divulge. But as soon as he saw that gleam, it vanished, and he shook his head, wondering if he was mistaken.
“If anyone can handle gossip, it’s you, Mama,” he praised, though he felt unsettled by this realization that just by dancing with Agatha, he had changed the trajectory of her Season and the gentlemen who might approach her.
“Be careful, my dear. Do you understand?”
He nodded. “Of course.”
“No,” she returned swiftly, shadows haunting her eyes. “Not ‘of course.’ I’ve never thought you were a cruel person until this night.”
He sucked in a sharp breath. “A cruel person? Because I asked Miss Agatha Allen to dance? Because I want you to invite her to our house?”
“No,” she replied.
“Then why?”
“Because you’re throwing a lamb to the wolves, my boy, and she is completely unprepared.”