Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
To Isadora’s surprise, they came back to Winchester early morning to a house lit up like Twelfth Night. Servants who ought to have been in their beds an hour since were criss-crossing the hall, and candlelight showed gold in half the windows of the east front.
Beside her, Nicholas was silent as he took it all in, and more terrifyingly silent still as they opened the door to a flustered butler, whose ordinarily calm composure had come apart at the seams.
“Well?” Nicholas pressed, hunting around as though he could immediately spy the source of the problem. “What is it?”
The housekeeper came bustling up to Gregson’s rescue, and Isadora watched relief sluice the poor man’s face clean.
“It’s Lady Sophia, Your Grace,” Mrs. Perry said with a calm that was so clearly practiced, it lifted the fine hairs on Isadora’s nape.
“She was… rather upset to have been left behind tonight, and when Nurse was getting her ready for bed, she slipped away and went into hiding. No one can find her. We have the whole household looking.”
She looked as though she expected Nicholas’s wrath. Isadora felt the way he tensed, every muscle wound as though he was about to sprint through the house himself.
“What time was this?” he asked in an awful, quiet voice.
“Shortly after you left, Your Grace.”
“She has been missing all this time, and I wasn’t sent for?”
“We…” the older woman chewed her lip, “we hoped to find her before you returned.”
Isadora stepped between them. “It is all right,” she chimed, and gave the woman a reassuring smile.
“We have all been eight. She is hiding. Children hide. She will be under a bed, or behind a curtain, or asleep in the linen press, and when we find her she will be perfectly cross about it.” Peeling off her gloves, she handed them to the housekeeper.
“How many rooms have you done? I still have some energy; we can join the search.”
“We left the East wing to last.” The housekeeper accepted her gloves and bobbed a curtsy.
Nicholas turned to her, eyes flat. “You seem very certain of the outcome.”
“Well…” Isadora wasn’t as certain as she pretended to be, but she could hardly admit that to Nicholas, who seemed on the verge of ripping the heads off everyone in their vicinity before tearing the rest of the place down in search of her.
So, she licked her lips, choosing her words carefully.
“Sophia is a child, and thus impetuous, but she is not a fool.”
“But if she ventured outside and is lost—”
“Let us eliminate the possibility that she is inside first. I’m sure”—she hoped— “Sophia would not have gone outside in the dark. This is a cry for attention, not a real attempt at escape.”
She walked through into the drawing room, thinking through what Sophia might have been feeling.
When she was a girl, sometimes she would hide.
The curse of the middle child was to always be invisible, and when her mother was still alive, she had tried to attract attention to herself by making everyone hunt for her whenever she felt down.
Of course, her mother had quietly spoken to her and explained why she couldn’t keep doing that, but she understood how it felt to be so empty, so deprived of attention, that she would grasp at anything to find it.
“She wants us to find her,” she murmured to Nicholas, who was shrugging out of his coat. “That’s the entire point of this display, even if she doesn’t know it herself yet…”
He cast a curt glance about the room. Everything else that had passed between them—the tension in the carriage, the near kiss in the ballroom, and the way he had defended her against her aunt—had been put aside.
They would deal with that later.
“She wouldn’t hide anywhere too obvious,” Isadora mused aloud. “And the servants will have looked in all the regular places. She would only go where she thought we would choose to look.”
“Under her bed?” Nicholas moved toward the door.
“No, that’s not where…” Isadora was shaking her head—when she suddenly had it. “Her cat!”
Nicholas stopped and turned to her, a question in his eyes. “Her cat? I thought the cat was yours.”
“She told you that so she wouldn’t get in trouble,” Isadora said impatiently, already brushing past him.
“You both went behind my back?” he glowered.
“Well, of course. Was I supposed to direct your disapproval in her direction instead? She may not be my daughter in blood, but the moment I married you, she became my daughter in heart.” Isadora gave a small, crooked smile to herself.
“I know how it feels to live without a mother, Nicholas. I would never subject another girl to that. And mothers protect their daughters.”
He looked at her, silent for a long moment, something whirring behind those glacial eyes. Then he reached up and pulled the cravat loose from his throat, and the duke went out of him with it. “Do you know where she is, then?”
“I have a hunch.” Isadora gathered her skirts as she hurried up the staircase, one flight, then the next, Nicholas close at her heels. A small ball of warmth unfurled in her chest at the thought that he had not once questioned her authority or made the slightest attempt to take charge.
That tiny act of trust meant more to her than she could ever confess.
“Three days ago,” she explained as she scurried along a corridor, “the cat started nesting.”
“Nesting?”
“I expect she’ll have her kittens sometime over the following weeks.
She was looking for somewhere safe in which to have them, and passingly, I had suggested to Sophia…
” She turned into one of the spare bedrooms and opened the closet door.
Inside, huddled amongst spare linen and blankets was a small, disheveled girl blinking up at them.
Beside her, in a nest of her own making, was Molly, glaring balefully at their uninvited intrusion.
“There you are.” Isadora kept her voice gentle and held out a hand to Sophia. “You must be exhausted, sweetheart. Come with me.”
Sophia folded her arms across her chest, her eyes glistening in the light of the candle Nicholas held. “Why should I come with you? You didn’t take me before…”
“Sophia,” Nicholas started, as though he was ready to scold her, but Isadora held up a finger, and his mouth snapped shut.
“Is that why you hid, darling? Because you wanted to punish us for leaving you behind?” Isadora’s chest ached.
Ever since she’d arrived, Sophia had seemed far older than her years.
A product of her upbringing, no doubt; her father had accepted her when she behaved like a little lady—questioning less and tolerating more—and so she had.
But she was still a child, and she should not be punished for having a child’s feelings, or the inability to deal with them the way an adult might.
So Isadora sat cross-legged on the floor, heedless of her gown. “Did I ever explain what sort of social this was?” she asked.
“A ball… With dancing.” Sophia’s lower lip trembled, though she made a valiant effort to stop it. “You were dancing with Papa,” she mumbled.
“Mm. I did dance with your father. But more than that, I spoke to a lot of boring people, because it’s the first time anyone has seen me as a duchess. And do you know how many other children were there?”
“None,” Nicholas pointed out from behind her, finally understanding where she was taking this.
“You would have been expected to stand still on sore legs and smile for hours. No one was talking about anything interesting. Not how far ducks can fly, or what the sun does when it sleeps. Only about the weather and the refreshments on hand and who married whom.”
Sophia cast a wistful glance at Isadora’s gown, and understanding came at once.
So it was the dress she wanted.
“But… I have an idea,” Isadora chimed at last. “How about you and I go shopping tomorrow for new clothes—let’s say…
dresses? As pretty as this one.” She gave her shimmering skirt a little swish.
“And then we shall hold a private ball of our own. I’ll play the pianoforte, and afterward we shall eat cake.
An outrageous amount of it, because I had none at all this evening. ”
Sophia wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand and climbed stiffly out of her hiding place. “It doesn’t sound like a very good ball if there was no cake…” she murmured, and Isadora immediately opened her arms.
“Oh, it was the dullest,” she bemoaned dramatically.
Sophia sank into her arms, and Isadora held her tightly, closing her eyes against the sting in her heart.
“A little ball at home with the three of us would be far better.” Her lips curved.
“But you know, sometimes your father and I are going to have to go out to balls and other boring social events, and you might not be able to come to some until you’re a lot older. ”
“It’s unfair…” Sophia said into Isadora’s shoulder.
“It is unfair. Sometimes life is unfair. But it doesn’t mean we don’t want you to be there, or that we’re not thinking of you. None of this means we love you any less.”
Nicholas rested a hand on Sophia’s head briefly. “She’s right, you know,” he told her quietly. “We love you just as much when we leave you at home as when we bring you with us.”
Us.
The word resounded in Isadora’s chest, and she held on to Sophia for her own sake as much as the girl’s.
None of this looked exactly as she had expected or hoped, but she had finally found a family of her very own.
And at least where Sophia was concerned, Nicholas seemed to view her as an integral part of the puzzle, too.
With Sophia, they were a we, even if they weren’t in any other portion of his life, and that was far more than she’d ever had before.
After putting Sophia to bed with the help of the nursemaid, Isadora and Nicholas retired upstairs.
The night had taken its toll, and although Isadora had felt perfectly alert while handling Sophia, exhaustion tugged at her now.
She felt like a bedraggled parrot, dragging its feathers back to its perch for the night.