Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“I’m sorry for calling uninvited like this.” Isadora stepped into Caroline’s bedchamber, shaking the rain from her hair. The July storms had swept in, and all the north lay under a great cloud. She didn’t mind; the weather reflected her mood.
“Don’t you dare apologize for disturbing my tedium,” Caroline interrupted, crossing the room to where she had an open perfume bottle standing on her desk.
She dabbed it liberally at her wrists and under her ears, then proffered it to Isadora.
“Make yourself comfortable. And do try it—my mother sent it from America.”
“Why didn’t she come with you?” Isadora asked.
“Oh, because she has no intention of being stuck among the British, and who can blame her.” Her American friend raised an elegant shoulder. “You’ve no notion how many times a lady or gentleman has looked at me askance the moment I open my mouth.”
Isadora smiled. “You don’t want their good opinion anyway.”
“No, indeed I don’t,” Caroline snorted. “So—what is this about?”
Isadora rubbed the perfume on her wrists, the pretty floral scent surrounding her, and flopped into the chaise by the fire. “Nicholas,” she sighed.
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes. I feel as though we had our three minutes of bliss, and then he has gone right back to his old habits.”
“For what reason?”
“How should I know?” Isadora rubbed her forehead. “It’s as though he left the house as one man and came back as another. I’ve asked what the matter is, of course, but he simply tells me it is none of my concern. As though I have no say in his life.”
“Ah, yes,” Caroline said dryly, “because a wife has no role or say in the life of her husband.”
“Precisely!”
Caroline fetched something and handed it to Isadora. She looked down to find a bowl of candied nuts in her lap.
“For you,” Caroline said, unnecessarily. “I always eat them when I’m feeling particularly down about something or other, but I think you deserve them more than I do today.” She pondered Isadora, her chin in her hands. “I thought you said things were going better?”
“They were. For a matter of weeks. We were…” Isadora’s cheeks heated. “Well, that is to say we finally—”
“You finally consummated your marriage.” Caroline nodded knowingly. “I have older sisters in the States, you know. I’m familiar with the concept. So, it’s not that that has gotten in the way of you both.”
“Not in the slightest. At least… not that I was aware of. He even…” She hesitated, looking down at her stomach.
In the days since he had finished inside her, after explaining what was required to get a woman with child, she had examined herself and wondered if that might have been enough. Or all the times since.
How soon was too soon to know?
She didn’t know if she desperately wanted a child to hold the family together, to bind Nicholas to her in a way even he could not ignore, or if she was terrified that having a child might be the final piece that tore down their ephemeral bliss.
“You think it’s something else?” Caroline asked.
“He married me out of obligation—for Sophia’s sake, and a little for mine. Once he understood my situation, I think he meant to save me from it, though he’d never admit to as much. But now that I’m his wife, what if he’s changed his mind?”
Caroline shook her head decisively. “That makes no sense.”
“Then what other explanation is there? He doesn’t listen when I talk, he doesn’t confide in me—and he did at one stage, you know.
I thought we took all of the pain from our past and showed each other, and we were able to move on from it.
But all that has ended. The last few nights he hasn’t even come to my bed.
As though he’ll accept me as Sophia’s mother and nothing more. ”
The tears came despite her, and she blinked them off.
Losing him hurt worse than she might admit—but letting it eat her hollow served nothing.
“The thing is,” she went on, brittle, “I don’t know how to fight for a man who doesn’t want to be there.
And if I push and push, what if he gets fed up and simply tells me he wants to leave? ”
“He wouldn’t dare!” Caroline shot upright, her eyes alive with indignation. “I wouldn’t let him.”
“He’s a duke, Caro. What could anyone do?
If he decides he no longer wishes to be married to me—or at least, in the manner in which we have been married—then he can change his mind, and no one can stop him.
” And the longer his silence continued, the more Isadora felt as though that was the only possible conclusion.
For Sophia’s sake, she didn’t think he would send her away, exactly. But he might change her role within the house: to Sophia’s stepmother and nothing more. An end to all the intimacy they had shared, and an end to her dreams of the family she had always wanted.
The one she’d, briefly, thought she’d had.
“Well,” Caroline said bracingly, “at least you’ll still be a duchess. He can’t take that from you. You have your house, your servants, a little girl who adores you. What more could a woman want?”
Love. Isadora didn’t say it, but she felt the word spring instinctively to her lips.
“And if you do want more,” Caroline said, “you’ll have to fight for it, even when it seems there’s nothing left to fight for.
You’re thinking of your pride, of being rejected.
But perhaps the man is a fool who needs a push.
Suppose he loves you, yet believes rumors you’ve been unfaithful. Consider Windham.”
“Mr. Windham is nothing to me,” Isadora interrupted, frustrated.
“I know that. But does he? And I don’t mean has he expressed that, but does he truly believe it?”
Isadora pressed a hand to her aching heart. There was a quietness inside now, a ragged feeling that hurt every time she took a breath. “If he thinks me capable of that,” she said quietly, “then I don’t believe he can love me at all.”
Nicholas sat Sophia on the small chair before his mirror and held up two coats. “Which do you think? The blue or the green?”
Sophia tilted her head. Her lips pursed. But the question she asked was not the answer he had been expecting. “Why are you and Izzie fighting?”
He blinked. The question hit as he expected a marksman might: right between the ribs. For a moment, he felt as though he ought to look down and check there was no blood.
A fatal blow.
“Who says we are fighting?” he asked carefully.
“Of course you are.” Sophia made a scornful sound that was too old for her age. He missed the carefree, younger girl she had been when he and Isadora had been with her together. This older, sharper version, wise beyond her years, scraped like a scalpel against his already bruised heart.
What if she grew up and proved beyond all doubt that she was not his?
“I don’t like it when you’re angry at each other,” Sophia muttered, bridging the silence he had left gaping. “Izzie is happier when you’re together, and so are you.”
“We are still together,” Nicholas pointed out.
“Hardly! You don’t look at her when she’s not watching. Or even speak, if I’m not there.”
“We still share breakfast,” he tried unconvincingly.
Sophia rolled her tiny eyes. “Papa, don’t think I’m a ninny, please. A few weeks ago, you were talking. And now you’re both sitting like you’re in an ice house.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not! I don’t like it.” She pointed to the green coat. “I like that one better.”
Nicholas slid it over his shoulders silently. If Sophia had noticed he wasn’t himself, he would have to try harder—this rioting thing in his chest had nothing and everything to do with her, and he would not punish her for what was no fault of her own.
“Whist?” he asked when they finally made it down into the drawing room. Isadora, thankfully, was elsewhere; he had a suspicion she had gone to dine with the American. No doubt they were abusing him roundly behind his back.
He deserved it.
The heaviness stayed with him however he tried to tease and joke the way Isadora did with Sophia so effortlessly. They played whist, and he lost as many hands as he could, only winning when Sophia grew suspicious.
By the end, she was yawning, and Isadora had not yet returned.
He suppressed the worry that something might have happened to her with a viciousness he didn’t want to examine. “Bedtime,” he forced mirth into his voice.
“Where’s Izzie?”
“Izzie is spending time with her friend tonight. She’ll probably be back late.” If she comes back at all.
He tried to push the thought away, but it kept returning with sticky insistence. If she came back. He wanted to believe the best of her, but he didn’t know how to believe the best of anyone anymore.
Isadora might not return. And if she did, who knew what she had been doing in the interim? He kept seeing her arched the way she arched for him, those low sounds he had thought his alone, given to a stranger. Each one crushed the air from his chest.
All he knew was the longer she spent away from his side, the more acutely he felt it. The loss, her absence. His entire world felt as though it was imploding, and he couldn’t scrape it back together again.
Sophia yawned again and sprawled across the chaise longue. He bent down and picked her up, gathering her in his arms as he carried her upstairs. She had lost that strangely adult aura she had, and now she was all child as she squirmed sleepily in his arms.
“Bedtime,” he murmured again. “I’ll call for nurse.”
“Stay with me, Papa,” she mumbled.
His footsteps faltered. He looked into her face, and for a terrible second, he saw Grace. He saw Sherborne.
Then his vision cleared, and he saw his daughter. His daughter. The one whom he adored and would adore until eternity’s end, no matter what the truth was.
“I’ll stay,” he promised, carrying her the rest of her way to her bedchambers.
Her nurse came running and changed the half-asleep girl into her nightgown.
Nicholas was the one to tuck her into bed, and he sat beside her as she settled against the pillow, eyes closed and lashes fanning against her summer apple cheeks.
His daughter. His.
“I want you to be happy, Papa,” she mumbled sleepily. “And Izzie, too. I don’t want you to fight anymore.” Her eyelids fluttered, and her breathing deepened.
Nicholas sat silently by her side for a few moments longer.
“I know,” he whispered eventually. Sophia was too asleep to hear. “I don’t, either.”