Chapter 3 #2
Mark’s stomach dropped into his shoes. Oh.
That tragedy. Why was she bringing it up?
It was Ellen who’d been affected, not him.
Ellen deserved sympathy; he didn’t need it.
His pulse throbbed in his ears, and his breath hitched.
Emotion swelled inside him, though he wasn’t sure exactly which.
Clearing his throat and forcing his body to be calm, Mark glanced around the room.
“Speaking of our lovely Ellen, do you know where she is?”
“Over there.” Mrs. Hanson pointed her fan at a corner of the room, by the fireplace.
Ellen stood, conversing quietly with a gentleman beside her.
Mark’s breath caught in his throat. Her hair was burnished bronze, shining in the gaslight.
Now that it was swept into a low chignon, Mark could see her long, elegant neck.
Her bosom, artfully displayed, rose and fell as she laughed at a jest. Her gown, a striking shade of sky blue, made her complexion turn peaches and cream.
A curl had escaped her chignon and draped over her shoulder.
Mark followed that bronze curl over her shoulder and down her chest, then gazed at the hint of cleavage on display. His blood heated.
Ellen was beautiful. She wasn’t a girl anymore, either, but a woman. Mark could see it now, in the way she held herself, in the pauses between her sentences as she thought through her next words, and the way her eyes sparkled as if she knew a secret no one else did.
Mark wished she’d tell him the secret. Wait, no.
What was he thinking? This was Ellen. Certainly, she had matured over the past few years.
But she was still the same girl who’d announced loudly at the opera she couldn’t understand a word of it—it was Italian, of course she couldn’t—and who got his mother’s friends’ titles wrong—how had she not known a duchess was always “your grace,” not a marchioness?
—and had giggled stupidly whenever his favorite professor came for dinner—as if ignorance was amusing, even if she was a woman.
“Go to her.”
Mark glanced down in surprise. He’d been so caught up in gazing at his wife, he’d forgotten his mother-in-law standing beside him.
“I think I might do that,” Mark told her.
I owe her an apology. He’d been so focused on his duties for the last three weeks, he’d forgotten that even Ellen would need some time to understand before agreeing to her duty.
And so far…she wasn’t anything like he remembered.
He was intrigued. As he took a step toward her, the dinner bell rang.
Everyone reached for their dinner escorts.
Mark practically lurched across the room to reach his wife, but as he reached her side, Ellen placed a gloved hand delicately on the other man’s offered arm. She looked up at Mark and her eyes flashed with hatred. “Mr. Martin is escorting me to dinner. Perhaps you can fall behind.”
“Oh,” Mr. Martin said awkwardly. “You’re Captain Glenfall? My compliments, sir. You have a charming wife. If you’d prefer to walk her in to dinner—”
“No,” Ellen said firmly, and gave Mark a look that could curdle blood. “He and I have an understanding that we won’t monopolize one another’s time on the social scene. Do carry on, Mr. Martin.”
Mark nodded grudgingly, ignoring the desire to explain he was typically called Captain. The desire to grab her and whisk her away into a dark room or a closet was growing stronger. For years he had wondered why on earth he’d married her. Now he remembered.
Mark remembered their first kiss, when they’d ducked behind an oak tree and he’d tenderly traced her lips with his fingers, then gathered courage and pressed his lips to hers, when they trembled and breathed together and felt like they’d both jumped off a cliff.
He remembered their second kiss, when she’d giggled and pulled him into the empty drawing room and he’d shoved her against the door and devoured her mouth, as if she was life itself and he was greedy for every drop of nectar he could wring from her.
He remembered their wedding night, when he’d come to her, as shy as she had been, but pretending not to be, when he’d been struck dumb by her nakedness and the satin feel of her bare skin against his.
Mark remembered the tenth time they’d made love, probably his favorite, because she had grown bold for once and screamed his name as he drove into her slick, hot, wet—
“Coming?” Mr. Martin raised a brow. “You can fall in step behind us.”
Mark pushed the memories away and let his wife and the other man lead the way out of the room.
He was the last to leave the drawing room, and he watched another curl loosen from his wife’s chignon.
He suddenly had the devilish urge to tuck his finger around it and yank it free, just to see what she would do.
Would she gasp and giggle, like when they were engaged, or would she skewer him with the disapproving look of a goddess?
Once they were all seated, Mark found himself across from his wife. She didn’t look his way once.
There were fifteen at dinner, including himself, and he had to admit it did set the numbers off.
No one minded overmuch. Most were businessmen and their wives, much older than Mark’s twenty-eight years.
One was a magistrate, two others were barristers.
They were the upper ten percent of London Society.
Mark was popular, both because of his naval career and his close ties to the aristocracy.
Most of the men wanted to hear stories of his time in Bermuda, Spain, and Argentina.
Sailing was hard, cramped work, even for an officer, but Mark had enough good memories to share them.
The women wanted to hear more about his brother.
“He was injured three months ago in a riding accident,” Mark repeated. “Or so I’m told. I didn’t receive a telegram until over a week after it happened.”
“A week! And your brother is a lord.” One of the older women tsked.
“It is common for news to be delayed on ships, madam.” Mark sneaked a glance at Ellen. “Letters can be delayed by at least one month. In the past, I’ve received letters nigh three months after they were first posted.”
Ellen took a dainty bite of crème br?lée, giving no sign she’d heard him.
“When will he make a full recovery?”
Mark took a bite of his dessert to prepare his answer.
“He’s doing much better,” he lied. News of Matthew’s injuries flew through the ton like the juiciest gossip.
What his family had been able to keep secret—at least for now—was that Matthew would likely be bed-bound for the rest of his life.
He certainly couldn’t have children. “His poor valet was doing most of the nursing and heavy lifting when we discovered the village woman my mother employed was drinking on the job.”
Several gasped.
“That’s just like the lower orders, though.” The magistrate’s wife nodded with conviction. “You can’t ever trust them to do good work.”
“Your mother should hire a Nightingale,” the woman beside him suggested. “The women are trained by Florence Nightingale herself and are highly reliable. My cousin went to her training school.”
Mark turned to her in surprise. “That’s a capital idea. Thank you, madam.”
“The baroness has already hired a Nightingale nurse,” Ellen said abruptly, never looking up from her dessert. “The young woman should be arriving at Cottesloe in a day or so, if not already there.”
Mark looked at his wife in surprise. “She did? She is?”
Ellen bestowed upon him a glacial smile. “Your mother and I correspond regularly. She asked for my help in finding proper medical support for your brother.”
Ellen writes to my mother? The thought discomfited him, as though two worlds were colliding. What do they say about me? And why would my mother seek Ellen’s advice?
From the corner of his eye he caught Mrs. Hanson give a warning glance to her daughter, as if she disapproved of Ellen’s comments about nurses.
But before he could puzzle through that exchange, Mrs. Hanson gracefully rose from the foot of the table and smiled down at her guests.
“It is time to let the men have their cigars and port.” The women stood, as did their husbands.
The ladies, in a flurry of colorful gowns, headed toward the dining room exit.
Ellen stayed near the end, allowing guests to go first. As she reached the doorway, a footman standing nearby gave a small gesture. Ellen paused and sidled closer to the man in livery.
Mark, curiosity aroused, strained to hear what the man was telling Ellen. The young man passed Ellen a small note, which she immediately opened and read. Her lips pursed, she looked back at the footman and asked a question. He shrugged and resumed his alert post against the wall.
“Ellen,” Mrs. Hanson warned in low tones. “Not tonight.”
Mark watched avidly as Ellen faced her mother, standing in the hall. “Mother.”
“I refuse to tolerate this,” Mrs. Hanson said, then looked around and dropped her voice to a whisper. After a brief exchange, they parted ways—Mrs. Hanson to the drawing room where the ladies waited, and Ellen for the back of the house.
Now he absolutely had to know what was going on. Mark rose quietly and slipped out the door. He caught a flicker of sky blue out of the corner of his eye and went in pursuit.
Mark followed the flutter of her silk dress down the foyer, through a plain service door painted the same color as the walls to disguise it, down the plain, unpainted stairs, and into the servants’ quarters.
Her footsteps stopped at the bottom of the stairs around a corner, and he paused halfway, out of sight.
“Laura, what’s wrong?” Ellen's voice, stripped of the girlish affectations he remembered, sounded strong and calm.
“Oh, madam!” Laura, out of sight, hiccupped through a sob. Mark strained to catch her words. “She’s in labor already.”
“What? Already?” Ellen sounded surprised but not shocked. “I was going to visit her tomorrow, but I suppose babies do not wait upon our schedules.”