Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Jessamine returned to the party with William in her arms, his eyes open wide, a clear, pretty blue, staring at the world as though it fascinated him. There was not a single person in attendance who was not charmed, and Jessamine was determined that no one should question his origins further.
If William were Andrew’s love child, Jessamine would not be furnishing so much love and affection for him. At least, that was what she hoped the world would think.
For her part, she didn’t know what she would do.
Whatever the sins of their parents, a child was an innocent.
If Andrew had been unfaithful—although, given when they married, it would be an indiscretion long before he had even met her, so it wouldn’t have been a betrayal in that sense—then she would be angry with him, but not with the child.
Never with the child.
William smiled up at her, chubby fists waving, and Jessamine took him on a tour of the garden.
Lady Marwich, who had clearly made it her mission to protect William’s reputation with every bone in her body, held him and loudly said that he looked just like Mr. Walter Kinley, the cousin to whom they were pretending William belonged.
“After all,” Lady Marwich confided in Jessamine as William was being handed to yet another cooing lady, “why should he not resemble Mr. Kinley? All babies look the same in my opinion, and I ought to know, considering I had six of my own.”
“Did you ever see Mr. Kinley as a baby?” Jessamine asked.
“I might have done,” Lady Marwich said vaguely.
“I saw several babies of that time, and I could not now tell you who they belonged to. I expect I even saw your illustrious husband as a babe. His mother and I were friends. Not close, you understand, but she looked to me as a sort of mother figure, though I was only a decade or so her senior. Poor girl.”
Jessamine cast another glance at Andrew. He had been somber almost the entire party so far, and she couldn’t quite understand why. “Why was she a poor girl?”
“Only her choice of husband. One’s husband can make or break one’s life, you know. And poor Clarissa picked Ronald to be her husband. A mistake. He was not a kind man, and although he loved her, it is my firm belief that love is not enough.”
Jessamine kept an eye on William, content to be passed around the group like a particularly large potato. “How so?”
“Well, one cannot suppress one’s nature, dear. Not even for the sake of love, although it’s all very well and romantic to suppose they can. She thought he could for her, and she was sadly mistaken. Poor girl.” Lady Marwich clucked her tongue. “And then she paid the ultimate price.”
Jessamine gasped. “He killed her?”
“Of course not. Do be sensible, dear. But she died, and perhaps if she had been in a different, happier situation, she might not have done.”
Lady Marwich’s face softened, and Jessamine knew she was thinking about her own mother, who truly had paid the ultimate price. She had loved a man she ought not, and she had married him, and when he tired of her, he disposed of her as easily as one might shoot a horse.
A distasteful thing, but one that he did not shy away from doing.
Jessamine’s chest felt too tight. She sipped at the air.
“Which is, of course, why I encouraged you to marry your duke,” Lady Marwich continued, seemingly oblivious to Jessamine’s breathless hurt.
“He might be a trifle stern at times, and one can see the soldier in him, but he is a good man, and honorable, and he will do you right. He has done already.” She leveled a serious look at Jessamine.
“And if you ask me, you ought to be making more of an attempt to get closer to your husband. Get to know him. A man like that, trapped in his head, needs a woman’s gentle touch.
” She rapped Jessamine’s arm with her fan.
“A gentle touch, mind. Don’t you go barging in there like a bull in a china shop just because you think he might need a little teasing out of himself. ”
Jessamine looked at Andrew again. He was listening politely to an older lady, his face an impassive mask, but he stood as though he were standing to attention.
Or, perhaps, as though he were protecting himself.
Something about being here had hurt him in some way, perhaps even in a similar way to the way in which she had been hurt.
And she would find out how.
She didn’t get her opportunity until much later on that evening, when the guests had finally returned home, and Jessamine had finally put William down to sleep. Lucy was with him, knitting in the chair by the corner, and so Jessamine felt it was safe to see her husband, at least for a little.
Her heart rattled in her chest as she rapped on the door to his bedchamber. This was a room she had never dared enter before. He had been in hers, of course, but that had been a very different experience.
She sucked in a long, deep breath at the quiet “come in” and finally ventured inside. Andrew was sitting on the bed, his hands braced against his knees, his coat and waistcoat tossed over a chair. At the sight of his shirtsleeves, Jessamine’s stomach twisted and turned like a coiling snake.
“What is it?” he asked, raising his gaze to her as though reluctantly.
Jessamine looked down at herself. She still wore the gown they had purchased together; she’d thought it better than changing into her nightwear for this conversation, but now she wondered if it was sending the wrong message.
A message like Kiss me, Andrew. Kiss me.
She cleared her throat and kept her distance. If she came any closer, she would be tempted to run her fingers through his messy hair and step in between his legs and tilt his head up to hers, so she might see every particle of his blue eyes.
And that would not—could not—happen.
“Is everything all right?” he asked when she said nothing.
“I came to check on you,” she blurted.
He frowned. “Check on me?”
“Yes. Because…” How to phrase this without sounding as though she had been watching him this entire time, and that she wanted nothing more than to soothe whatever pain he was experiencing? “I thought perhaps you might be a little sad.”
His eyes searched hers for a long moment.
“A little sad,” he repeated.
“I saw your face earlier.”
He tilted his head. Not angry, but not open, not yet. He was a closed book to her. “You seem very concerned about my face, Jessamine.”
“Merely…” After a moment’s hesitation, she sat beside him, hands braced on the bed on either side. There was enough distance between them that there was no danger of them accidentally touching. “Well, you were looking at me.”
That prompted him into a snort, and she smiled a little. They sat in silence for a long moment, and for once it didn’t feel awkward or strained. So much had sat between them since they were married, but this felt like harmony, in a strange way.
“I thought perhaps it might be to do with Rebecca,” she said.
He leaned forward so his arms were braced against his knees, hands clasped between them. “What made you think that?”
“It was an event celebrating her son,” Jessamine said. “And also erasing her from the picture. No one knows that William is her son.” She laced her fingers together, staring down at them rather than at Andrew.
Lady Marwich’s advice rang through her ears again, insisting that a man like Andrew needed a gentle touch.
This had to be it. There could be no denying he was locked inside his own head, thinking about something she had no access to, and there could also be no denying that if they could just talk about it—if he could finally open up to her—they might have one of the most honest conversations they’d had since their marriage.
“Rebecca was my friend,” she continued when Andrew didn’t speak. “I know it’s not the same as the bond you two had, and I would never compare my loss to yours, but I loved her too.”
Slowly, Andrew turned his head to look at her. For once, his blue eyes weren’t hard. The sternness in his face had softened into something she knew well: grief.
“Talking about Rebecca has…” His voice came rough, and he coughed to steady it. “It has never come easily to me.”
“That’s all right.” Jessamine smiled gently.
“I can do the talking, if you like. Here’s what I remember.
Rebecca was a kind woman. She loved freely, and openly, and was never afraid to say what she thought.
Her marriage had been a source of sadness, yes, but it had never defined her.
She was bold and bright, and she made the world a better place for being in it.
” Jessamine shot Andrew a sideways glance.
“And I know she was close with you when you were children.”
He blew out a long breath and closed her eyes. “I failed her.”
Jessamine waited, knowing there was more.
“Her father… My uncle, he was determined for her to marry Lord Cartwell, despite his age and infirmity. It was cruel to expect a girl so young to marry a man so old. She begged me for help, but…”
His throat bobbed as he swallowed, and Jessamine put a daring hand on his.
“She begged me,” he repeated, “but I was unable to stop it. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t convince her father to do otherwise.
No one could convince him of anything he didn’t want to do.
He had never known compassion, much like my own father.
Neither of them ever once felt sorry for the woman they condemned.
And… All her father saw was the personal gain.
” Andrew shook his head, his mouth turning down.
“As for my own father, he sent me into the army. Bought me a commission and all but shipped me away as Rebecca married. We exchanged letters for a while, but I knew how desperately sad she was, and she knew I had let her down. I should have tried harder. Run away with her. Defied our fathers.”
He made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, and Jessamine ached for him.
“It sounds as though there was nothing you could have done,” she told him.