An Ideal Duchess (27 page)

             
Her son squawked, and she realized she had been holding him too tightly. She rose from the rocking chair, rocking him gently in her arms as she walked to the windows of the nursery, which was at the pinnacle of Bledington Park, and allowed her an unhampered view across the estate, all the way down to the spires of the village church. Though she had never been an avid churchgoer (tradition led the inhabitants of Bledington—upstairs and belowstairs—to the church every Sunday, where the Family sat in their ornate pews at the front of the congregation), the sight of the stone cross gave a trifle bit of comfort over her impossible situation.

             
She pressed a kiss to her son’s head and then carried him back to his bassinette. He cooed, waggling his chubby arms at her, and she smiled down at him, giving his head another caress before bending over the other bassinette, in which her younger twin lay, his expression calm, his eyes fastened to her face.

             
She turned, the baby in her arms, as the door to the nursery opened behind her. Bron stepped in, his cold gray eyes sweeping the room, sending the nanny and her day nursemaid scurrying into the night nursery. She stared coolly at him and walked back to the rocking chair, sitting with her baby cradled to her chest. She tucked her face into her son’s head as she heard the shuffling of Bron’s feet as he walked towards her. His mud-splattered boots came into her line of vision, his tension palpable in the air. Then he sank to his knees beside her, his hands awkward as they reached for the baby in her arms.

             
“Which one is he?” He asked softly, staring down at the impossibly calm child.

             
“Cornelius—Neil,” She replied just as softly.

             
His eyes were bashful when he gave her a short glance, rising to his feet, holding Neil as carefully and gingerly as one held a delicate glass bowl.

             
She looked over at Roddy’s bassinette when he gurgled and cried, already impatient and irritated with being ignored by his parents. She rose to fetch her moody elder son, but he continued to put up a fuss until Bron peered hesitantly into his cradle.

             
“They’re so small,” He breathed reverently.

             
“They’re much larger than when they were born,” She smiled shyly.

             
“I’ve…I’ve never come to see them.” He looked guilty. “In fact, I haven’t been in this nursery since I was a child.”

             
“With your brother,” She said haltingly.

             
“And Viola,” His expression closed.

             
She felt a pang of regret when he thrust Neil into her arms—that is until she remembered just why she had sought refuge in the nursery with her sons.

             
“You’re coming down for breakfast, aren’t you?”

             
Amanda turned her back on him and joggled her son. “No, I’m not. Please give everyone my regrets.”

             
“Don’t be so childish, Amanda. Put the boy in his cradle and come downstairs.”

             
“Why Bron? Has my absence caused you more humiliation? Am I to come down to make amends for my rightful response to such a barbaric tradition?”

             
“You offended Hugo greatly,” He grasped her by the shoulders and forced her to turn around.

             
“I’m not going to apologize to that boor.” She exclaimed, grateful for the buffer their son placed between them. “And I’m not going to apologize to you. I said ‘no’ and you let him wipe blood all over my face.”

             
“You’re exaggerating. It was one dab on your forehead. Goddammit Amanda, Beryl didn’t balk at it and she’s only eleven.”

             
“She’s just as indoctrinated as you are,” Amanda scowled. “I’m not at all sorry I wasn’t raised like you.”

             
He narrowed his eyes, nostrils flaring with fury. “What does that mean?”

             
“Selfish, self-righteous, ignorant, idiotic, and insulated,” She looked down at the sleeping baby in her arms. “I’m not going to allow my sons to be raised in that manner.”

             
“Short of taking my sons out of this house, I doubt you will have much say in their upbringing as English gentlemen. Lest you forget my dear duchess, you’ve taken my nationality when we married, and you promised to obey.”

             
“You are a bastard, Your Grace,” She hissed at him.

             
“You chose to marry this bastard; I doubt you looked beyond the gleam of the strawberry leaves to see who or what lay beneath,” He laughed bitterly.

             
Amanda stalked over to Neil’s bassinette, her hands shaking with so much fury that she feared she would wake him. But he slept on peacefully, and his brother, when she checked in his bassinette, had also fallen back to sleep. She felt Bron standing behind her, and the charge in the air changed. His hands were on her arms, forcing her to face him and he backed her against the wall, his mouth set grimly, his eyes flinty chips of ice.

             
“I despise you,” She whispered.

             
“We don’t need to like one other to be married,” He muttered against her throat. “Or to do this.”

             
She gasped when she felt his hand skim over her thigh, bare between the bottom of her corset and the top of her wool stockings. Any ounce of desire she felt from his gesture was not enough to allow him to have her against the wall of her son’s nursery with the nursemaids only an earshot away! Moreover, she was still terribly angry with him, and his lovemaking was not going to distract her from this.

             
“Bron, no,” She placed her palms flat on the hard, unforgiving lines of his chest.

             
He paused, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of her thigh.

             
“Bron! Her Grace sent me to fetch…you…”

             
She turned to see Viola in the doorframe, eyes wide and dark in her pale face as she flicked her glance wildly over them, the bassinettes holding their sons, and then back to them again. Bron straightened and she smoothed the skirt of her riding habit when his fingers fell away. Somehow, she was unashamed of what Viola had interrupted, though she was not entirely sure that had his cousin not burst into the nursery, he would have accepted her denial of his desire.

             
The thought shook her, and she moved away from Bron, walking carefully towards the door. Viola flinched when she approached, but her eyes gleamed with barely concealed contempt when their glances met. She was the first to turn away, even more disturbed and disillusioned by the events of this morning and by her marriage in general. It was only the fear of losing her sons that kept her in this wretched house, and she realized she had to shake off whatever this was that plagued her each day in order to survive.

*          *          *

              To Amanda’s relief, her embarrassing bout of illness had been forgotten by the hunters munching and swallowing the outlandish display of food spread across the dining table in buffet style. Even more relieving was that her mother-in-law’s usual edict of silence during meals had been trampled over and ignored by the hunt, who jawed off about the day’s hunt in foreign terminology and referred to one another in nicknames so bizarre, she could barely make tails or heads of the tenet of their conversation. She smiled at suitable intervals whenever a huntsman or huntswoman turned to her for her opinion as she squeezed between the array of scarlet coats, buff breeches, black riding habits, and mud-splattered Wellingtons. Everyone seemed more interested in hunting than in the impending Christmas holiday!

             
Mrs. Alcock, she noted, staring at the daunting buffet, had cooked enough to feed an entire regiment. There were raised pies, whole hams, and roast pheasants, there were different types of sandwiches, aspics, and galantines, and there were an assortment of cakes, succulent fruits, and sweets. The sideboard held decanters of port, sherry, brandy, and whisky, and bottles of Champagne tilted in buckets of melting ice. The meal was the height of informality, with adult men reaching across the table for a pheasant wing, quaffing innumerable glasses of alcohol, and all around forgoing their usual table manners in their haste to satiate their ravenous hunger after hunting all morning and into the afternoon. In the face of such gustatory extravagance, she contended herself with a small glass of sherry.

             
“Children. They’re like small children,” A dark haired woman in a severely cut riding habit came to her side, holding a coupé of champagne in one hand and a thin cigarette in the other. She switched the cigarette to the hand holding the champagne and held the now free one to her. “Sylvia Montague. Cousin Sylvia Montague, though Ursula wishes it were otherwise.”

             
“Amanda Townsend, no, Malvern,” She shook the woman’s hand. “A cousin?”

             
“By marriage. You see the tall, stooped man over there with the large blond mustache covered in aspic?”

             
Amanda turned to where Sylvia pointed.

             
“Cutty—Cuthbert Montague, my husband and Ursula’s dearest cousin, which means wither he goeth, I go.”

             
“The dowager must adore you,” Amanda smiled, warming up to this cousin-by-marriage.

             
“You know the feeling well, I presume,” Sylvia tipped her glass to her lips and drained the champagne.

             
“I don’t inspire the warmest reaction from my mother-in-law, but she has been nothing but cordial since I married Bron,”

             
“And Miss Townsend?” Sylvia raised a pencil-thin brow, her eyes hooded with knowing.

             
“The less said about Viola Townsend, the better.”

             
Sylvia cheered, clinking their glasses together. “You and I shall get along famously. It is time the Malevolent Malverns had new blood in their veins. They’ve been too insular and hidebound by ridiculous traditions for too long.”

             
“That’s what I told Bron,” Amanda sighed.

             
“But dear, I wouldn’t have had the delight of watching Ego Hambly turn twelve shades of puce when you vomited all over his beloved M.F.H. pink.”

             
Amanda blushed furiously. “Have I caused a terrible scandal?”

             
“Darling duchess, you of all people can afford to cause a scandal. What can Ego do besides fume and stomp around, cursing females? Your family owns most of Gloucestershire, including many of the farms surrounding his manor house.”

             
“Bron and my mother-in-law would be horrified,”

             
Sylvia gave her an incredulous look. “Darling, you’re rich, you’ve done your duty—you had two boys in one go, you brick, and don’t have any more, babies ruin the figure. Malvern and Ursula have no claim on you or your time. You could travel to London without your husband for the Season, or you could go to Cannes for the winter, and no one would bat an eye.”

             
“No!”

             
“If you don’t believe me, you can ask Ursula. She was always away from Bledington around this time of the year, always insatiable in pursuit of the fox. Her particular haunt was with the Marquess of Tewksbury’s Hunt…there were rumors in that direction oh, ten or so years ago, but everyone knows Tewksbury chased after all of the ladies in his pack. He’s married now to Ego’s mother.”

             
Amanda could only stare at Sylvia and then at her mother-in-law, who presided over the table with a semblance of her usual aplomb.

             
“I can’t see it.”

             
“There should be portraits of Ursula from her salad days—she was never quite beautiful, more handsome in fact, but she is a wonder on the hunting ground.”

             
Amanda raised her eyebrows, digesting this barrage of gossip and information. Sylvia smirked.

             
“Don’t think too hard about it, duchess,” Sylvia laughed. “It would take you longer than the week’s hunt to unravel the skeins tangling so many of our set.”

             
“Oh dear,” Sylvia raised a brow, her smile sharpening to anticipation. “Here comes the Duke of Malvern himself.”

             
Amanda turned to see Bron bearing down on them, his expression as cold as it was in the nursery.

             
“Don’t be intimidated by Malvern, he’s all bark and little bite.”

             
Amanda thought she heard Sylvia whisper “unfortunately,” but the woman had refilled her champagne coupé and was sipping from it.