That Kind of Woman (10 page)

“It is. Yours and mine. It is also Miranda’s.”

“And Grandmama’s and Henry’s,” Emma sniffed, and Andrew was certain that she’d said it just to be contrary.

“The point is no one died and made you countess.” Too late, he realized what he’d said. He closed his eyes and rubbed his aching temples.

Emma was unfazed. “I’m sorry about Uncle George, Papa, truly, but soon you’ll be the earl, and you won’t have time to worry about the household staff. Henry says Randa will return to London, so she can’t help you. Grandmama is too old to have to do all that work, and surely you don’t think Uncle Henry will! That leaves me.”

Andrew didn’t know whether to laugh at his daughter or shake her. “You think so, do you?”

Emma nodded, wiping the last trace of tears from her face with the back of her hand. “The sooner everyone gets used to it, the better. Mama died, and we all got used to that. You quickest of all.”

The barb struck home, and he pulled himself up to his full height. “Emma Louise, God knows I am sorry I couldn’t stay at home after your mother died, but Napoleon hadn’t been keeping up with my personal life. One day you will learn a thing or two about duty, and you’ll understand. In the meantime, I am your father and I am back, and you are no longer running the show. You, young lady, will do as you’re told.”

Her red-rimmed eyes narrowed. “Or what?”

“Or what?” he growled. Her query brought him up short. What sort of a question was that?

A very good one really, he realized. He could hardly order her flogged, though just at the moment, it was tempting. First his brother making strange, delirious requests, now his thirteen-year-old daughter getting fresh-mouthed with him. Him! Major Andrew Carrington, a man who had never had problems with discipline on the field!

He finally settled on an answer. “You don’t want to know what, miss!”

For several long seconds the two glared at each other before Emma stood and stamped her foot. “I’m going to find Grandmama!” she huffed. Then she turned on her heel and sailed out the library door.

He knew he should have taken her to task for her disrespect, but in all honesty, he was just relieved to have her gone. Alone in the silent room, Andrew gazed around at the book-filled shelves and breathed in the soothing scent of leather bindings and old paper.

Cannons and gunfire, these things ripped through a man’s heart and stopped it from beating. Dying brothers, hurt children, and years of mistakes, these tore through the heart, too, though it kept on pumping in their wake. He almost would have preferred the former.

*

Even though George was sick, Miranda made sure the roses he kept in the hothouse flourished. A vase of them sat on the piano, filling the room with a breath of summer. It was nearly midnight at the end of a chaotic day, and she sat in the glow of candlelight, inhaling the sweet fragrance. A Vivaldi opera spilled from the keyboard at her fingertips and her own clear, soprano voice joined in to remind her of the canals of Venice. The violin was her first love, but one couldn’t sing while playing it.

The Duke of Montheath and his illegitimate daughter shared one thing in common, a love of music. He was the one who had insisted on music lessons for her—violin, piano, voice. Ever striving for his approval, she had studied hard, and was considered quite accomplished among her parents’ friends on the Continent.

When they had returned to England, she found she could draw a crowd at a party. But when the music was done, the men went back to leering down her décolletage and women resumed their vicious gossip about which man would fall to the young “Henley Harlot.” Then George had come along …

At the painful memories, she stopped singing and transitioned abruptly to a Bach fugue. The piece would have been better on an organ, she thought, her dark contempt for the
ton
seeping into the music. She had played this fugue on a church organ in Vienna once, and she could almost hear its rich, haunting tones, smell the musty scent of old wood.

When she finished, she left her foot on the pedals so the notes lingered and faded before silence reclaimed the house. The sound of applause shattered the quiet, and she gasped in shock and dismay.

“An interesting choice of melodies,” Andrew commented from the doorway. “A study in contrast.”

Miranda felt her face grow warm. She had been searching for catharsis, and his presence felt like an invasion of her private thoughts. Her irritation didn’t last, though. His face was drawn and his green eyes troubled.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

He wandered slowly into the room. “Not yet. I heard you playing. I hope you do not mind that I came and listened. I should have asked permission, but you were so wrapped up in it. I hated to interrupt.”

She let her fingers drift lightly across the keys and a splash of notes tinkled from them. “I was just dabbling.”

He shook his head. “Hardly that. You’re quite gifted.”

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Well-trained. I don’t know about gifted.”

“You’re too modest.”

She studied him for a moment. His cravat was wilted and his ordinarily flawless dark hair fell untidily over his forehead. In his hand was a snifter of brandy, but he gazed at it curiously, as though he weren’t entirely sure what to do with it. He didn’t look much like Major Andrew Carrington. Somehow, he looked both very young and very old at the same time.

“Shall I play something for you?” she asked. She seldom played for a single individual. It was too personal, too intimate, but at the moment, it was the only solace she could think to offer.

“I’d like that.”

She chose “Jésu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” thinking it lighter, but stopped midmeasure when he sank into a chair, his head in one hand, the snifter hanging precariously in the other. Against her better judgment, she rose and took the glass, her hand brushing his.

He sat up straight, but refused to look at her, choosing instead to study a portrait of his mother on the wall. “I barely remember her; I was so young when she died.”

“George speaks well of her. He said she loved you both dearly.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me. It’s been a hell of a week.” He winced at the slip of his tongue. “Sorry for that as well. I’m too used to addressing soldiers these days.”

She wanted to smooth away the disheveled hair that fell across his brow, but she simply swirled the brandy in the glass. “I rather imagine it has been a difficult week.”

He smiled. “Difficult. Yes, that was the word I was looking for.”

This was just how she imagined talking to him when he came home: together, alone in the lamplight, just as the room so often was when she wrote him.

“The lieutenant colonel said you were on your way back to England to issue a report. Did you ever get to?”

“What?”

“Issue your report?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I did. The British military is very efficient, my lady. They made sure I had concluded all my duties before they gave me your letter and told me that I was selling my commission.”

“I am sorry I couldn’t have warned you sooner. It was just so very hard to get word to you so deep in Spain. It must have come as a terrible shock, and then to have to pack up your daughter and come here so quickly. I wish there was something I could have done to ease this for you, Major.”

He gave her a wry smile, and as she looked upon his lips, she wet her own. How she longed for a few hours’ escape from all the sadness in the house, and how very much she wished she might take Andrew with her. God knew, they could both make use of the respite.

“‘Major,’“ he said, repeating her. “‘My lady.’ We are so very formal, you and I. Even the tone of our letters.”

Miranda didn’t reply. She had thought their letters warm and intimate, however formal the salutations. It seemed impossible that he would have written to just anyone of the agony of composing letters to the families of the men he had lost. She had read his missives to George, and such sentiments had not appeared in them.

“I know this isn’t easy for you, Miranda,” he continued. “I remember when we lost Caroline and the baby. I didn’t know where to begin.”

Tears burned her eyes, but she didn’t know whether they were caused by the sound of her name from his lips or the mention of his late wife. He looked deeply into her eyes, and it seemed to her that some wall disappeared between them—a wall she only noticed now by its absence. Miranda nearly gasped at the naked emotion she saw etched in his face. This was the Andrew she had come to know in his strong, sprawling handwriting.

Without thinking, she took a sip of his brandy before she replied. “Your situation was much harder, I’m sure, losing her and the baby and being left with a child to raise on your own.”

He rubbed his temple as though it ached. “Emma,” he said, and there was pain in the way he spoke it. “When her mother and brother died, I told her they would be with her always, two angels looking out for her. If I was right, and Caroline can see what a mess I am making of her child, she must be ready to throttle me the minute I step over to the other side myself.”

“You mustn’t be too hard on yourself. Your career has kept you so busy.”

“I’ve been an officer too long not to take responsibility when it’s mine. I’ve had the damnedest—sorry!” He shrugged sheepishly, and she waved the breech of etiquette away with a graceful hand. “Most
difficult
”—they both smiled—”time finding a governess with the gumption to stick around. Lettie has done her best to keep the girl from going completely feral, but she’s too tender-hearted.”

Finally, Miranda set the snifter on a small table and returned to the piano bench, sitting so that she faced him. “You have your hands full with that one,” she agreed. “She’s not bad, though, just spirited and a little lost.”

“You’re very good with euphemisms. She’s ‘spirited’ or maybe ‘difficult.’ ‘Lost,’ not neglected.”

“We are all family, Andrew. No one will judge you harshly. We have come to accept one another’s imperfections here at Danford.”

“She was my little girl, you know, dogged my every step whenever I was home.” He spread his hands and looked at them, as though he had been holding something precious and then inexplicably lost it. “I can still feel her warm little body snuggled up in my lap, smelling of Caroline’s perfume and some treat filched from the kitchen. Now, I’ve lost five years with her, and I wonder if the damage can be undone.”

The ache in her heart took Miranda’s breath away. “You know, there are many parents with far less worthy excuses for the time they spend away from their children, and they never consider that time a loss. They travel, go to parties, balls, all the most fashionable places. They think of their children only when they wish to show them off in some way.”

He tilted his head and examined her face. “You speak as though from experience.”

Miranda’s gaze wandered across the piano keys. “Just an observation,” she murmured.

His guard was down, and Andrew spoke his thoughts as they came. “It is a shame that you and George …”

“What?”

“Nothing. It would have been a boorish thing to say.”

But he had pricked Miranda’s curiosity. What did Andrew Carrington know of her and George? “A shame that George and I…?”

Andrew winced. “I just remembered something you said on your wedding day…about children.” He could almost feel the lump in her throat when he watched her swallow hard. War had made him callous. She was, after all, only a woman. “I told you it was boorish. I only meant that you are young, yet…”

She stared at him a moment before a bitter laugh slipped past her tightly drawn lips. “And some other man will surely snatch me up and give me those children?”

He wanted so much to comfort her, to offer her some kind of assurance. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be a woman, to have so little control. It would be a nightmare. His voice gentle, he said, “I know it may seem so right now, but your life is far from over.”

Her voice hardened and her chin took on a stubborn tilt. “My marriage to your brother has changed very little about the way your peers see my family. Would
you
want Barbara Henley’s daughter as the mother of your heirs?”

Andrew felt his face flush. He thought of George’s crazed conversation and of his own jumbled emotions, and he looked past Miranda and out the dark window, ashamed.

“I thought not,” she said.

“I—”

Miranda rose from the bench. She had no doubt that he hadn’t meant to hurt her, but it didn’t change the fact that he had. “I think I have kept you up long enough. I promise, I will not play so late at night again and disturb your rest.” Gently, she closed the dust cover over the piano keys.

Andrew stood, too, looking as though he wanted to speak but had thought better of it. Instead, he reached for her hand. “Miranda—”

Miranda pulled her fingers beyond his reach. “Good night, Major.”

He bowed slightly, already regretting his impulsiveness. It was completely unlike him. “Good night, my lady,” he replied, feeling simultaneously relieved and bereft when she left the room.

The next morning, Andrew awoke torn between two driving needs. His stomach growled fiercely, evidence of the fact that he hadn’t eaten much for dinner the night before. At the same time, he had a burning desire
not
to run into his sister-in-law, and she would surely be at breakfast. What had possessed him last night?

He thought again of how he had taken her hand, and how she had withdrawn it, subtly reminding him that he had far overstepped his place. And to have so thoughtlessly brought up children, then blundered on about her going on with her life! Good God!

He rose and shooed away the valet who came to help him dress. He was an officer in the army, not a pampered aristocrat. Besides, the valet would have been too efficient. By taking his time with his own cravat and freshening up the polish on his boots, Andrew hoped Miranda would have time to finish her own breakfast and go about her day before he made it downstairs.

He was almost right. She had finished everything on her plate but was still sitting alone at the table when he came into the dining room. It looked as though everyone else had eaten and left, but there were still ham and eggs on the sideboard. He helped himself and sat down across the table from her.