The Viscount Needs a Wife (13 page)

H
e took her next to a short gallery with windows looking over the rear of the estate. It would be a pleasant place to sit in summer, and was large enough for exercise in bad weather. One large fireplace provided warmth, but again Kitty regretted not having her cloak.

Paintings hung on the walls, and Braydon took her to one.

“My predecessor.”

The smoothly plump man sat by a desk on which documents were spread. That was common when the sitter was a landowner, but it seemed to Kitty that the papers were mere ornaments. He had thinning dark hair and a slightly anxious expression, as if he was thinking,
Will she approve of this?

“Odd that a loving mother can make life particularly difficult.”

“You're thinking of Lady Cateril as well?”

“She tried to force Marcus to live at Cateril Manor, where she'd have fussed over him all the time. As it was, she fretted over him in letters and sometimes dispatched doctors to torment him with pointless treatments.”

“It must be hard to accept that there's no hope.”

“I see that, but she sought a miracle that would make him what he'd once been. I don't think she truly loved him as he'd become. Oh, that's unfair!”

He startled her by taking her hand. “You loved him as he was, and you did what you could to protect him.”

She looked into his cool blue eyes. “It was little enough.”

“Sometimes that's all we can do.”

His touch and understanding were so unexpected that tears threatened. She twitched away to look at the portrait again.

“There's an open locket on the table,” she said, looking closer, “with a picture of a woman. Mother or wife?”

“You're observant.” He came close beside her. “Youngish, I'd say.”

“Wife, then. He must have loved her when this was painted.”

“Or done the conventional thing.”

Kitty was tilting her head to try to make out the features of the brown-haired woman in the miniature. “It might be of his mother when young. Is there a painting of the dowager here?”

“A family group over here.”

The large painting showed a seated young woman with a boy at her knee and an older man standing behind. Though they were dressed finely, they were presented outdoors, with the park and house behind them. Lady Dauntry was plump and pretty, with dark curls, but not at all like the woman in the miniature. Lord Dauntry had rather heavy features and wore an old-style gray wig.

“They look content,” she said.

“I see them as smug. Prosperous, satisfactorily married, and with a healthy young heir. Within three years,” he added, “the fourth viscount will be dead and she will raise the fifth alone.”

“In the midst of life we are in death,” Kitty murmured, quoting from the funeral service. She turned away from the disturbing painting. “Are there any later pictures of her?”

“One. She keeps it in her boudoir.”

“I assume she's gray haired by now?”

“Somewhat. She wears ostentatious mourning caps, so it's hard to tell.”

Kitty looked around at generations of Braydons. “I suppose you'll have to have your portrait done.”

“And you. We could wait until we have a son and reproduce that one.”

“No.”

“No,” he agreed. “Portraits are odd things, aren't they? They show sitters like flies in amber, oblivious of the fate stalking them.”

Kitty thought of the painting of Marcus. “Some people lead tranquil lives,” she argued. “Consider Ruth and Andrew. They could be captured in contentment now, and there's every chance it could happen again in twenty years and then forty.”

“We'll pray for that.”

“You doubt it?”
Has he, too, detected trouble there?

“The future is a mystery to everyone. My father died when a wall fell on him.”

Surprised by a personal revelation, Kitty sat on a cushioned window seat, ready to hear more. “How?”

“Pure ill luck,” he said, strolling to sit beside her. “He was walking along a London street toward his Whitehall office. Some building work was being done, and an old wall crumbled down on top of him. A young lad nearby was killed at the same time.”

“In life we are in death, indeed. A lesson to enjoy the moment we have.”

“I agree. How did your parents die?”

“In a fire. A stove kept the chill off the bookshop in winter, and it somehow set fire to the books. They lived above. The smoke killed them. I was scarcely out of mourning when Marcus died. And now Princess Charlotte. Women do die in childbirth, but it was such a shock. Perhaps because she was a princess?” she asked.

“We believe that royalty are immune to cruel fate?” he asked. “History hardly bears that out.”

“We might at least believe that they receive the best medical attention. Many are blaming her doctors.”

“Perhaps with cause. But I suspect the universal grief is for a belief that innocents are safe. Whereas fate is a malign old crone.”

“Not for us.” She said it in instinctive reaction to his bitter tone. “Many people are fortunate, and we will be of that party.”

“By force of will?”

“If necessary. Consider this—how often have royal women died in childbirth?”

“I have no idea.” But he was thinking. “Not the queen, certainly, despite nearly twenty births. George the second's queen died long after the birth of her last child. Queen Anne suffered endless unsuccessful pregnancies, which might have harmed her health, but none directly killed her. Queen Mary died of smallpox, and James the Second's queen of cancer.”

“You've studied such matters?” she asked, astonished.

“I have a retentive memory. Elizabeth, of course, had no children, nor did Mary Tudor. Ah . . .”

“Jane Seymour!” Kitty said. “Henry the Eighth's third wife. But that's nearly three hundred years ago. So, we may all have taken as fact that queens and princesses
don't die in childbirth. Hence the shock at the affront to natural order.”

“You're smiling.”

Kitty realized she was. “Such speculations are fun. Is there a natural order?”

“I'd like to think so, and to preserve it.”

“How?”

“In any way I can.”

“I'll help you if I can.” Kitty looked around. “Speaking of which, is there a portrait of Diane Dauntry here?”

“There must have been, but it was probably destroyed.”

“Thrown on a bonfire, with the dowager dancing around it, cackling?”

“Hush.”

She looked round quickly, but there was no one there. He was correct, however. She must guard her tongue.

He walked to the fireplace and rang the bell beside it. When a maid came, he sent her for Mrs. Quiller. The woman entered with a guarded expression and seemed relieved by the simple question.

“There were two portraits, milord, a miniature and a large one. They were returned to her family.”

“What was she like?” Kitty asked.

Mrs. Quiller bridled, as if insulted. “It is not my place to say, milady.”

“I simply meant in appearance.”

“Ah. Thin and blond, milady. Will that be all?”

“Yes, thank you.”

When the woman had left, Kitty slid a look at Braydon. “Perhaps she thinks I, too, will be soon gone.”

“I expect you to prove her wrong. Onward.”

“A moment.” Kitty returned to the portrait of the fifth viscount to study the miniature again. It didn't help. The woman was definitely brown-haired and youngish, but
didn't really resemble the young dowager. It wasn't important, but the fifth viscount's marriage and the flight of his wife tweaked her curiosity. The answers must be here somewhere.

She left the gallery feeling more comfortable by the moment. She still didn't know her husband in all the many ways possible, but she could enjoy his company, which was something. It was a great deal.

He showed her the drawing room, which was in the wintry-perfection style but warmed slightly by a carpet in shades of peach and a number of paintings on the walls. It was not warmed by a fire, so must have seen little use recently. It was typically a lady's room, and the dowager had her own.

A pianoforte and a harp sat in one corner. Kitty had been taught to play a keyboard but not kept up the skill. She'd never played a harp. Was an aristocratic hostess expected to entertain her guests in that way? In that case, she'd have to apply herself to practice, which had never been her forte. She found it hard to imagine herself staging grand entertainments here. Who did she know other than the village gentry?

A house like this should host events, however, even if only local ones on high days and holidays. What was she to do about that? What was she to do about anything?

Her comfort curdled.

Beauchamp Abbey was a large and complex house, and she knew nothing of the running of such a place. It was elegant, and she was not. Everything here was luxurious and spoke of wealth, and she didn't know how to be rich. She'd known people who had come into money and wasted it or hoarded it or made ridiculous show with it. It took familiarity to deal with wealth graciously. Braydon had that. She didn't. How was she to learn?

“I require coffee after my exertions,” Braydon said, “and relief from rooms like this. We'll enjoy it in my quarters.”

They returned to the staircase, and Kitty let Sillikin make her own way down, claws clicking on slippery marble. She'd have a carpet laid there, but that wouldn't remove the sensation of entering a snow-palace stage or the presence of an invisible and hostile audience.

It was a relief to leave the hall toward the back and enter a part of the house with wooden floors and brown wainscoted walls. Not summer, but perhaps a dull autumn.

They passed the door Braydon had mentioned—the back door through which people could enter on business. People like his estate steward, she supposed, and perhaps his head groom and gardener. How many servants did he—did they—employ in total? An alarming number, she was sure.

A short corridor held three doors, and the first was open to show a young man at a desk covered with books and papers.

“My secretary, my dear. Worseley.” The man standing was surprisingly young for such a post and even blushed a little as he bowed. “Any discoveries today?” Braydon asked, then turned to Kitty. “As I said, I found the viscountcy's minor papers in disorder. Worseley attempts order—in his idle moments.”

The young man smiled at the wry comment. “I've assembled and annotated the records to do with the Lincolnshire estate, sir. The one the dowager Lady Dauntry brought into the marriage. All seems in order now, and there's reason for the lack of income.”

“That being?”

“It's a mere remnant, sir. A house and garden.”

“Ah. Perhaps those details were obscured on purpose. What an excellent fellow you are.”

Worseley blushed with pleasure. Here was a different Braydon. He was almost playful, but there could be no doubt who was lord and master.

Of course, he'd been an officer in the army, and good officers knew how to bring out the best in their men. She tended to forget Braydon's past because the soldiering didn't show through the gloss. She found it impossible to imagine him muddy and tattered, even in the heat of battle.

He showed her the next room, which had glass-doored shelves packed with ledgers, folders, and document boxes. “The muniment room. Most of the important and current estate papers were properly kept. It's only the more personal papers that are out of order. On to my inner sanctum.”

They entered, and Sillikin explored while Kitty assessed it by eye. It was a room much like his bedroom, and designed more for comfort than work. The pedestal desk, even holding neat piles of documents, seemed subordinate to a thick carpet, a large fire, and two very comfortably upholstered chairs by the fireside.

Kitty smiled. “I sense the fifth viscount overlaid by the sixth.”

“Sounds deuced odd.”

She was startled into a laugh. “I mean that your predecessor used this as his haven, not for work, and probably spent most of his time in one of the chairs. Who used the other?”

Sillikin abandoned hope of treasure and flopped down in front of the fire.

“I don't know,” Braydon said, “but the one on the left is significantly less worn. The overlay?”

Kitty considered. “The desk gives off an aura of hard work—that's you—and that cabinet is out of place.” She indicated the glossy black cabinet whose doors were
decorated with inlaid wood and mother-of-pearl. It was about five feet high. “You had it moved in here to hold more business papers than he ever bothered with.”

“You're very shrewd.”

She didn't like his tone. “At least you added the D.”

“I've seen no sign of shrewishness.”

“That's because you haven't crossed me yet.”

“Perhaps I should practice taming.”

“I recommend not!”

“You, my lady, are a shrew after all.”

“A word applied to any woman who speaks her mind.”

“Only when the mind is fierce.”

“And is there anything
wrong
with fierceness?”

He began to speak, then clearly thought better of it. “Not always, I grant you, but may I point out that I am not the enemy?”

That was a just reprimand. She'd almost lost her temper there, over nothing.

“I apologize.”

“But you enjoyed that.”

She almost protested, but he was right. “Your turn to be shrewd? True, it's been some time since I've felt able to let rip.”

“You didn't fight with Lady Cateril?”

“How could I? She was deep in genuine grief.”

“So, perhaps, is the dowager Viscountess Dauntry.”

“Is she?”

“In one sense, yes. But it's a grief that leads to war.”