by Liz Carlyle
But Frederica was a half-dozen thoughts behind him. “Bentley, you never said one word to me of marriage,” she whispered. “You—why, you left me in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again! Did you expect me to—to what? Go down to breakfast and announce that I’d surrendered my virtue to you? My God, Gus and Elliot would have killed you! And that I could not have borne. So, yes, I hushed it up. What else was I to do?”
Against her spine, she felt her husband’s body stiffen. “Freddie, good God!” he whispered, his tone one of horror. “I never left you in the middle of the night! It was dawn—or so near it your bloody chambermaid practically burst in on us. I had to jump half naked out your window! Do you know how high up that is? Do you? I damn near broke my leg! I limped for a fortnight!”
Amazed laughter bubbled up in her throat. “Oh, Bentley! Surely you did not?”
“Dash it, Freddie, don’t laugh at me!” he warned. “Not after the agony and doubt you put me through.”
She tried to control her mirth, but the vision of her husband jumping naked out a second-story window was a bit much to bear with any semblance of grace. “Bentley, I am so glad to know now that you wanted me,” she said. “But I am not omniscient. A word or a note would have been most helpful.”
Her husband’s anger had melted. “Freddie, my God, I did!” he whispered, looking vaguely mystified. “I wrote you a very pretty proposal. Spent an hour and every sheet of paper you had doing it, too. I set it on your bloody windowsill. Surely you do not mean to say…you do not suggest—”
“Oh, my God!” Freddie widened her eyes. “I wondered who’d used all my paper! You left a note? Where? When?”
“That very morning!” he said insistently. “Didn’t you get it? I had to make sure you understood…how I felt. Bad, Freddie. I felt bad. But I felt other things, too. And I wanted to marry you, Freddie. I don’t think I let myself know how much until you didn’t answer me. But it took me so long to write that bloody note—I kept scratching through and ripping up—and by the time I had it right, the chambermaid turned up. Damn, Freddie it was a near-run thing.”
Frederica felt an awful ache in her chest and an enormous knot in her throat. He had written her a proposal? A very pretty one, he said. And she believed him, too. After all they had been through, she did not know why it should matter so much to her, but it did. Oh, it did.
“And you wanted me?” she choked, one tear sliding down her nose. “Not just the child but me, too? You are not sorry? You do not regret this?”
Bentley set one hand over her belly, barely rounded now, and made a soft circle with his palm. “Good Lord, Freddie, I regret almost everything in my life—but this? You? No, those things I’ll never, ever regret.” Suddenly, he cleared his throat, and his face took on an awkward expression. “Here, now, give me your hand,” he said gruffly.
Curious, she did so. Then she watched as Bentley slid the heavy signet ring from his little finger. The same ring that had winked at her in the moonlight that fateful night at Chatham Lodge. The ring she had studied so intently on their wedding day. And the ring which had so cruelly grazed her temple. In the dying light, he held it up between them.
“Frederica d’Avillez,” he whispered. “Will you marry me?”
Frederica smiled quizzically. “I already did.”
Holding her gaze, Bentley shook his head. “No, that was a marriage with mights and maybes attached to it,” he answered. “I love you, and this time, I want us to marry for better or for worse. Forever and ever. With no getting out of it and no looking back.”
“Do you know, Bentley,” she whispered. “I think I already did that, too. But yes, and yes, a thousand times over, yes.”
And on the last yes, Bentley slid his ring down her finger until it rested loosely above the one he’d given her on their wedding day. Then he pulled her into his arms and kissed her, long and deep, the way he’d learned she liked it.
When he’d finished—and it was a good long while, since he was the sort of man who liked to take things slow and easy—Frederica let her head fall back against his arm. “Bentley Rutledge!” she whispered, her voice soft with amazement. “Do you know you are the sweetest, kindest, most perfect man I have ever known?”
And in that instant, she knew that it was true. For all his wicked smiles and slipshod ways, he had a heart of purest gold. He had always been a good friend. He had become a wonderful lover. And he was going to be a splendid father. In short, he was the very embodiment of that long list of qualities which she had always wanted in her perfect husband—well, all of them save one. But perhaps that one she could do without?
She stared into her husband’s eyes and thought of that awful day the dressmaker had come to Strath. Of how she had cried in Evie’s arms, because her life was to be forever half empty. She had pinned her hopes, she’d told herself, on romantic love. She had been waiting for her dream lover, that one perfect man who could make her feel safe and secure and deeply loved. She had wanted a man who was wise, well grounded, and worthy of her deepest respect—and one who was very, very ordinary.
“Oh, well!” said Frederica.
Then, laughing through her tears, she shrugged and threw her arms around his neck. No, Bentley Rutledge could never, ever be ordinary. Not in a million years. But then, a girl couldn’t have everything, could she?
Epilogue
A Twice-Told Tale.
“Dearly beloved, ye have brought these children here to be baptized, and ye have prayed that our Lord Jesus Christ would vouchsafe to receive them, to release them from sin.” A shaft of twinkling emerald light sliced across the Reverend Mr. Prudhome’s prayer book as he solemnly worked his way through the ministration of holy baptism.
He motioned the godparents forward. Lord Treyhern and Lord Rannoch stepped up to the font, followed by their wives. Mr. Prudhome cleared his throat sharply. “Dost thou believe all the articles of the Christian faith as contained in the Apostles’ Creed?” he intoned. “And wilt thou endeavor to have these children instructed accordingly?”
Beside him, Catherine gave Cam a subtle nudge, but, of course, it was unnecessary.
“I do believe them,” Cam answered without so much as glancing at his open prayer book. “And by God’s help, I will endeavor so to do.”
The Reverend Mr. Prudhome—who knew precisely where his bread was buttered—smiled indulgently at his lordship. “And wilt thou endeavor to have them brought up in the fear of God?” he asked, the smile deepening. “And to obey his holy Will and Commandments?”
“I will, by God’s assistance.”
And so it went, line upon line, until Mr. Prudhome took the child into his arms. “Name this child,” he instructed the godparents.
“Luciana Maria Teresa dos Santos Rutledge,” said Cam, rattling off the foreign names as flawlessly as he would his own. Mr. Prudhome echoed the words as he dipped his hand into the font. Luciana merely gurgled and crammed one corner of her lace collar in her mouth. The rector swapped off infants and repeated his command to name the child.
“Frederick Charles Stone dos Santos Rutledge,” said Cam smoothly.
Blister it! thought Bentley. Perfect as always.
In fact, none of the godparents missed a syllable. Frederick Charles Stone dos Santos Rutledge went quietly over the font. But when the cold water trickled down his bald head, he started, gave the Reverend Mr. Prudhome a bleary, cross-eyed look, then ripped off a belch which echoed off the rafters.
“God help us all,” whispered Freddie beside him as the new rector wiped something from his crisp white surplice. “That one’s a Rutledge for sure.”
Moments later, the crowd was flooding into the churchyard, jerking their cloaks and coats snug as they stepped into the sharp, wintry air. On the top step, Bentley paused to rifle through his pockets until he found a ten-pound note. “Here,” he said, shoving it into Gus Weyden’s fist. “Don’t spend it all on your red-haired opera dancer.”
“What’s this?” rumb
led a vaguely malevolent voice behind them.
Bentley looked back to see Rannoch towering in the doorway. Undeterred, Gus grinned up at him. “Rutledge laid me a tenner the godparents couldn’t say all those names without bollixing one of ’em up,” he chortled, shoving the note into his coat pocket.
“Bentley!” Frederica jabbed him hard with her elbow. “You never!”
He winced and cut her a sorrowful, sidelong glance. “Have you any notion, Freddie, what it costs to feed and clothe two children at once?” he asked. “And then there’s the schooling. The come-out. The grand tour. The marriage settlements. I tell you, one of us will be treading the boards and the other picking pockets in Covent Garden before this is over.”
“God spare me!” groaned Rannoch. Behind them, he clutched at his chest, then pushed his way past and down the steps. Gus just winked, then hastened off to snatch little Luciana from the crook of Evie’s arm.
Ignoring propriety, Bentley looped his arm around Frederica’s waist, and together they stepped onto the grass. “Don’t give Elliot a coronary, or Evie will never forgive me,” she warned good-naturedly. “Besides, when you persuaded me to marry you, you said you were rich as Croesus.”
“Shot it all, Freddie love,” he said, stroking a hand down his lapel. “On all these christening clothes. Kem has expensive taste, you know.”
“Bentley Rutledge, you are the most egregious liar!”
Just then, a shadow appeared at Bentley’s elbow. “Il Cavaliere di Dischi,” rasped a low, soft voice. “Buongiorno!”
Slowly, and with a touch of dread, Bentley turned around. Though the signora had been visiting at Catherine’s for a week, she’d not been in attendance at the baptism. But here she was now, springing on him out of nowhere. He smiled, and offered his arm. “Good morning, Signora Castelli.”
To his shock, the wizened old woman was grinning. He’d not thought it possible. “Twins!” she said, gleefully smacking her hands together. “Twins! Again! It is in the blood!”
Bentley smiled warmly. “I’m glad it pleases you, ma’am,” he said sincerely. “All my teasing aside, it certainly pleases me.”
The old woman elbowed him lightly. “Si, fertile fields, you Rutledges!” she cackled. “I have considered this well, Cavaliere, and I see now my error.”
“Your error, ma’am? I marvel you even know the word.”
The signora squinted at him. “The question we asked, it was impossible for the cards to answer, no?” she answered, opening her arms expansively. “And so I thought—Dio mio!—I really thought I had lost the gift! This glorious event I could not foresee! Now, your sister, the Lady Catherine—that I saw! Twins, plain as the nose on my face.”
And a dashed impressive nose it was, too. “Did you predict that, ma’am?” he asked, curious.
Sagely, the old woman nodded. “Si, when I read her cards,” she whispered, narrowing one eye. “But that is the difference, you see, Cavaliere? It was her cards which I read.”
Throughout this conversation, Frederica had remained strangely silent. Bentley gave her hand an affectionate squeeze where it lay upon his arm. “Then all I ask, signora, is that you keep those blasted cards far away from Freddie here. If she’s to go through another birthing, I’d as soon not know it ’til I must. These two shaved a score off my life.”
“Ah, too late!” the old woman cackled. “Too late! Too late!”
“Too late?” Too late for what? Surely she did not mean…
Beside him, he felt Freddie inching away from his grasp. He gripped her hard by the elbow and turned to face her. Freddie had lost most of her color. She would not hold his gaze.
“Tell me,” he rasped. “Tell me, Freddie, that this woman is insane. Deranged. Attics-to-let. Tell me you aren’t—aren’t—already—”
Her smile crooked, Freddie shook her head. “Oh, no, I only let her read my cards!” she protested. “Last night after dinner, when you went into the gun room with Max.”
“And—?” he demanded.
“Well,” said Freddie witheringly. “Remember, my love, when we joked about that cricket team?”
The old woman plucked at his coat sleeve. “Sette, Cavaliere!” she cried joyously. “Sette! A most providential number! In this marriage, you will be many times blessed! Thank God for that big house, eh?”
“Sette?” whispered Bentley, grappling with the bits of Latin and Italian which rolled around loose in his head. “Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette—why, that’s—that’s—”
The old woman lifted her gold-knobbed stick and shook it in the air. “Si, seven!” she shouted, like some deranged spectator at a hazard table. In the dispersing crowd, feet froze and heads turned. Helene coughed. Zoë giggled. And the Reverend Mr. Prudhome, who apparently did not approve of jocularity in the churchyard, smiled tightly and stalked back toward them.
The old woman just wrinkled her impressive nose, crossed herself, and hobbled away.
Freddie patted her husband solicitously on the arm. “Poor dear!” she murmured as Mr. Prudhome bore down on them. “Seven children! Let’s tell Gus. Maybe he’ll feel sorry for you and give back the tenner.”
But Bentley was rapidly throwing off the shock. “Oh, I’ve a better notion, Freddie,” he said, sliding one hand around to pinch her lightly on the derrière. “Why don’t you feel sorry for me and let me start working on Number Three right after luncheon?”
And then Bentley Rutledge shocked them all—well, really only the Reverend Mr. Prudhome, who was new in the village—when he snatched his wife by the waist, kissed her soundly, then lifted her up and twirled her round and round the churchyard.
