But, oh, Hawthorne was so blessedly robust. Margaret helped him out of his clothes, and he did the same for her, though she left her shift on. Some habits would take time to conquer. Maybe by candlelight…
“Come to bed,” Hawthorne said, scooping her into his arms. “We are married, and by God it’s time we enjoyed some of that bliss everybody’s always snickering about.” He tossed her onto the mattress as if she weighed no more than a velvet pillow, then came down over her and nuzzled her temple. “I wanted to kill Bancroft. Wanted to wrap my hands around his skinny neck and watch him gasp for air, but I thought you’d disapprove.”
“Not entirely, but we must be mindful of the example we set for the children. Nonetheless, I appreciate the sentiment that—kiss me again.”
Hawthorne obliged, though the dratted man had stores of patience that made Margaret forget all about her trying day. She kissed him back, reveling in the sheer delight of being private with her husband. Hawthorne was spectacularly aroused in no time—a fine quality in a husband—and then Margaret got the inspiration to tickle him.
To laugh and love felt wonderful. To join her body to his and let the glory of erotic pleasure eclipse all else was a joy beyond description. She had not known pleasure could be so exuberant and lusty, had not foreseen that physical intimacy could be at once sublime and simply human. When she lay panting on Hawthorne’s chest—the tickling had escalated to wrestling—she found she was indeed exhausted and at peace.
Almost.
Hawthorne drew patterns on her back, his breathing a gentle tide beneath her. “I should get dressed,” he said. “Tell me to get dressed.”
“What’s the rush?” The rhythm of his breathing, full and deep, slow and calm, lulled her toward sleep. And toward profound gratitude for the man she’d married.
“We have serious matters to discuss, my dear, and I’m to summon my brothers as well. If I don’t summon them, they might well come calling uninvited, and the teasing we will endure if we’re caught literally napping…”
“Not teasing.” Margaret kissed her husband’s brow. “Envy. They will be so envious of us, they will gallop off to find spouses of their own. I do love you, Hawthorne. Very much.”
She could make that admission while he was caressing her back, her cheek pressed to his. She bid a silent farewell, not to Charles’s memory, but to the shadows on that memory that had prevented her from proper grieving and from letting go.
“I love you, too, Margaret-mine, but I meant what I said when I referred to serious matters that must be discussed.”
Margaret sat up, hoping to see humor lurking in her husband’s eyes, but no teasing light leavened his words. “We’ve discussed accidental death and even murder, Hawthorne. What could be more serious than that?”
He gathered her close, so they were again skin to skin. “I’ll tell you what could be more serious than murder.” He put his lips near her ear. “Motherhood.”
Hawthorne felt the shock of the word—motherhood—go through Margaret as a shiver. He drew the covers up over her and prayed for fortitude.
“Greta has her papa’s eyes and his smile,” he said. “What I cannot puzzle out is how she came to be called your niece rather than your daughter.”
A fraught silence gathered, while Hawthorne traced a four-leaf clover on Margaret’s back.
“Lucas died without knowing I was expecting.”
“I’m sorry.” How much loss was one woman to endure? “How did he die?”
“Measles. I had measles as a child. I recovered. Lucas was an adult, in the pink of health, but the disease progressed to lung fever, and there was no saving him. It’s worse for babies and adults, apparently. I was so upset, so surprised and unprepared. I did not realize that I had conceived until the situation became obvious even to me. Lucas told me I could not conceive, not from a few encounters, and I was too embarrassed to ask Hannah for particulars…”
Perhaps Lucas had been that ignorant, but Hawthorne doubted it. Hannah would likely have provided a better education than that to her grandson.
“But you did conceive.”
Margaret nodded, her hair tickling Hawthorne’s chin. “Charles came upon me out gathering spearmint. I was crying—the scent of spearmint still makes me sad—because I missed Lucas, because I did not know what to do, because soon everybody would know what a fool I had been. I had little in the way of means to support a child, and I felt… I was tired all the time, food had no appeal, and my aunt was threatening to cast me out.”
“The same aunt who didn’t teach you enough basic biology to protect yourself from handsome young men—that aunt?”
For the first time since they’d embarked on this topic, Margaret peered at Hawthorne. “You blame her for that?”
I certainly don’t blame you. “You had no papa, no brothers, not even cousins who might have protected you from charming bounders. Of all young women, you should have been equipped with a factual understanding of conception. Maybe Lucas Weller meant to marry you, but he neglected to tend to that detail before he went walking with you in the beechwood, didn’t he? And from what I recall, Lucas had only a laborer’s skills, though he could have learned medicine from Hannah, as you did.”
“He was learning, and he was a hard worker.”
What the hell good, what damned good at all, was a young man’s capacity for hard work when he’d left a woman alone to fend for herself and for a child she hadn’t known could come along?
“My ignorance is no excuse,” Margaret said. “I should not have let Lucas so much as kiss me. I knew better.”
“For all your herbal expertise, you apparently knew next to nothing. Tell me about Greta.”
Margaret rolled away so she lay beside Hawthorne on the bed. “The London doctors told Charles that he hadn’t long to live. I knew him because he consulted with Hannah regularly, and when he proposed marriage—his name in exchange for my medical care—the bargain seemed heaven-sent. The only difficulty was that Greta would arrive at such a time that Charles would have been away in London when she was conceived. Then too, Charles did not expect to live long enough to be any sort of father to her. His sister was expecting, and placing Greta with her seemed like an ideal solution.”
Hawthorne did not care for this heaven-sent, ideal solution at all. “Charles talked you into the notion that Adriana and Greta could be his sister’s twins.” Why not allow the mother and child to remain together, for God’s sake?
But then, Charles had been facing death, and Margaret would have suffered all manner of judgment if it had become known she’d married Charles while carrying another man’s child.
“Charles’s sister had been trying for years to start a family,” Margaret said. “She leaped at the chance to become a mother twice over, and I hadn’t the backbone to insist that Charles give me his name and accept a cuckold’s horns at the same time. His illness robbed him of much dignity, and to be honest, my feelings regarding a baby were mixed. I can see in hindsight that I was infatuated with Lucas—only infatuated—and for a time, I was infuriated with him too.”
Hawthorne longed to take Margaret in his arms, but settled for linking his hand with hers beneath the covers. “Your feelings aren’t mixed now. You would die for those children.”
She turned on her side so she faced him. “I want to steal them away and disappear to darkest Peru with them, Hawthorne. I let Greta go once, and it nearly killed me. We had a few months together while Charles’s sister finished her confinement, but before Greta could crawl, I had to leave her. I hate that. I hate knowing I left her in another’s care when I was on hand to love her, but now Adriana has been left with me and has no mama at all.”
“They have you. They both have you.” And you all have me.
Margaret withdrew her hand from his. “How did you know?”
“You will recall that I did not come to our union in a state of ignorant chastity.”
That earned him a small smile. “Thank the Deity for that.”<
br />
“Thank a certain Oxford widow, among others. Mrs. Plumley was a mother. She was not a widow. Childbearing can change a woman’s body.”
“But I keep my shift…” Margaret closed her eyes. “In the herbal. You took off my shift, and I forgot to slip it back on before I left the bed. You saw the marks on my belly.”
“I saw all of you, naked as the day you arrived in the world. A more fetching sight I have yet to behold.”
She sat up, tucking the sheet under her arms. “I’ve lied to you, Hawthorne. Married you under false pretenses. I am sorry for that, but I didn’t think you’d wed a woman who’d conceived an illegitimate child and given that child to another to raise. Your family has significant consequence, while I’m… I married above my station, both times.” She folded the sheet in a careful crease. “Are you angry?”
Hawthorne sat up too, so they both had their backs to the headboard. “I am enraged.”
She ducked her head. “You are entitled to your temper. If you’d like to establish your household at the Dorning Hall steward’s cottage, I will understand, but I hope that the girls—”
A soft tap on the door to the sitting room adjacent to the bedroom had Margaret drawing the sheet up higher.
“Go away!” Hawthorne bellowed. “Mrs. Dorning is resting.”
“Callers, sir. Your brothers are here.”
Margaret flopped back against the pillows. “Higgins would not disturb us unless your brothers were being insistent.”
“They are always insistent, but you and I are not done with the discussion. Nobody will be moving anywhere just yet, Mrs. Dorning. Our first priority is to return the children to Summerton, and for that, my brothers might be of some use.”
She was off the bed before he could kiss her, and maybe that was for the best. Valerian and Oak would be delighted that Hawthorne and his new wife were unable to immediately receive callers in the middle of the afternoon, but given the day’s events, Hawthorne was not in the mood to be teased.
“The physicians said a change of air would do you good,” Emily said. “The trip down here has left you more exhausted than you were in London.”
Papa watched her pace, his expression bemused. When had he grown so pale? The afternoon sun slanting into the guest parlor revealed not only dust on the piano, but a further decline in Papa’s health.
“Stop fretting, Daughter. Anybody would need time to recover from more than a hundred miles of the king’s highways.”
No, they would not. Not when those hundred miles were taken at a snail’s pace in the most luxurious traveling coach ever commissioned.
Papa is losing ground, and I am losing my wits. “So now that we’re here, what do you think of Summerfield?”
“The acreage is considerable, the neighborhood pretty. The house is structurally sound, and you’ve the money to kit it out any way you please.”
Emily had the money to kit out half the country manors in England however she pleased, but she had only the one father.
“The steward is evasive when I ask him about marling, crop rotation, tenancies, and the like.”
Papa shifted as if uncomfortable, though the sofa was well upholstered. “Hartley is a man, in case that detail eluded your notice. He’s probably unused to females interrogating him. If ever a woman was suited to the post of magistrate, you are she.”
Emily stuffed a pillow behind Papa’s back. “I am not inclined to take on Summerfield.” Papa believed that land was the bridge that, when crossed, could make a cit into a squire. In Emily’s experience, a cit with a huge country estate was a laughingstock, at best.
“You have turned up your pretty nose at the past four possibilities I have paraded past you, Emily Catherine. Is your objection to the property or to Bancroft Summerfield?”
She took the place beside her father on the sofa. “Both. The front drive needs a fresh load of shells if the ruts and pits aren’t to become worse. The growing season is well under way, and he hasn’t even finished shearing. I went riding with him this morning, and I can tell you his hedges are overgrown, his ditches haven’t been cleared in several years, and his tenant cottages need repairs.”
That bothered Emily. The tenants could not by law make their own repairs to a rental property, and those families had children. A smoking chimney, a persistent draft, a leak that encouraged mold… Those evils were to be expected in London slums, not in the “pretty” countryside.
What bothered her even more was her conversation with Margaret Dorning.
“Child, you want too much,” Papa said. “You want a perfectly run estate that yet turns a healthy profit, but I tell you, that’s not how farming works. The land is a jealous mistress. She will take all of your profits and give you a flood or drought in return. A prudent man makes only those improvements necessary to wrest a good crop from his acres, and he saves his coin for the lean years. Bancroft is shrewd enough to see how intelligent you are and lazy enough to let you have the running of the place. You can manage him and Summerfield easily.”
When had life come to such a pass that Emily must consign herself to a shrewd, lazy husband? “I never aspired to be a country squire’s unpaid steward or his intimate convenience. You and Mama were a love match. Is it too much to ask that I esteem my husband?”
Papa patted her hand, his fingers cold against her knuckles. “Such blunt speech won’t win you any man’s regard. You will be miserable married to a fellow you cannot manage, and Bancroft is all but begging for a female to put him to rights. He’s already notorious for leaving Town without paying his gambling debts. Next, he’ll mortgage this property and end his days in debtors’ prison unless an obliging horse tosses him headfirst into a ditch betimes.”
“And for the pleasure of letting him raid my settlements, I’m to take on the job of nannying a grown man and raising his children?”
Valerian Dorning sprang to mind, a younger son without property or means. He would never turn into a sot, much less end his days in debtors’ prison or leave a debt of honor unpaid. Bancroft had been given so much, and he was doing so little with it. He was handsome, but fortune hunters were supposed to be handsome.
Papa said nothing. Emily at first thought he was nodding off, which had begun to happen since coming to Dorset. He had taken to sitting in the garden when the children exercised the dog, and invariably, the hound greeted him and ended up reclining at Papa’s feet.
His gaze went to the window, where a beautiful spring day was ripening into its afternoon glory.
“Emily, we are running out of time. My businesses are in the hands of good managers, and I know they will consult with you on any major decisions, but you—my most precious daughter—cannot wait for a perfect match. Bancroft can frolic with your settlements all he pleases, and you will never know want. The lawyers will keep him in check to that extent. As an unmarried heiress, you are vulnerable. I would like to go to my reward at peace in the knowledge that your situation has been settled.”
Emily subsided onto the piano bench rather than debate the truth. If Papa himself acknowledged his ill health, arguing with him would be unkind and a waste of breath.
But, oh, to lose him. To lose the only man who treated her as if she had half a brain, the only man she could trust to take her interests to heart. And now he, too, was counseling her to compromise, to settle, to yoke herself to a husband whose greatest claim was that she and her lawyers could manage him.
“I will think about your advice, Papa, but you are wrong. You say I can be happy only with a man I can manage, as a governess manages an unruly toddler. I suspect the opposite is true: I can never be happy with a man I must manage, and surely Bancroft Summerfield is such a creature.”
A dog barked in the garden, a happy, exuberant noise suggesting Captain was playing tag with the children.
“The faithful hound is exercising with his charges again,” Papa said, pushing to the edge of the sofa cushion and then to his feet. He kept hold of the arm of the sofa for a moment befo
re straightening. “Perhaps you’d fetch my cane and see me to the garden. I’ve a mind to sit in the sun for a bit.”
Emily complied, and as she offered her father her arm for the journey down the terrace steps, she considered Margaret Dorning’s words. Bancroft did not love the beautiful, lively, wonderful children throwing a stick for the dog. He did not love his estate. He had affirmatively misrepresented his sister-in-law, and he didn’t care enough for his sheep to see them comfortably shorn as hot weather approached.
Emily seated Papa on a sunny bench, then continued on to the folly at the foot of the garden. The day was lovely, not quite hot as long as the breeze blew, and the scent of scythed grass added a pleasant tang to the air.
“I cannot manage a fool who loves only himself,” Emily muttered when she had the privacy to express herself honestly.
And yet, where would that leave the children if Bancroft refused to send them back to their aunt and Emily declined to become Mrs. Bancroft Summerfield? Was she to accept his proposal for the sake of a pair of girls she barely knew?
Maybe. They were very dear, and very small, and had neither mama nor papa to love and protect them.
The dog snatched up the stick Miss Fenner had pitched over the greening flowerbeds and loped off with it to drop his treasure at Papa’s feet. Papa made no move to pick it up, but remained, chin on chest, dozing in the brilliant sunshine.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Hawthorne was prepared for Oak and Valerian to greet him in the family parlor. Instead, the room was crowded with Dornings.
Grey, Earl of Casriel, looking natty but tired, occupied the reading chair. Valerian lounged by the window, Oak examined the portrait over the mantel—three small children seated on some steps—and Sycamore was sniffing the stoppers of each decanter on the sideboard.
“My dear,” Hawthorne said, taking Margaret by the hand and drawing her into the room, “we’ve been invaded. Gentlemen, may I present to you my wife, Mrs. Margaret Mallory Summerfield Dorning. I will soundly thrash any brother who gives my Margaret cause to regret marrying me.”
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