‘You had morning sickness with a boy?’ Faith sounded smug to have been proved completely right. ‘Well, that rather disproves my mother’s theory too, doesn’t it?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t just morning sickness, dear. With Griff it was near constant sickness—morning, noon and night. I was always dizzy, bone tired and barely kept anything down. Not that I had any appetite to begin with. My lifelong love of food disappeared the second I conceived. If I even looked at food in the first four months I had to lie down. Even the smell of it turned my stomach...’
Charity swallowed hard as an ominous chill skittered down her spine as Mrs Philpot rattled off a list of quite specific symptoms which worryingly mirrored her own.
Not that she could possibly be pregnant of course.
Aside from the not inconsequential fact that her scandalous night with Griff had been her first and only time, and everybody knew virgins rarely conceived unless they featured in a Bible story, Griff seemed to know what he was doing. He was annoyingly, but always eminently, sensible and would have taken steps to prevent planting a baby in her belly.
Surely?
As her panicked heart threatened to beat out of her chest, she frantically searched her mind for the last memory of her courses—the courses which had always been so reliably predictable she could practically set the clock by them.
The courses she hadn’t given any thought to recently because she had been so preoccupied with everything else that was wrong with her life.
The courses that would immediately put her racing mind at rest.
She counted backwards, trying to pinpoint her last grace days from the theatre which excused her from performing as was her right, and couldn’t recall one at all in August.
Or July for that matter.
Until she came to the earth-shattering conclusion that she couldn’t actually recall being visited by her monthly curse in quite some time. And worse, if indeed her predicament could now be any worse, if she had to put her finger on the exact date of the last one, Charity hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the wretched things since Appletreewick.
Well over two months and a half ago.
Chapter Fifteen
The first Griff had known of his impending fatherhood was when a furious Augustus Brookes had turned up at his front door first thing the next morning and punched him squarely on the nose.
Since then, the last week had been a bit of a blur. If indeed a week filled with rage, accusations, bitter recriminations, crushing guilt and family feuding, all wrapped up in an enormous and looming bow of scandal could be constituted as a blur. To say tempers were high was an understatement. Even now, sat on opposite sides of St George’s Church in Bloomsbury, you could cut the atmosphere between his family and hers with a knife.
They all felt betrayed and they all blamed him, and he supposed that was no less than he deserved, all things considered. Even Dottie, who didn’t have a mean bone in her body, couldn’t look at him without shaking her head in disgust. Overnight, he had gone from being the sensible and decent Griff the Reliable Fun Spoiler to Griff the Despicable Despoiling Scoundrel and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
His mother kept weeping. His father kept glaring. Her sisters refused to speak to him, and her parents wanted his blood. The only two people in the church with a modicum of pity for his predicament were Piers and Luke, perhaps because his soon-to-be brothers-in-law understood how hard it was to resist a Brookes woman when you had inadvertently helplessly fallen in love with one—no matter how hard you tried.
Except at least Faith and Hope had loved those two men back.
In the last week whenever they were forced to collide, Charity had veered between being blasé and matter of fact or, when that façade cracked, utterly grief stricken. As she plainly was now. By the look of her pinched and swollen features she’d been crying for hours.
Not the best start to a marriage.
‘Griffith Alexander Philpot, wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?’
‘I will.’ God help him.
‘And Charity Grace Brookes, wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?’
She hesitated for an eternity, which he supposed said it all. Then her voice shook. ‘I will.’ She didn’t sound the least bit convinced by any of those vows or particularly committed to them.
Nor did she look at him as he slipped the ring on her finger or as they left the church in a carriage. Or even as they travelled the short distance from the church to his house in Burton Crescent.
Under the fraught and difficult circumstances, neither family had felt it appropriate to immediately celebrate their enforced nuptials with a traditional wedding breakfast. Instead, they had decided to break bread over a quiet dinner tonight at the Brookes’ residence in Bedford Place once the dust of the dreadful day had settled. A dinner which wasn’t as much a celebration as an attempt to heal the rift between them after Griff had thoroughly ruined their special and close friendship by thoroughly ruining Charity.
They had been duty bound to invite him as the groom, but he harboured no illusions that any of them actually wanted him there—his new wife included. Similarly, and in case he foolishly harboured any traditional thoughts of carrying her over the threshold, Charity marched through the front door the moment his housekeeper opened it and then stopped dead in the hallway. Then blinked at her new home like a startled deer staring helplessly down the barrel of a gun.
‘Would you like me to show you around?’
His question earned him a single, awkward nod.
‘Splendid...then I suppose we should start with Mrs Gibbons.’ He gestured to his hovering housekeeper. ‘She runs the place and does a very good job of it too.’
Mrs Gibbons bobbed a curtsy. ‘Welcome to your new home, Mrs Philpot.’ It wasn’t his imagination. She winced at the name before she covered it with a polite smile for the servant’s benefit. ‘It’s long past time this house had a mistress.’
To fill the ensuing silence seeing as Charity clearly had no intention of replying, Griff tried to laugh. It sounded hollow in his hallway, and a tad manic. ‘Mrs Gibbons despaired of my bachelorhood, didn’t you, Mrs Gibbons?’
‘I did indeed, sir. Such a lovely big house deserves the hubbub of a boisterous family within its fine walls and not the silence of a single man who is always holed up in his study working. There are rooms aplenty upstairs too, Mrs Philpot. Ten of them in fact and I cannot wait for them all to be filled with the laughter of your children...not that there’s any need to rush into that yet, of course. Not when I can plainly see that you are young enough not to worry about making haste. Besides, you are only a newlywed once in your lifetime and you should enjoy it for it is such a special time.’ She smiled knowingly, clearly recalling her own special time with Mr Gibbons many moons ago. ‘You’ll want time to discover how to be a wife first before you run headlong into motherhood.’
Griff cringed, wishing he’d had the wherewithal to have had the awkward conversation with his housekeeper that he clearly should have had before today. It wasn’t as if they would be able to keep the reasons for their hasty marriage a secret for much longer and his nosy housekeeper was no fool. She had birthed five babies of her own before Mr Gibbons has turned up his toes and had another five grandchildren. ‘Right this second, I think my...er...new wife and I would enjoy some tea, Mrs Gibbons, if that’s not too much trouble.’
Wife.
How strange that felt on his
lips.
‘Of course, sir. You show your lovely bride around the place and I’ll have it set up in the drawing room for when you’re done.’
He waited till she was gone then pulled a face. ‘Sorry about that...she means well and, in her defence, I haven’t told her anything yet.’
Charity offered him another curt nod, obviously content to continue to leave him to suffer for his sins in silence.
Wordlessly, she followed him from one room to the next, nodding at his explanations while her wide, darting eyes took it all in, still clutching her wedding bouquet like a pagan sacrifice, her pale expression stark and her blue eyes outraged. Back in the hallway, there was no putting off taking her upstairs any longer, which inevitably meant kicking the hornet’s nest they had tacitly so far avoided. Unless he could think of something scintillating about the architecture which delayed the great unsaid a little longer.
‘There are three floors in total, discounting the servants’ quarters in the attic and the kitchen in the cellar.’
Although what had possessed him to purchase such a ridiculously huge house last year when he returned was beyond him now, as it would likely only serve as a space they could both rattle around in while they avoided one another.
But back then, imbued with hope for a bright future and with no desire to return to living with his family after so many years of independence, he had foolishly chosen a house he had hoped he would grow into as well as grow old in. He’d had lofty plans of meeting a new woman, falling head over heels in love with her and then raising a huge family here with her just as Mrs Gibbons had said. That was, however, when he had still optimistically believed he could exorcise Charity from his heart and start afresh. A pathetic hope which he had clung to until Sheffield. Now that they were married and she was carrying his child, he had no earthly clue if that would be their one and only or if she would consider more. At this rate, and with things so frosty between them, he had no earthly clue if they would ever exchange a civil word let alone share a bed again. That detail, like countless looming others, was yet to be decided.
Like a condemned man on the way to the gallows he climbed up the stairs while she trailed behind, then he paused outside his door. ‘I tend to sleep in this bedchamber.’
What sort of namby-pamby non-committal sentence was that?
He didn’t tend to sleep there—he slept there. He’d be delighted if she decided to sleep in there with him too but he’d be damned if he’d admit that aloud any time soon. Not when she was still clutching her bouquet like a shield and looked ready to jump on any excuse to turn it into a weapon.
‘When I am in London, I mean, as opposed to Sheffield...’ Why the blazes had he said that when the word Sheffield always conjured images of what they had done in Sheffield? ‘That’s when I tend to sleep in there.’
Good grief, that was even worse!
His toes curling inside his boots he flung open the door so she could look inside, which she chose to do rooted to the spot behind him showing absolutely no desire to venture in and explore the space further, staring at the big bed and swallowing hard. An omen if ever there was one about the state of their fledgling union.
‘And there’s a matching suite over here.’ He marched stiffly across to the adjacent door and then through it simply to avoid the brittle air which enveloped them. ‘I thought this could be your bedchamber...if it is to your liking, of course. If not, there are eight more.’ All without the threat of an interconnecting door in the wall between them. Not that he felt inclined to mention that convenience yet in case she deemed such a marital familiarity as a gross inconvenience to her.
Good grief this was all so blasted awkward! His feeble smile felt like a grimace but he still held it in place. ‘But this has the biggest bed...’ he found himself swallowing as he pointed to it, his mind instantly picturing her lying rumpled and naked on the pristine white sheets ‘...a dressing room and a lovely view over the garden.’ Which he gestured to through the window with an over-enthusiastic sweep of his arm. That done, he suddenly had no earthly clue what to do with his arms, so he clamped them behind his back and resisted the pathetic urge to rock on his heels while he awaited her judgement.
Gingerly she stepped inside to give it the once over and then offered him the single curt nod which seemed to be the only way they were now doomed to communicate.
‘Splendid...then I’ll have all your things unpacked in here as soon as they arrive later.’
Another nod, a martyred one, and after a week of bending over backwards to do the right thing by her as fast as was humanly possible, his last taut and frayed nerve finally snapped in despair.
‘This isn’t just my fault, Charity!’ Griff exploded like a grenade, arms waving and expression incensed. Real emotion at last after a week of rigid stoicism. ‘There were two of us in that bed that night and I don’t recall you being a passive bystander during any of it! In fact, it was you...’ he shook a quaking finger at her ‘...you who instigated it!’ Then he started to pace, mimicking her voice and punctuating every word with his stupid, sanctimonious finger too. ‘“I could have any man I want, Griff! Any man! Even you, Griff!”’
‘I know what I said!’
‘She speaks! It’s a miracle!’
* * *
Incensed, she threw her bouquet at his head and scowled when he dodged to avoid it and it hit the wall instead sending a shower of petals everywhere. ‘Go to hell, Griffith Philpot!’
‘You’re too late, Charity Philpot—I am already there!’
Then he huffed out a sigh and closed his eyes momentarily, no doubt burying everything inside again where she couldn’t see it. When he opened them, they were filled with such sadness that it undid her. It was strangely reassuring to know that he was hurting too. ‘But at least I am trying to make the best of it and am not behaving like a spoiled and belligerent child! And I am the one everyone has blamed for what happened.’
That was also depressingly true.
Not once, not with her family, and his, all railing at him for his treachery, had he ever hinted at her part in what actually happened. Or reminded everyone that she was a famously shocking flirt or even alluded to all the many scandalous stories about her in the gossip columns. Which had allowed her to play the innocent victim in their Shakespearean tragedy while he was cast as the selfish seducer. The insidious villain of the piece.
For all his low opinions of her, that was extremely noble. If anything, he had been nothing but decent about the whole affair—right from the morning they had awoken in her bed and he had unreservedly offered to marry her despite his lack of enthusiasm for the chore. Charity didn’t suppose there were many men who would allow another man to punch them in the face on their own doorstep either, and not punch them straight back. But Griff had taken his punishment from her father like a gentleman and his stoic magnanimity and willingness to stand by her side this past week shamed her.
‘This wasn’t what I wanted.’ She wanted to curl up into a ball and weep but had to settle for gesturing limply to the room with gloomy despondence instead. ‘It’s not at all the wedding day I envisioned.’
‘You don’t say?’ He laughed without humour, his tone laced with bitter sarcasm. ‘You mean it wasn’t your girlish romantic dream to be carelessly impregnated by Gruff Griff the Repressed Fun Spoiler after one misguided night of passion, then shackled to him for all eternity on the back of it?’ He raked a hand through his dark hair and slumped to sit on the mattress, all the fight in him suddenly gone and his expression as wretched as she suspected hers was. ‘I am well aware I am not the husband of your choosing, Charity, and that hardly fills me with confidence for our marriage either.’
She sat beside him, deciding to be honest. ‘I wanted what Faith has with Piers and what Hope has with Luke.’ The magical ingredients of love, mutual respect and happiness.
‘Ah...well...’ He reached for he
r hand and instantly the world felt a bit better. ‘Maybe a miracle will happen. But in the meantime, how about we try not to murder one another while we work out how to rub along first?’
‘Just rubbing along?’ She stared at their interlaced fingers in case he witnessed the disappointment in her eyes. ‘Is that the best we can hope for, do you think?’
He was quiet for the longest time before he sighed. ‘Beneath my undoubtedly gruff, dull and sensible exterior beats the heart of an optimist and a dreamer and for a little while, not so long ago, we were good together, you and I.’ Then he kissed her hand—soft, tender, potent again—before he used it to haul her up. ‘Come on...let me show you the rest of the house and then we’ll have some tea.’
‘And then?’
He shrugged, smiling. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day, they built it brick by brick, and we are both clever people so I’m sure we’ll work it out.’
‘Because nothing is unfixable?’
He nodded as he tugged her towards the door. ‘As long as you keep believing you can fix it.’
Chapter Sixteen
Poor Griff was a social pariah at the tense celebration dinner later that night. At best, their families ignored him as they tried to pretend that the strong bonds between the Brookes and the Philpots would see them through the crisis, at worst they were all unbearable. Hers, unsurprisingly, were the absolute worst. Whatever the topic, either her mother or her father found a way to use it as an unsubtle dig at her new husband, yet to his credit he took each unfair blow on the chin.
‘How was Torbay, Piers?’ Luke filled the umpteenth awkward silence during the interminable main course with an innocuous question while Charity warily chewed a sliver of boiled potato.
How Not to Chaperon a Lady--A sexy, funny Regency romance Page 15
