Jamie blushed, but said, “Your apple dumplings.”
“Well, yes. And also my shoulders, for some unfathomable reason, although to my mind they are entirely unremarkable. But he never noticed what I wore, or praised my mutton pie, as you did last Sunday.”
Then it was Jamie’s turn to say, “Oh!” in a surprised voice. He went down to dinner, his lovely wife on his arm, in a very contented frame of mind.
Dinner passed off as usual, and the gentlemen lingered over the port. Then Jamie was sucked into a rubber of whist with theduke, which was impossible to refuse. His surreptitious glances around the room revealed that Georgie was not in her usual spot near the candelabrum with her embroidery, nor was she amongst the other ladies. It was not until the tea things were brought in that he was able to see that she was not in the room at all.
“Has Georgie gone upstairs already?” he said to Charlotte, who happened to be nearby.
“She was feeling unwell, so she went up to bed.”
“Unwell?” he said, with a frisson of alarm.
“A headache, I think,” Charlotte said vaguely. “She said she would sleep it off, anyway. We offered the usual remedies, but she wanted nothing.”
Jamie slipped away, and made his way with rapid steps up the back stairs nearest to their apartment. The parlour was in darkness, so he went into the bedroom. A single candle flickered in the draught from the open door, revealing an empty bed. He looked further into the darkness. Was there a hint of kingfisher blue on the floor beneath the window?
She was sitting, knees drawn up, her face buried in her skirts.
“Georgie?” he said softly. “Is there anything I can get for you?”
Mutely she shook her head.
“Shall I send for the apothecary? The physician from Brinchester?”
She looked up at him then, and he could see her face streaked with tears. “No. There is nothing to be done.”
“Oh, Georgie!”
With quick steps he crossed the room and sat down beside her, lifting an arm to enfold her. Without a word, she curled into him, buried her face in his shoulder and burst into a fresh flood of tears.
“Whatever is it, my dear?” he said, as soon as her grief subsided a little.
“The baby,” she whispered.
He felt the pain as acutely as a sword thrust to the heart. “Oh, no! My poor darling! I am so sorry.”
“There must be something wrong with me,” she wailed. “Other women have no trouble, why do I keep losing babies?”
“The second duchess had terrible trouble that way, too. She lost baby after baby, but she was still confined successfully four times. So there is still hope, Georgie.”
“I’m not sure I want to keep hoping,” she said softly. “It’s too painful to keep trying when it all comes to grief in the end. And Jamie, the worst of it is that we need never have married. If we’d known this would happen—”
“But we did not — we could not have done. We did the right thing,” he said.
“Oh yes, the right thing at the time, but it was all for nothing, wasn’t it? We’re tied for life and we could have stayed free and happy.”
And that was when the sword through Jamie’s heart twisted, and tore him apart.
***
Jamie was not at all sure what he said or did after that. Her words cut so deep that he could barely think.‘We could have stayed free and happy.’How else could he interpret that? It meant she wasnothappy, there could be no other interpretation of it.‘Free and happy… free and happy…’echoed in his head, like the tolling of the great church bell at a funeral. And in a way, it was an apt analogy, for surely this marked the death of his marriage. No baby — nothing but regret, and the greatest grief was that she was ready to give up on even thepossibility of another baby. It was too painful, the repeated hope and then disappointment.
He spent the night in the spare bedroom, not sleeping very much, feeling horribly alone… lonely. He missed her warmth beside him, and the sight of her glorious hair spread out on the pillow. He missed her soft breathing in the darkness, and the gentle sway of the bed as she turned over. And when the first lightening of the sky allowed him to stop pretending to sleep at last, there was nothing before him but long years of dreary estrangement. Three months they had been married. Three months of sunshine and smiles and warm kisses and the joy of a wife of his own, someone to share his unexciting life. Someone who listened to him, and took care of him, and made him feel like a man instead of a nonentity.
Someone to love.
How had he got to that point so quickly? Astonishing woman, to worm her way into his heart without him even noticing. And now… now there was nothing.
