“Yes, I believe she did,” Cecily agreed. “Unfortunately, it also seems Lilian never had the opportunity to show off Buster’s skills or anything else she’d done before.”
“There’s plenty of servants, surely,” Mary mused.
Cecily shook her head. “It’s not the same as family, Mary. Anyway, Mrs. Barnes has to work, and I don’t think the nursemaids have much to say about training dogs or ponies. Nathaniel really should have shown more of a personal interest before now. It makes such a difference to Lilian to be seen and acknowledged properly.”
Now, Lilian and Buster were running together, the little girl trying to outrun the animal and only succeeding because he kept returning to play with her.
“I can see that,” Mary acknowledged. “At first, I thought she was a naughty little girl who ought to be taught some manners. But since you got her out of that locked room, she has been as good as gold, at least with you.”
Cecily nodded thoughtfully.
It was true. Under her caring attention, Lilian was growing and flourishing in many ways. She was keeping more consistenthours, remembering to say please and thank you, and no longer shouting at Cecily. On some days, she even spent more than half an hour at her small desk in the schoolroom with Miss Osborne without making the well-meaning but ineffective woman cry.
“Yes, I feel I’m doing the right things for her now, but it should all have been put in place so long ago, and it’s hard to understand why it wasn’t. I know Nathaniel loves her, but why is it so hard for him to show that sensibly?”
Cecily’s expression softened as she watched Lilian stop and feed Buster treats from her pocket as a reward for his cooperation.
“Are you still angry with him, Cecily?” Mary asked tentatively.
She had listened to Cecily rage about Nathaniel’s irresponsibility for days after the locked room incident, but she knew nothing of the strange fires that had kept her anger burning.
If Cecily had not melted under Nathaniel’s knowing caresses, if she had not felt so magnetically drawn to him, would his faults irk her as much as they did?
Likely not.
“Maybe I am,” Cecily sighed. “I don’t seem to be able to let it go, although I know I must. We are married, after all.”
She had been cold toward Nathaniel since their row in the sitting room. Briefly, she feared that he would take her at her word andcome to her bed to exercise his conjugal rights before vanishing back to London. He had not, of course, and nor would he. He had been clear in stating that he would not take an unwilling woman.
“I believe the problem with your husband is that he has never had to face any consequences for his actions,” Mary pronounced.
“I suppose dukes often don’t face consequences, Mary,” Cecily reflected. “Who would ever have reprimanded or punished him?”
“Well, his parents should have done it,” Mary answered promptly.
“They were never around,” Cecily explained, listening thoughtfully to her own words. “Nathaniel lived here pretty much by himself, with only servants and a much younger brother. I suppose he has no idea how to be a parent because he never really had one.”
“He had a younger brother who grew up to be a completely spoiled buffoon with no motivation, no ambition, and no prospects,” Mary threw in, never losing an opportunity to run down her former lover. Patrick was always on her mind.
“Perhaps Nathaniel ought to take some responsibility for that, too. Patrick ought to have been pushed into some useful course of life when he was young enough to be steered. I suppose Nathaniel couldn’t be bothered to do that either.”
“Maybe you should punish him, Cecily,” Mary suggested with a giggle. “You are his wife, after all. Who else would ever dare?”
“Punish who?” demanded Lilian, who had come bounding up to them with Buster yapping beside her. “Punish Papa? I’d like to see that. I’d rub horseradish in his nose while he’s sleeping, and put pins on the chair in his study, and tear up the floorboards outside his room so that he falls into a big hole!”
Mary burst out laughing. “I’d do all those things to Patrick, too. It would serve him right.”
Cecily shot her a warning look and kept her own face straight with effort.
“Any of those things could really hurt your papa,” she pointed out to the child. “They would be very wrong, and you mustn’t ever do that. If you play tricks, let them be harmless and funny so that the other person can laugh too.”
Lilian sighed and nodded, but then frowned. “Like what kind of things?”
“I don’t know. Maybe put old eggshells in someone’s egg cup in the morning so that they think they’re about to eat breakfast, but then there’s nothing there,” Cecily offered, unsurprised that this elicited little enthusiasm.
“Or throw eggs at them from the window?” the little girl suggested.
“We don’t throw eggs at anyone,” Cecily told her firmly. “It makes a mess on the floor and could hurt them if you throw it hard.”
