Page 56 of Courting the Wrong Duke

“She is very worried.”

“She always is.”

“She loves you.”

“I know.”

The dowager folded her hands over the closed book resting in her lap. “She also surprised me.”

Rosalind looked up.

“I asked your mother why she seemed so willing to believe your father had chosen to leave.”

The question settled heavily between them.

Rosalind had wondered the same thing herself. “And?”

“She told me she does not truly believe it.” The older woman sighed softly. “Only that it is easier than imagining something worse.”

Rosalind lowered her gaze to her clasped hands.

Her mother's words from the day before returned with painful clarity.

I choose to believe whatever allows me to wake each morning.

“She said much the same to me.”

The dowager nodded, as though that answer saddened rather than surprised her.

For a few moments neither woman spoke.

The silence felt companionable, the sort shared by two people mourning the same man in different ways.

At length, the dowager smiled faintly. “I sometimes forget how many years have passed.”

Rosalind looked at her.

“Our families spent so many summers together that it is difficult for me to think of your father without also remembering two little boys forever trailing after him.”

A smile tugged unexpectedly at Rosalind's mouth. “That sounds rather like William.”

“And Algernon,” the dowager said quietly. “Though in very different ways.”

Something in her tone made Rosalind's smile fade.

“I do not know whether William ever mentioned it, but when the boys were young, Algernon suffered from a dreadful stammer.”

He had never mentioned it.

She found herself trying to imagine the proud, reserved duke as a frightened little boy unable to force the words from his mouth.

The image simply refused to fit.

“It was quite severe,” the dowager continued. “My late husband was... a very different father to Algernon than he ever was to William.”

She paused, her gaze settling somewhere beyond the window.

“He loved them both, of course. But parents do not always understand each child equally well.”