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“Because London air truly is unhealthy?” Esme said, rather confusedly. Pregnancy seemed to have filled her head with cotton wool. She felt like one of her cousins, the one her mother used to call bacon-brained.

“Use your head. He’s suspicious of the child you’re carrying. Darby was Miles’s heir, wasn’t he?”

“He still is,” Esme said.

“Not if you have a boy.”

Esme stopped and faced her friend. Helene was dressed in a rose woolen gown with a matching pelisse and gloves. Perfect for a winter’s day in the country. Her hair was drawn up in an elaborate nest of braids that made her head seem to float, swanlike, on her delicate shoulders. She didn’t look tough as nails, but she was.

“We’ve discussed this,” Esme said. “Darby is still Miles’s heir. I will not accept the estate.”

36 Eloisa

James

“Balderdash!” Helene said.

That was the strongest oath she allowed herself, so Esme knew that she was truly perturbed.

“If you give birth to a boy, Esme, that boy will be the heir to Miles’s estate. This house as well as the one in London in which Darby is living, if I’m not mistaken. You will not disinherit your son. In fact, I’m quite certain that you can’t, given the laws governing entails.”

Esme laced her fingers over her stomach in unconscious support of the disloyal thing she was about to say. “You don’t seem to understand that this babe may not be Miles’s child.”

“You don’t know that,” Helene snapped.

“You think I would pass off another man’s child as Miles’s child?”

“Would you deny Miles’s son his heritage?”

“Of course not!”

“Then how are you going to know?” Helene demanded.

“I’ll just know.” Esme could feel her eyes starting to prickle. That was the worst of being pregnant. She, who hadn’t cried since her father married her off to a stranger, seemed to cry four or five times a day at least.

“Even I, who know next to nothing about children, know that it’s impossible to tell a child’s true parentage,” Helene announced. “Remember all the dust kicked up last year when the Earl of Northumberland insisted that his firstborn son couldn’t have been his because the boy got sent down from Oxford for the fourth time?”

“Northumberland is a fool,” Esme muttered.

“Likely not. The countess debuted the same year I did, after all, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers her desperate vows of adoration to a mere soldier. Her father married her off quickly to avoid a mésalliance, or so he said. But her babe was born barely nine months after the wedding: perhaps she married quickly for another reason.”

Fool for Love

37

Esme scowled. “I can’t believe you’re telling me all this sordid gossip, Helene. It isn’t at all like you.”

“I’m trying to knock some sense into your head,” Helene said tartly. “There’s no way to tell whose babe you are carrying. You have black hair; Sebastian Bonnington has yellow hair; your husband had brown hair. Even if the child had brown hair, it could be just a combination of your and Bonnington’s colors.”

Esme paled.

Helene pressed her advantage. “You would do a great disservice to Miles if you deliberately allowed his own son to be disinherited. And there is no way to ascertain a child’s father.”

“Perhaps it will be a girl,” she said weakly.

“That would be for the best. Especially from Darby’s point of view.”

Esme started walking toward the house again. “I forgot Darby! And the children. Where shall we put them?”