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Darby and the gardener had finished their conversation. The man bobbed his head farewell and left with Slope.

“Do you think that Lady Rawlings is quite all right?” she said, gathering her reticule. “Will you give my regrets to her, please, Mr. Darby? It’s a shame that neither of the nursemaids was appropriate. Perhaps we should send an urgent message to the employment agency, asking for more candidates? I’m afraid that I have an appointment in the village and shall have to leave now.”

“Don’t worry about the nursemaids. We’re lucky enough 108 Eloisa

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to have Esme’s nanny already at the house. And we did hire a gardener, so the morning wasn’t entirely a loss.” The smile in his eyes when he said that made Henrietta feel almost dizzy.

“Is your appointment in Limpley Stoke?” Darby continued. “I will accompany you, Lady Henrietta, if you would be so kind as to take me up in your carriage. It seemed to be a charming little village. Perhaps I should ascertain whether Miss Eckersall was correct in her assessment of its lack of liveliness.”

“Were you thinking of making a long stay in the country?”

Henrietta asked, unable to stop herself.

“No, I wasn’t,” Darby said thoughtfully. He looked at her in—oh, such a way! Henrietta didn’t know what to make of it. For a moment she thought of asking him why on earth he was flirting with her. But even though she’d spent her adult life trying to be direct whenever possible . . . this didn’t seem the right moment.

< 13 =

In Which Lady Rawlings

Interviews Her New Gardener

Esme only wandered down the stairs when she observed from an upstairs window that her new friend Henrietta and her nephew Darby had left the house together. She came down humming and feeling rather more cheerful than she had in weeks.

Something about Henrietta’s calm acceptance of her unfortunate situation was immeasurably consoling. Henrietta was right to insist that Esme’s babe belonged to no man. After all, Sebastian had only offered to marry her due to a punctilious sense that he was responsible for her husband’s death. And Miles was hardly a model husband, either, given that he had resided with Lady Childe for the past three or four years. Why should she feel so guilty about either of them?

If Sebastian had bothered to say good-bye to her after seducing her in a drawing room, he would have discovered that she and Miles were reconciling the very next night. Instead, he treated her like the doxy he clearly believed her to be, and simply visited her room the next night as if she were at home to all callers.

A flame of anger lit in her chest. Why had she wasted so 110 Eloisa

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many tears on the man? Sebastian Bonnington was a reprobate who didn’t even ask her before he strode into her room in the middle of the night. What did he think she was? A lightskirt, someone available for an easy romp whenever he wished? More fool he. She was not that type of woman. True, she hadn’t been faithful to her marriage vows, but neither had Miles. That didn’t mean she was a courtesan. She hadn’t taken a lover for years, not until the one evening with Sebastian.

And nothing— nothing—in that encounter gave Sebastian the right to assume that her bedchamber was his territory. She reflexively rubbed her tummy as she stared out the back window onto the flower garden. From now on, no more tears. No more talking about disinheriting her child, either. Henrietta was right. She would never be able to tell whose baby she carried.

Instead, she’d make certain that Henrietta married Darby, thereby ensuring Darby an inheritance more than equal to Miles’s. Mrs. Pidcock had nattered on and on last night about the estate Henrietta inherited from her father, a clear twenty thousand pounds a year unentailed. Of course, Mrs. Pidcock had also blathered on about how Henrietta couldn’t ever marry, given her inability to have children, but Esme thought that was a foolish conclusion. Such things may not be known in the country, but she was well aware of couples who had eschewed having offspring, after turning out the requisite heirand-a-spare. She herself, before being caught off guard by Sebastian Bonnington, had never risked pregnancy. There were ways . . . and she would simply ensure that Henrietta knew those ways. One could surmise that Darby was an old hand himself.

There was a large man moving about the bottom of the garden, which suggested that Darby had hired the gardener sent by the employment agency. Presumably the man could do something with the rose arbor. The old man who had been Fool for Love

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in charge of the gardens had clearly relinquished control to nature long ago. When she arrived last summer, each rosebush had at most one or two roses. Buds started, but they mildewed without opening, in a distressing way. She watched the man some more. He was behaving rather oddly. He was definitely doing something to the plants, but what was it? Perhaps he had a cure for whatever it was ailed them.

It took her a good half hour to dress herself warmly and set off down the hill. The lawns at Shanthill House stretched down a gentle slope, and the rose arbor was set at the very bottom. It was Esme’s favorite spot. Some long-ago Rawlings had arched white lath in a long line and then trained roses up the beams. When she and Miles first married, ten years ago, the roses used to crowd together, thick and plump, their wild perfume intoxicating anyone who sat in the arbor. Of course, in the midst of winter the arbor was nothing more than a scraggly tunnel of rose branches and thorns. So what on earth could he be doing to the roses?

She made it down the hill without twisting her ankle and paused at the bottom to catch her breath. Carrying this babe around was far more exercise than she would have thought. Before pregnancy, she had the vague idea that one “carried” the babe until it decided to be born . . . and that was that. No one warned her of the hysterical crying fits, the swollen ankles, or the inability to walk without rolling slightly from side to side. The man was about halfway down the arbor. He had his back to her, but she could see what he was doing. He was reading a book.

How very peculiar.

She’d never heard of a literate gardener. In fact, Moses, the man who used to be in charge of the gardens, made it very clear that he didn’t hold with book learning. But this gardener was glancing from the rosebushes to his book, and back again.

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“Excuse me,” Esme said in her nicest lady-of-the-manor tone of voice. “I simply wanted to—”