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“No.” That was the first place Miles would look, if only to blast her for impulsively leaving him. “We’ll stay with a friend.”
“I don’t believe a marriage is easily annulled,” Ada commented, once they had climbed into a hackney carriage. “Though perhaps the process is simpler when a husband storms out before consummation,” she added thoughtfully. “I haven’t heard of that happening before.”
“I’m certain that’s the case. It’s not yet legal.” Belle stuck her thumb in her mouth and gave a huge sigh, so Daisy started crooning a lullaby.
“If I hadn’t been told otherwise, I would swear Belle was your baby,” Ada commented. “She looks like a miniature version of you.”
Daisy glanced down at the baby’s white-blonde curls. “She is mine. I plan to move to Brussels where my cousin lives. I would be very grateful if you would travel with me, Ada. It’s not a long sea voyage, and I’ll pay your passage there and back.”
“You couldn’t do it without me,” Ada said practically. “Are you certain you want to leave Lord Devin? Everyone down to the boot boy says he’s generous and fair. Not to mention rich. I’d marry him for the bathtub alone, and that’s not taking into account his thighs.” She laughed.
“He’s very angry at me,” Daisy said. “I don’t blame him, but I can’t live with him under those circumstances.”
“So what set him off, then?” Ada looked at Daisy expectantly. “Being an Irishman, my father used to explode like one of them new firecrackers. In his case, it was always a matter of the belly. If he was hungry … look out!”
“I married Lord Devin under false pretenses. I told him Belle was my own child.”
Ada frowned. “That’s absurd. He came around to the house when you were working on those coded letters with Lord FitzRoy-Paget last year. You weren’t showing. By the trial, you’d have been swollen like a gourd. What’s more, Belle was likely born in February, and the ball where your dress fell apart was early March. Surely he doesn’t think that ladies prance straight from the birthing chamber to the ballroom?”
Daisy shrugged. “Why would he know anything about pregnancy? I certainly don’t.”
“Everyone knows it takes nine months to grow a child,” Ada objected.
“I was so stupid,” Daisy confessed. “I actually thought that he’d be happy to discover I was a virgin. Instead he is furious and thinks I manipulated him into marriage.”
“That is surprising,” Ada said, nodding. “The way men go on about chastity and obedience from the pulpit, you’d think that a woman turned into a clod of dirt the moment she allowed a man between her legs.”
Daisy rocked Belle gently back and forth.
“I could have sworn Lord Devin was mad about you,” her maid added. “The way he looked at you this morning! I had to fan myself after I left the room.”
“You’d be wrong,” Daisy said flatly. “He didn’t even stay around long enough to bed me, and that speaks for itself, doesn’t it?”
Ada winced. “Aye, I’m afraid that it does.
“As soon as he heard the truth, he put his clothes back on and left me sitting on the bed.” Daisy’s voice cracked.
Ada’s eyes rounded. “You were still in that towel?”
“Not even. And he was in the buff himself.”
“Where did he go tearing off to, then?”
“He left to chastise Belle’s father.”
“Lord Devin put his clothes back on, the better to go out and have a fight with your Da?”
Daisy blinked.
“Everyone in Lady Wharton’s household knows about the babes,” Ada said, leaning forward to pat Daisy’s knee. “Your father is infamous for his nighttime activities. Not to mention those other children that appeared over the years, all of them your spitting image.”
“My mother is convinced that only our butler knows of the orphans,” Daisy said, shocked to the bone.
“They aren’t orphans, though, are they? There’s been some debate below stairs about that. Still, even those who didn’t think Lady Wharton should have sent the babes to an orphanage are loyal to her, sorry that she married a man like your father. He must walk into a brothel the way fox does a henhouse, if you’ll forgive the vulgarity.”
“I had no idea what he was truly like,” Daisy said. Then she sighed. “I definitely married a man who is the opposite of my father.”
Ada snorted. “Aye, that’s right. There’s scarcely a man in a hundred who would have left you, just out of the bath, naked as the day is long.”
