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11
Brevity is the soul of wit.
—SHAKESPEARE
“No,” Hawk said.
“What, nothing else to say? You proffer this rackety reason, unbelievable, and you know it, and then say no?”
> “Correct,” Hawk said.
If a look of absolute ire could destroy, Hawk would have collapsed, slain at his father’s booted feet.
“This is all nonsense, my boy,” the marquess said after a moment in which he’d failed to reduce his son to filial obedience. “See your man of business in London? Absurd! He had to beg you to pay him a call after you returned to England. I tell you, Hawk, I forbid you to leave now.”
“Not now, at dawn,” Hawk said.
“And just what does your wife think about this? Does she even know that you plan to leave her?”
“No, not yet. I will speak to her when I find her, which is difficult, since she hides whenever I am in the vicinity.”
“Except at night,” the marquess said with lowered brows.
“That is right.”
The marquess threw up his hands. “I’m going to breakfast now.”
To Hawk’s surprise, Frances was seated at the breakfast table when he and his father entered the small breakfast room. She was wearing what he now recognized as the ugliest of her three gowns, a dull brown wool that could have had no style the day it was conceived. On her head sat a cap of bilious yellow.
She looked up briefly, nodded, then lowered her head again to her plate of eggs.
The marquess looked from one to the other, and announced, “I think I shall breakfast a bit later.” He left, a brief prayer on his lips that his son would bend one way and Frances would not run.
She looked like a pinched, pale, very homely shadow, Hawk thought, except for those awful spectacles that brought everything into sharp focus. He suppressed the unacceptable feeling of guilt and set himself to his trencher.
When Otis retreated from the room, taking the serving maid, Rosie, with him, Hawk sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest.
“Good morning, Frances.”
“Good morning, my ... Philip.”
“I am pleased with your verbal progress.”
“Thank you.”
He wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled. Instead, he said, “Do you think you could be with child?”
Frances dropped her fork. She wanted to hurl her cup of very hot tea into his face. She wanted to scream the best of her invectives at his head. She said in a low, tight voice, “It certainly seems possible. You have, after all, done your duty quite assiduously.”
“That is quite a number of words you have strung together,” Hawk said. “It pleases me that you realize I deserve more than a nod or a shrug from you.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “You deserve much more.”
Hawk frowned. Her voice was flat, utterly emotionless. Didn’t the woman have a shred of sensibility? But perhaps her words had held a shred of sarcasm?
“I am leaving in the morning.”
“I wish you a good journey.”
