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“Lemon and ginger tea,” Jane said, “and dry toast.”
Quinn kissed Jane’s knuckles, then rose and stalked toward the door, apparently intent on plundering the kitchen in person.
“Quinn, you cannot go belowstairs,” Althea said. “The staff is in a near panic, the guests will start arriving in less than two hours, and Monsieur will have an apoplexy if you appear in his kitchen now.”
“If my duchess is in want of damned lemon tea—”
“She’s right,” Jane said, rubbing a hand across her middle. “Use the bell pull, Quinn, but we have a larger problem to solve. If I am suffering a bout of dyspepsia, who will hostess this ball?”
For an instant, Althea considered that Jane’sbout of dyspepsiamight be manufactured, but the duchess’s pallor and the real worry in Quinn’s eyes argued for genuine bad luck.
“I will,” Althea said. “I was originally planning to anyway.”
Quinn yanked the bell pull so hard it came off in his hand. “That was before you aroused the ire of the local matchmakers.”
“And if I am also suffering a bout of dyspepsia,” Althea said, taking the bell pull from him, “what conclusion do you suppose Lady Phoebe will draw?” Althea dragged the chair from behind the escritoire to the place beside the hearth and used Quinn’s shoulder to balance on as she climbed onto the chair. “She will imply that what she caught me doing was far more than kissing Rothhaven.”
Althea retied the bell pull to the wire that dangled from the ceiling and climbed down.
“If Rothhaven presumed to that extent…” Quinn began.
“Nobody presumed,” Althea retorted. “And I have a ball to prepare for.”
She left Quinn draping a shawl around Jane’s shoulders, a sight that did odd things to Althea’s composure. Quinn was serious by nature, intensely focused on what he saw as his obligations, and not a man to be trifled with.
To see him dithering and fretting over Jane, worried to the point of storming the kitchen and breaking the bell pull, was reassuring. If Quinn Wentworth could be felled by Cupid’s arrow, perhaps there was hope for Lord Nathaniel Rothmere.
Chapter Eighteen
“You’re alive,” Cousin Sarah said for the twentieth time. “Oh, thank the benevolent hand of providence, you’re alive.” Mama had managed to peel Sarah from Robbie’s neck, but then Cousin had cast herself against Nathaniel, where further histrionics were in progress.
Robbie’s gaze had a distant look, though he wasn’t having a staring spell. He peered around the garden as if unable to determine where all the noise was coming from.
“Robbie is hale and sound in many regards,” Nathaniel said, “but Mama and I didn’t know that when I came of age or when the former duke went to his reward. My father perpetrated a great fraud on us all.”
Sarah subsided onto the bench, Nathaniel’s handkerchief in her hand. “And you’ve only recently become aware of Robbie’s continued existence. That was the letter you sent Cousin Wilhelmina before we departed. I knew something was afoot, but I never considered it might be something so, so…”
She looked at Robbie, the handkerchief held in a quivering grasp near her nose, and went off into a fresh display of lachrymosity. Mama patted her back, Robbie paced, and Nathaniel wanted to bellow profanities.
Another chink in the family armor, another inadvertent tear in the secrecy cloaking the Rothhaven household.
“This is that awful man’s fault, isn’t it?” Sarah went on. “He had fits, but he couldn’t stand the thought of his own son being similarly afflicted. If he weren’t dead, I’d have to kill him for that.”
“What?” Nathaniel and Robbie had spoken at the same time.
“Sarah, explain yourself,” Mama said, sounding every inch the duchess. “My late husband was obnoxiously healthy.”
Sarah ceased dabbing at her eyes. “No, he was not. I saw him once in a shaking fit. He was Lord Alaric Rothmere then, enjoying the favor of every matchmaker in London. He never danced, except to partner a woman in the evening’s opening promenade. I thought that a ploy to increase his consequence, but I later suspected he was terrified of embarrassing himself.”
Mama stared hard at the pruned roses. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why was this kept from me?”
“I thought you knew. How could you be married to him and not…But then, yours was not a cordial union, was it?”
In Nathaniel’s opinion, his parents’ marriage had been one of fraught silences and tense distances. They had occupied separate wings of the Hall, traveled separately, and lived as near strangers.
“Perhaps now we understand why the union was so chilly,” Nathaniel said to his mother. “What I’d like to know is how you allowed Papa to send Robbie away in the first place.”
Mama’s gaze went to Robbie, standing so still and tall in the lengthening shadows. “His Grace told me to choose. He could send one of my sons away or both. Nathaniel would go off to public school at far too young an age, and be banished in all but fact if I refused to accede to the duke’s plans for Robbie. His Grace convinced me Robbie would be well cared for, the best care money and intimidation could buy, though he refused to tell me exactly where my son would be.
