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I didn’t have a response to that because she was right, and her choices weren’t mine, they were hers, and for my part, I had no choice but to respect them.
“I’m sorry about Lou,” I murmured.
“Don’t be,” she said forcefully. “You’re not supposed to have favorites, but you gel with certain people. Ian and I get along splendidly. He butts heads with his father. Daniel can sometimes frustrate me. Richard adores him. Daniel wanted me to like Portia, Richard wants to give his son everything. The writing was on the wall with a meeting of the family. And Louella is family. It was inescapable. Awkward, but inescapable. Now,”—she kept her eyes steady on me—“even more so.”
Well, as to that.
I looked down at the books. “I’m not the countess.”
“Oh, my dear, I think we both know you will be.”
I felt a lump in my throat.
“I despaired,” she said quietly. “He so worried he’d turn out to be like his father, he let many suitable women slip through his fingers. He’s a gambler. In a way, he made his fortune gambling. But he wouldn’t gamble on love. Until you.”
Until me.
I crossed my arms and rubbed them with my hands, like I was hugging that thought to me.
“It’s only been a week, and I know I’m falling for him,” I admitted.
“I know that too,” she pointed out the obvious.
“But he’s not Wolf or Augustus,” I said carefully.
She smiled a knowing smile. “Ah. The tragic Cuthbert. Yes, he did give Joan children, but not her first. Her first was a true Alcott, Thomas’s son. I know, I know,” she said when I opened my mouth. “You wonder how she could know. Women of that time were careful to provide heirs, it gave them power. She was careful to provide Thomas an heir, a true one, in hopes of gaining some power. But the Alcott men have had a thing for blondes. Joan wasn’t blonde. She was dark with blue eyes the color of sapphires. You can see this in her portrait upstairs.”
I didn’t have to, I’d been up there, and she was indeed dark.
So this meant it was not only Joan who gave the Alcott line their royal ancestry, but also their coloring.
I loved that she took over that way and enriched her line even if Thomas didn’t deserve it.
Duncroft did.
“All this doesn’t explain…” I took a hand from my arm and flipped it out. “You and me here, right now. It’s eerie.”
“Of course it’s not. You leave tomorrow. With what’s going on with my son, this conversation had to happen. I’ve been waiting for you here since ten thirty.”
“Oh,” I mumbled.
“You can’t know how glad I am with how taken he is with you. You’re a lovely woman with a kind heart. But I hope you never have to sit and wait until your son is done with his love so she can have a conversation with his mother.”
I scrunched my nose.
“Exactly,” she decreed.
“But I came right to you.”
“This is my space. Where else would I be?”
“Your bedroom,” I suggested, not adding or about a hundred and fifty other rooms in this house.
“I would hope you wouldn’t disturb a woman in the middle of the night in her bedroom,” she sniffed.
No matter what she said, or how she explained it, it didn’t change the fact this was weird.
And I didn’t buy the three oh three thing. There was no way to cypher three oh three was exactly when Alice and Wolf first made love. Or me dreaming about Alice and Wolf at all. I might have seen the painting, but dreaming about them like I did made my noting in passing of it a stretch.
