“That she will become your sister?” he said, smiling back at her. “No. That they are starry-eyed over each other? Definitely.”
“Well,” she said. “Well.”
“Abby speechless?” he said, getting up from his place and coming around the table to hold back her chair for her. “I must have given you startling news indeed. Are you sure you do not wish to go to the Vendrys’ tonight?”
“I liked your suggestion,” she said, “that we spend the evening in the library again, just the two of us. You do not find my company dull, Miles?”
“Dull?” he said, taking her hand on his arm. “If I think back on all the evenings we have spent together, Abby, the one that stands out most in my mind is the one we spent at home together. I think I enjoy being a staid old married man.”
She smiled. “Laura and Boris,” she said. “I have been remarkably foolish, haven’t I?”
“Now, how can I agree with that,” he said, “without appearing quite ungallant? ‘Eager,’ I think, would be a better word. Eager to see to the happiness of your friend and mine.”
“Will Sir Gerald marry his mistress?” she asked. “Is it done?”
“It is not done,” he said, “though there is no law against it, as far as I know. Anyway, it may already be too late. She left him a week ago to go and marry someone else. Or perhaps the truth has still not punched him on the nose. I don’t know, Abby.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “you should tell him, Miles, that—”
“No,” he said firmly.
She sighed. “I have to go upstairs for my embroidery,”she said.
“Do you?” he said. “I shall see you in the library in a few minutes’ time, then.”
HE WAS BEING COWARDLY, the Earl of Severn thought as he drew the book he was currently reading from a shelf and sat with it in his favorite chair beside the fireplace. There was a great deal of talking to be done, and he had intended to do it as soon as they came home. But Abigail had been happy and had disappeared into her room, humming tunelessly.
He had intended to talk to her at the dinner table, but had realized as soon as they were there together that he could not talk about such private and personal matters in the presence of servants.
He had suggested to her that they miss the evening’s entertainment, intending to bring her into the library and have his talk with her. And yet he was being seduced by the memory of that one evening they had spent there together, and he was settling down to a hoped-for repetition of it. She would come in with her embroidery and seat herself opposite him, and he would relax with his book, concentrating on it, but feeling even so the contentment of knowing that she was there with him.
He set the book down impatiently and got to his feet. He stood with his back to the fireplace, his hands clasped behind him, and watched her when she came in a few moments later, her workbag in one hand.
“Everyone at home would have been amazed to see how dedicated a needlewoman I would become one day,” she said. “Embroidery was never one of my accomplishments.”
“I suppose,” he said, “you were too busy drying tears and soothing headaches and bandaging cuts and telling stories. And nursing your father.”
She smiled at him a little uncertainly and sat down on the chair she had occupied a few evenings before. “Life was never dull at home,” she said.
“And compensating two little girls for their mother’s desertion,” he said. “And protecting them from the violent rages of a drunken father, standing in for the half-brother who might have been there to protect them himself but was away much of the time.”
“What did Boris tell you?” she said, releasing her hold on her bag, which fell with a plop to the floor.
“And taking all the burdens of the world on your own shoulders,” he said. “And looking to everyone’s happiness but your own, Abby.”
“What has Boris told you?” She stared up at him from her large gray eyes.
“Enough,” he said. “Enough that I think I understand everything, Abby. Except your opinion of me. Did you really think it would make a difference to me?”
“You know about Rachel?” Her voice was a whisper.
“About Mrs. Harper?” he said. “Yes.”
“I said I was your cousin,” she said. “You married me, knowing nothing else about me. You would not have done so if you had known what a ramshackle lot we are. A drunken, violent father who shamed us in public and abused us in private and gambled away all of his son’s inheritance and all of his daughters’ security. A stepmother who ran away with another man and who now operates a gaming hell and a brothel in London. Even what you knew was bad enough. I had been dismissed from my job for flirting with my employer’s son. Yes, Miles, I thought it would make a difference. In fact, I know it would have.”