“You’ll love Juby,” she said. “We miss him so. He made dolls for the girls, you know. Out of string and bits of wood. They were always hanging on him, begging for a story.”
Villiers had one thought in response to that information: Juby couldn’t be his son. Impossible.
“It’s an odd thing, you taking him in. Will he be in the stables? He does like horses.”
Naturally he would, with that nickname. “Madam,” Villiers said, “he will not be in the stables.”
“He won’t be good in the kitchens,” she prophesied.
“The cook will have a fit. That boy likes to eat.” She beamed proudly.
“I shall do my best to keep him fed.”
She put out a hand and touched his sleeve. Villiers froze. He greatly disliked being touched. “Will you let him visit me now and again? I’ve seen him only two or three times since Templeton took him to Grindel’s. He ran away once, but they took him back again. I do miss him.”
“Of course,” he said courteously, stepping back so her hand slipped from his arm. Then he bowed again and left her there on the doorstep, baby sleeping on her shoulder.
He had a biting headache and a strong inclination to forget this whole idea. He couldn’t have a child named Juby. It was inconceivable. He was Villiers. A duke.
How did he know this child was actually his? A gentleman’s son, she’d said. Surely Templeton would have mentioned that the child’s father was a duke?
Everything in him recoiled from the distastefulness of the entire visit. The slobbering child, the ridiculous nickname, the shabby house.
Gentlemen didn’t worry about this sort of thing. A child born on the wrong side of the blanket was no real child of his.
Even he couldn’t rationalize that assertion, though.
Tobias was his child. He remembered the mother, Fenela, well enough. She was a luscious girl, an Italian opera singer, who had been enraged when she found herself with child.
She had screamed, and he had laughed, and in the end he promised to care for the child when Fenela traveled on. As he recalled, he supported the entire opera company for some seven months. They continued their entirely pleasant nightly encounters until she declared that she hated both him and her swollen ankles.
Eventually Templeton had informed him of the existence of a son, and the child’s settlement in a good establishment, and that was that.
He even knew why Tobias had the name: because Fenela had been singing the part of an innocent maiden, seduced by the dastardly baron, Tobias. The baron courted the maiden’s affections and lured her to an adulterous doom.
Except that the evil baron had turned into the flourishing, fat Juby.
Juby.
Villiers shuddered as he got into his carriage.
Chapter Twenty-one
Later that morning
Elijah woke with the distinct sensation that something was wrong. But what could be wrong? He and Jemma had finally fallen asleep as the first morning light was creeping through the curtains. Now he was lying behind her, her curvaceous bottom tucked against him, his arms around her.
He felt a pulse of joy…and yet the terrible sense of unease lingered. After a moment he slipped out of bed. Jemma made a little moue as his arms left her, and then she rolled farther into the pillows. Her hair was tousled and silky, the color of drowsy sunshine, just as he had told her.
The unease appeared again. Normally just the sight of Jemma fired his loins. But not this morning. With that realization came another.
His heart was misfiring. It had actually woken him up, which had never happened before. He sprang from the bed and walked a few steps. Sometimes even a small amount of exercise was enough to correct the timing. But his heart still bounded in his chest, as if it had forgotten the proper rhythm.
He would have to go for a ride; that often calmed its rhythm. He eased out of Jemma’s chamber and retired to his own rooms.
He had finished his bath and was pulling on a coat when a footman scratched at the door. After a whispered exchange, his valet came back and said, “Mr. Fowle is very sorry to disturb you, Your Grace, but the Honorable Howard Cheever-Chittlesford is waiting below.”
“Oh Christ,” Elijah said. “Sent by Pitt?”
“He didn’t say, Your Grace.” Vickery handed him his wig. “He is accompanied by another gentleman, Lord Stibblestich.”
Elijah groaned inwardly. Cheever-Chittlesford was a petty bureaucrat who prided himself on his eloquence, yet Elijah seemed to be the only one to notice that the man’s eloquence was always employed in the wrong tactics. Cheever-Chittlesford was the sort who would comment, for example, that the slave trade had its place, and that Pitt shouldn’t push too aggressively to abolish it.