Page 19 of Better Than a Duke
“I’ll see to it.” With a twirl she pranced out of the room.
As he watched her go, Beckett sat back in his chair. Not for the first time, he wondered if he’d done well by his daughter. She spoke like a miniature adult on occasion and had a vocabulary beyond her years. But there was a fine line between precocious and spoiled, and he’d tried very hard to avoid the latter.
It made sense that she wanted things to remain as they were. Sameness was comfortable. But the idea of having someone else to assist, to answer questions with facts when he could only suppose and surmise, someone to turn Rebecca into a proper young lady when the time arrived, that could be a boon.
The knocker on the front door, a cat with a mouse in its mouth, clanged against the heavy oak. Beckett stood as he heard it open, Butler’s greeting, and the higher-pitched answer. IrisSilbern hadn’t changed her mind, then, when he’d thought she might. As she seemed quite willing to state her opinion, and quite capable of defending it, he considered her arrival a victory.
He stepped into the hallway. “You see, Mama?” Edmund was saying. “His nameisButler.” He looked up at the butler. “What if you were a groom?”
The servant straightened his back. “I would never, Master Edmund.”
“Would you have to change your name, though?”
Iris Silbern, still on the front step, smiled. “I believe there are quite a few persons named Smith who don’t work at a forge. A name is a name, passed down from parents whose parents might once have belonged to those occupations.”
Edmund faced her. “What’s a Silbern, then?”
“You are, Pickle. Not every name is an occupation. Sometimes it’s a place, and sometimes it’s just a convenient group of letters or the weather on the day someone of import was born.”
“Oh, you mean like Raines.” The boy approached to offer his hand to Beckett. “Was your family named after the weather?”
“Evidently so.” Beckett shook hands with him. “Might you have a maiden name, Mrs. Silbern? I’m suddenly very curious to know what your ancestors’ occupation might have been.”
Her cheeks darkened. “As I said, sometimes a name is just letters thrown together. Might I apologize to your daughter for stomping into your house yesterday?”
“Certainly. At the moment she’s changing into appropriate clothing for frolicking, but please come wait with me in the morning room.”
With a nod, Iris stepped into the house and followed her son, who’d evidently already learned the Raines House floor plan, into the morning room located just off the foyer. “Thank you,” she said, nodding as she took a seat on the very front edge of achair—no doubt so she could spring into action at the slightest provocation.
“How fares your aunt?” he asked, sitting opposite her while Edmund took a turn about the room and stopped in front of the wooden bird carvings lining one shelf.
“She’s improved a great deal. Over the winter she was bedridden. It’s only in the past few weeks she’d taken to the wheeled chair.”
“Which you are to push about. When not rubbing her feet.” It was none of his affair, but she’d been dressed for dancing last night, and she’d clearly enjoyed twirling about the ballroom. Anchoring her to someone else seemed akin to putting fetters on a hawk, preventing it from flying.
Her eyes narrowed. “I am doing her a favor, and in return, she and Uncle Harold are hosting Edmund and me for the Season.”
“I said we should harness the chair to a pair of big dogs,” Edmund commented, picking up a bird and turning it in his hand. “Did you carve these?”
“No. I purchased them from a wood-carver in Lincolnshire.”
“They’re sterling. You should paint them. Or I could paint them for you, in the birds’ colors.”
“Edmund, do not deface Lord Hentrose’s art collection.”
Sighing, he put the bird back. “I was only suggesting.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Beckett said, keeping his gaze on Iris on the chance she might lunge at him for what he was about to say. “If you can tell me your mother’s maiden name, you and Rebecca may paint those birds as a team.”
“Edm—”
“It’s Flexing.” The lad whipped around. “Does that mean your papa had bent arms, Mama?”
“Someone in the family did,” Beckett supplied, laughing. “And your mother does, certainly. There she is now, folding them.”
For a moment as her crossed arms went over her chest, he thought he’d made her angry, but then she snorted. “Very well, have your fun, but last night was not the first time we danced, Lord Hentrose.”
“Beckett,” he supplied again, furrowing his brow. “It wasn’t?”
