Page 61 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
“So,” he said, straightening. “I am proposing that we put all the rest of it aside. The arrangement and the expectations and the competitive dinner invitations.” He looked at her directly. “We have a few days of honeymoon left. We are going to eat together every day with Frederick. It doesn’t matter if we argue for most of it. Tomorrow I am going to ask the cook to prepare a picnic, and we are going to take Frederick to the south gardenand do something that has nothing to do with estate accounts or household responsibilities.” He paused. “Does that seem reasonable to you?”
Emily looked at him. At the straightforwardness of him, the complete absence of performance in it, a man simply saying what he meant and meaning what he said.
She felt the last of the tension she had been carrying since the corridor outside Frederick's room settle quietly and release.
“I would like that very much,” she said.
He looked at her. “Good,” he said.
They sat in the rose garden for a while longer, not saying very much, and it was the most comfortable either of them had been in two weeks. Neither of them remarked on it. Emily thought that this would do. She was content with this.
She was glad that she had been wrong about how marriage to a man like Theodore Merrick would turn out.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Mama used to sing when she made bread.”
Emily looked away from the daisy she had been threading through Frederick's hair, which he had been tolerating.
They were in the south garden, the one that had quickly become Emily's favorite, with the low stone wall along the far end and the wide stretch of grass that caught the afternoon light and held it there. Frederick was sitting between her knees on the blanket they had spread out after lunch, his back to her, his small shoulders relaxed.
Emily's hands stilled in his hair.
“She did,” she said. “She always sang when she was doing something with her hands. Bread, or sewing, or washing up. She could not seem to help it.”
“Was she good?” Frederick asked.
“You don’t remember?” Emily considered this honestly. “No,” she said. “She was terrible. Completely and absolutely terrible. But she sang very loudly and very happily and did not seem to notice or care that she was terrible, which I always thought was the right approach.”
Frederick made a sound that was almost a laugh. “Papa used to put his hands over his ears.”
“Ah, you remember that?” Emily smiled.
“He did it like this.” Frederick pulled his own hands up to cover his ears and scrunched his face with the exaggerated suffering of someone enduring something unbearable, and Emily laughed properly at that, at the smallness of him doing an impression of a grown man, at the fact that he had this... this memory that was his and nobody could take it.
“That sounds exactly right,” she said.
Frederick lowered his hands and looked at the garden again. And they sat in that comfortable silence, at the picnic that Theodore had asked to be arranged for them.
“Was your papa nice?” Emily asked carefully.
Frederick lowered his head and then shrugged his shoulders. “He smelled like wood all the time,” he said. “Because of the wood he worked with. And his hands were big.” He looked downat his own hands. “Much bigger than mine. He said one day my hands would be big too.”
Emily felt a pang in her chest.
“Was he kind to you?” she said.
“Yes. He used to carry me on his back,” Frederick said. “When we went to the market. Because my legs got tired.” He paused. “He said I was heavy, but I do not think I was really that heavy. I think he was just saying it.”
“I think you are probably right,” Emily said.
“He used to read to me,” Frederick continued. “Not very well. He said the words wrong sometimes, and Mama would correct him, and he would say them wrong again on purpose to make her cross. She was not really cross. She was always laughing.”
Emily pressed her lips together and stopped playing in Frederick’s hair.
“They really liked each other,” he added quietly. “I think they like each other more than they liked me, and they liked me a lot.”
Emily looked at him. At the scar on his cheek and the daisies in his hair. She fought back the urge to cry. It was a good thing. Frederick remembered his parents in the most perfect way. She hoped that the memory of them would stay with him, much longer than the memory of their death would.
