Page 15 of Dark Tides
“I didn’t know that she did?”
She laughed irrepressibly, and then clapped her hand over her pink lips and the little white teeth. “Ah, this house! Nobody laughs here!”
“They don’t?”
“No, it is very grave. Roberto was such a happy young man. I thought everyone would be merry.”
He started to speak and then checked himself, as if there was too much to say. “It all happened a long time ago.”
“When the twins were born?”
“There are twins?”
She widened her dark eyes. “Did you not know? But I thought you came to see them?”
“I did not know there were twins,” he said, carefully choosing his words. “I must speak to Mrs. Reekie. I might be able to… I could assist the boy. I have been blessed in my good fortune, and I would want to be of assistance to her, if I can.”
“You have no family of your own?”
“My wife and I were childless. It was a great sorrow to us.”
“But of course. It is a sorrow for any man and wife. Especially if there is property.”
He smiled at her frankness. “You are a Venetian indeed. Yes, it is a great pity, especially if there is property.”
“I am not a Venetian,” she corrected him. “My family home is in the hills outside Florence. We are a very old family, a noble family. That is why I know the importance of a son and heir. And now I am an English lady. With an English boy. Would you have made Roberto your heir if he had lived?”
She could see him shift on his feet and look awkward. “I have a particular interest in the boy… in the twins.”
“But Roberto is their uncle? Then my baby must be their cousin?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So you must love my boy too,” she insisted. “Let me show him to you.”
“Perhaps I should go now and come back this afternoon?” he suggested, but she had already opened the parlor door and called out before he could speak, and then the nursemaid came from the kitchen with the baby in her arms.
Quickly Livia took the baby from the nursemaid and turned to James with her cheek against the little dark head. The baby was awake, and as she held him out to James, he fixed the man’s face with a dark blue wondering gaze.
“Is he not beautiful?” she demanded, her hands still on him as she put him into James’s arms, so they held him together.
“Yes,” James said truly, struck with tenderness at the thought of this child, another child, growing up fatherless in this poor little house.
“See, how he likes you,” she remarked, moving away so that James held the baby on his own, and felt his grip tighten with anxiety.
“I have no experience of babies,” he said, holding him for only a moment and then trying to hand him back to her. “I don’t know how to manage them. I don’t know what they… prefer.”
She laughed at that, but she took the child and held him against her shoulder, turning sideways so that James could see the exquisite baby face against the darkness of his mother’s glossy hair and her profile, as clear-cut as a cameo. “Ah, you would learn in no time,” she assured him. “You would be a wonderful father. I know you would be. Every man should raise his son. It is his legacy. How else can he leave a name in the world?”
The door opened behind her and Alys stood in the doorway. Shelooked in silence from her sister-in-law to James and back again. James flushed with embarrassment.
“My mother will see you this afternoon,” Alys said icily to James. “Not now. Lady da Ricci was telling you to leave now.”
“Indeed yes,” the lady said, her dark eyes wide. “Forgive me, I was distracted.”
James bowed. “At what time shall I come?” he asked, picking up his hat and riding whip.
“At four?” Livia suggested brightly. “And stay for dinner?”
