Page 44 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
And she may never be able to think of him as anything other than her son. For there was no other word to express what she felt.
She was grateful. Grateful that he had gone on to have the life he did. Grateful that he had not lived with her beneath the stigma. And grateful to herself for choosing to leave. Because she could not have imagined staying and watching him, trying to observe a careful distance and yet never being able to have him. Any more than she could fathom attempting to be his mother at thirteen years old.
She had discussed this with Mrs Brown now that they were sharing responsibility of the child in this time when there was no one else, and she had been instructed on how to give the child a bubby pot—a white ceramic pot with a tea towel placed over the spout to slow the flow of milk.
And yet she did not feel prepared.
She looked at the children, who were growing visibly uncomfortable the longer the baby cried. She could feel her own stomach knotting up tighter and tighter as she fought to catch her breath.
‘I will fetch your brother. I’ll only be a moment.’
She went from the nursery into the babe’s room, her heart pounding hard.
There was something so strange about the moment. As if she had one foot here, and one foot back in time. Back in Scotland.
He was wretched. Small and red-faced, and badly in need of a caregiver.
She had not held her own child. At first she’d been too weak to do so. She had bled so much the strength had drained from her body and it had taken time for her to be able to even lift her hand.
But then whenever she’d looked at the child she’d been overcome. By rage. By sorrow.
And the Laird’s wife had held the babe and it had seemed...right.
In all the time since, Mary had never held an infant.
She had never been a governess for a family that had a babe, and it had not been deliberate. Truthfully, with eight years between herself and that moment, she had not thought that it would affect her quite so deeply.
She hadn’t picked him up the other night when she’d seen him wailing. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to do that.
But if she didn’t, no one would.
This child was a casualty of all this chaos. The death of his mother. The disinterest of the wet nurse.
The distance of his father.
Her own wretched damage.
He deserved none of it.
She reached down and picked the infant up from the cradle, a deep, crushing sensation overtaking her. Like she had been standing in the rocks by the seashore only to be overtaken by the waves, the force of them pinning her to the rocks.
She pressed his warm body to her breast, and then rang the bell she had been told to use to signal her need of food for the child.
He was fussing still when she carried him back into the children’s room.
‘Michael, please read the next—’
‘We can’t concentrate with him squawking,’ said Elizabeth.
‘He will have food soon,’ she said. ‘Then he won’t squawk.’
Or rather, she hoped not.
She looked down at the tiny babe. He was barely more than a featherweight in her arms.
So small and so fragile.
He made her ache.
