Page 67 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
She took out a pot, and a jar of milk. She poured a measure of milk into the pot, her movements looking more at ease than he would’ve imagined, given that she had said she’d never cared for a babe before.
‘I would have allowed her to care for her bastard, and I would have laid claim to him. If she had lived. It would’ve been simple enough. Though I know she wanted to leave me.’
‘And the children?’
He felt his soul turn to stone. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Surely she could not have taken your children from you. Your heir.’
‘By law, no. But she could have run with them. She might have, if her lover had not cast her aside. We did not have a way to communicate. We did not... She would not have had a child with another man if all had been well. I do not know what was in her mind.’
He could not say what hurt him more. The thought that his wife would have taken the children from him, or that she would have left them. He had watched his children deal with their mother’s death. The devastation his children would have felt, knowing their mother might leave them... It destroyed him. The idea that they might have been taken away from him hurt no less. However, he could not say for certain if they might have been happier with their mother.
She, for her flaws, had been warm and lovely.
She had taken tea in the garden with them. She had pieces of her heart that were not frozen, and...
Many of the failures in their life, their marriage, had been his. He had been faithful. But his heart had never been hers.
He often wondered if he had driven her into the arms of another. If he could have stopped it had he been a different man, a different husband.
And yet there was no real healing to be had in thinking of these things.
She had not left.
She had stayed. She had given birth. The child hadn’t died.
She had.
And so the babe was here, a burden for him to bear should he want to preserve his wife’s reputation. And his own. A man who was made a cuckold, a man who had a cuckoo in his nest was hardly a man who could be looked up to.
Keeping the child, preserving the idea that the child was his was the best way forward in every way except this. Except...
With the milk finished, Mary turned to him as she fed the infant using a ceramic pot.
‘I will see a new wet nurse is found by tomorrow,’ he said.
‘A good idea. The poor child. I don’t think he understands why he has lost his superior food.’
‘Perhaps if the wet nurse were not more interested in the man she was seeing he would still have it. A concern for whoever I find to take her place.’
‘Not all women are distracted by men,’ she said.
‘Is that so?’
‘It is so for me. I have shaped my life around not needing or wanting one.’
‘And you do not find me a distraction?’
A dangerous question.
For here they stood in the kitchen, with no one around, her in a nightdress, and he in his suit, but with the collar and sleeves undone. They were half undressed between the two of them.
Thankfully, the child was between them.
‘I am not the sort of woman who can afford distractions, Your Grace.’
‘West.’
