Lottie felt tears spring to her eyes. She looked down at her lap. “I’m sorry you think me a fool.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.” His voice was brisk, impatient.
There’d been a time back before they’d married when her slightest frown would cause him to offer profuse apologies. Once, he’d sent her an arrangement of flowers so big it’d taken two footmen to bring it into the house. All because he’d not been able to take her driving on a day it’d rained.
Now he thought her a fool.
“It’ll take a special parliamentary committee, I believe,” Nate was saying as she thought these gloomy things, “to decide if this man is indeed St. Aubyn, and if he is, who the proper Earl of Blanchard is. That, at least, is the opinion of many of the learned parliamentarians. There hasn’t been a case such as this one in living memory, and many are quite interested in the legal implications.”
“Are they?” Lottie murmured. She’d lost interest in the conversation while her husband had finally become engaged in it. Had her marriage always been thus? “In any case, I thought it would be nice to attend the ball. It’s bound to have all the best gossip of the year.”
She glanced up in time to catch the look of irritation that crossed his face.
“I know that keeping up with the latest scandal is vital to you, dearest,” he said. “But there are actually other things of import in the world, you know.”
There was a short, awful silence.
“First I’m a fool and now I’m interested only in gossip,” Lottie said very clearly, because she was holding back the tears with all her will. “I begin to wonder, sir, why you married me at all.”
“Now, Lottie, you know I didn’t mean it that way,” he replied, and didn’t even bother trying to hide the edge of exasperation in his voice.
“In what way did you mean it, Nathan?”
He shook his head, a reasonable man beset by a mad wife. “You’re overwrought.”
“I am not,” Lottie said, the tears beginning to overflow, “overwrought.”
He sighed, pushed his chair back from the table, and stood. “This conversation is pointless. I’ll leave you to yourself until you’ve once again regained your senses. Good night, madam.”
And he left. She sat there in the dining room, gasping and trembling and thoroughly humiliated.
It was the last straw.
“HE’S VERY HURT, Jeremy,” Beatrice said as she paced from Jeremy’s heavily draped window to his bed. “You have no idea. He told me just a fraction of what he’d experienced in the Colonies, and it was all I could do not to scream aloud. How could he survive such horrors? And yet he’s incredibly strong, incredibly determined. It’s as if he’s driven out of his soul whatever softness he may’ve once felt. He’s been fire-hardened.”
“He sounds very interesting,” Jeremy said.
Beatrice looked at him. “I’ve never met a gentleman like him in all my life.”
“What does Lord Hope look like now that he’s transformed himself?”
“He’s tall with very wide shoulders and wears a sort of aloof glare most of the time. He’s quite intimidating and rather savage-looking, actually.”
“But you said he’d cut his hair and donned a wig and other civilized accoutrements. He sounds quite normal to me,” Jeremy said from the bed. That was the best part about Jeremy—he always took an interest in one’s thoughts and troubles, no matter how trivial.
“He may wear the same sort of clothes as other gentlemen, but they fit him differently somehow.” Beatrice picked up a tall green bottle from Jeremy’s cache of medicines and peered at the dark liquid inside before returning it to its brethren. “And he’s still wearing that earring I told you about. The tattoos he can’t remove, but why do you think he hasn’t taken off the earring?”
“I haven’t the faintest,” Jeremy replied with evident delight. “I do wish I were able to meet him, though.”
Beatrice turned and glanced at him. Jeremy was sitting up in bed today. She’d plumped the pillows for him and helped him sit higher. His cheeks were still flushed, his eyes too bright, but she fancied he was a little better than the last time she’d seen him.
At least she hoped so.
“Perhaps I can bring him around someday,” she said.
He glanced away. “Don’t, Bea.”
She blinked. “Why ever not?”