She shook her head. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“They’ll be glad that I found a duchess,” he explained. “They’ve been waiting for years, you know. And they’ll be even happier when there’s a child in the nursery.”
She heard it, the unsaid word,again. She did not add it, for she did not want to increase the pain that she already knew was in his heart. She felt as if a wound had been opened inside him and something festering was coming out.
It was in the way he stood, the way he talked, the way he looked at her now. And she feared it.
But at the same time, she wondered if since the wound had reopened there was a chance that all the poison could come out and he could be healed? Or would it be the opposite? Would it simply never heal, and his wound would cause him to grow sicker and sicker?
She did not know. She knew that she could not heal it for him. That the child could not heal it for him either, but perhaps she could help him in some way.
She prayed so.
“You are thinking various serious thoughts,” he observed, easily eating up the manicured grass beneath his feet.
“I am thinking nonsense,” she replied with a forced smile.
“Oh, well, nonsense can be very helpful. It can distract the brain a great deal. Come. This is the garden,” he announced as he came around the towering limestone turret of a corner.
Her eyes all but bulged.
There was a set of stairs that came out to a great outlook of beautiful stonework which then cascaded down the hillside towards a lake that had clearly been manmade.
Poseidon sprung from the lake, his trident held high in the air as fountains of water jetted into the sky.
“These are not just gardens,” she countered.
“They areindeedgardens,” he replied.
“These are superior to any of the gardens that I have seen,” she breathed. “They outdo St. James’ Park. They outdo Kensington Gardens. They outdo—”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “We have had many years,” he said with a laugh, “to hire the most excellent landscape artists. And if you must know, these were inspired by Versailles. My father and his father before him had a great admiration for the French gardeners. And hence, this is why it looks as it does.”
She stared at the elaborate pebbled pathways that were wide enough for several ladies in the skirts of the previous century to descend to the next level and then to the next and to the next before they met the lake.
There were small, beautifully painted boats tied to a grotto at the bottom of it, all of them ready to go out for pleasure, she supposed.
She wondered when he had last had a party here.
She did not ask, but suddenly she wondered if this place could come to life again with her here. She had not known much joy in the last years.
And for the first time, she realized that she would have the resources and the power to make joy happen if she wanted.
And she did.
Oh, how she did.
Chapter 18
The letter arrived by courier.
Garret was not surprised at all by the contents as he cracked the seal, opened it, and read the rather elegant hand.
Even so, he let out a sigh of relief.
He had thought that the brother, Turnbridge, would be effusive or at least accepting of his sister’s marriage to a duke.
Even if that duke had shot him in a duel.