Daisy gave her brother a swift, hard hug and headed for the stairs.
“Why do they do this?” Casriel asked, pacing along the library’s shelves.
“Why do the ladies give birth?” Fabianus replied from a comfortable reading chair near the hearth. “A married man with eight siblings should have some insight into the facts of conception.”
“Not the ladies,” Casriel said, staring out into the frigid blackness of a winter night. “The babies. They come at the worst times. Beatitude gave birth to our firstborn in the middle of a raging storm, and now Mrs. Weller is fifteen miles off attending a great-niece.”
Fabianus well recalled the sheer terror of holding a vigil while Marianne had endured her travail. As difficult as their marital impasse had been at the time, all he’d wanted was for her and the child to come safely through the ordeal. His prayers had been answered, and his relief and joy had been sufficient to inspire a rapprochement with his spouse.
A footman arrived carrying trays upon which sandwiches, sliced apples, and shortbread had been laid.
“His lordship will need a pot of gunpowder,” Fabianus said. “Or a tankard of cider. Nothing stronger than ale.”
“Cider,” Casriel said.
The footman set the trays on the sideboard, bowed, and withdrew. He would know, as servants always seemed to know, exactly how the labor abovestairs progressed. Lady Daisy and Mrs. Margaret Dorning were on hand to assist the countess. Hawthorne Dorning, Margaret’s husband, had been sent on some errand involving herbs, as best Fabianus could determine.
Fabianus had offered to remove to the local posting inn, and Casriel had asked him—asked him—to remain at the Hall and keep watch with him. For a man with six brothers to have none of those good fellows on hand at such a time struck Fabianus as very poor planning, at best.
“Eat,” Fabianus said, taking the trays to the reading table. “If you are to be up all night, you will need your strength.”
“My father went through this nine times,” Casriel said, ambling to the reading table and subsiding into a chair. “Nine times. I’m not hungry.”
“Eat anyway, or the staff will fret.” Fabianus wasn’t particularly hungry either, but he, too, expected to have a long night.
Casriel crunched off a bite of apple. “I nearly called Fromm out when Daisy told us the second child was on the way so soon after the first. We love Kenny, of course, but Henry wasn’t four months old, and Daisy was already back on the nest. Then almost the same thing happened after Kenny’s birth. I did say something that time.”
“What exactly does one say in such a situation?” Fabianus chose a sandwich, ham and cheddar on buttered bread.
“One says, give my sister at least a year to recover from your damned rutting, or I will stuff your pillicock up your handsome arse. Sycamore suggested the exact phrasing, and he has a way with a threat. Fromm, who was inclined to make a jest of everything, apparently heeded my suggestion.”
The footman returned with two tankards of cider and again withdrew without saying a word.
“I gather you did not care for Lady Daisy’s husband?” Fabianus asked.
Casriel dipped a wedge of apple into his cider. Had the fare been tea and shortbread, the behavior would have been understandable. Given the occasion, Fabianus did not remark the earl’s eccentricity.
“I thought Fromm was harmless, a prosperous neighbor’s pampered son, poised to step into his father’s shoes when the squire went to his reward. Fromm was, however, a bounder of sorts, at least as a young man. He enticed my older sister to yield to his charms. All the while, he was also currying favor with Daisy. Daisy had the better settlements, and she was too naïve to see that the man to whom she’d granted her favors was a hound. I did what I could, but at seventeen Daisy fancied herself smitten.”
The tale was all too familiar. “Eat your sandwich, Casriel. Was the marriage nonetheless cordial?”
“You are distracting me from my worries,” Casriel said, “by provoking me to confess my regrets.”
“Is it working?”
Casriel took a bite of sandwich. “Daisy’s situation was an ongoing woe. She put on a brave face, but once a woman speaks her vows, she’s stuck. Then the babies come along, and she goes from stuck to being a prisoner of maternal devotion and hidebound convention.”
Fabianus started on his second sandwich, though he was gaining access to family history no mere acquaintance ought to be privy to.
“Is not the husband stuck as well?” He certainly had been.
“Not to nearly the same degree. He can seek favors from other women, which Fromm did early in the marriage with a dedication that boggles the mind of a man past the age of eighteen. A husband controls his own wealth. If he works for a wage, he maintains dominion over his coin, while a wife does not. He maintains dominion over the children, and if his wife should desert him for excessive cruelty, the authorities will use force to help him retrieve her.”
Casriel had clearly given some thought—and gloomy thoughts they were—to Lady Daisy’s situation.
“Her ladyship would never abandon her children,” Fabianus said.
“Precisely.” Casriel was a genial, mannerly fellow, but that one word conveyed ire. He stuffed the sandwich in his mouth, and Fabianus hoped the topic was closed.
No such luck.
“Fromm broke his word to me,” Casriel said. “His father was still alive at the time of the nuptials, and thus Daisy’s settlements did not spell out that she’d have a life estate in the Grange in case of Fromm’s death. Eric thought making that promise while his father yet lived either ill-bred or unenforceable, but Fromm Senior’s signature was on the settlement documents. Had the promise been written into the agreements, I assure you it would have been enforceable. I trusted a man who’d taken liberties with both of my sisters. Had Daisy not already been carrying—”
Casriel fell silent. Many, if not most, engaged couples anticipated their vows, and among the working folk, a woman often did not marry until she had conceived. Still, the admission should not have been made.
“Her ladyship is homeless?” Fabianus asked.
“Fromm’s will left everything, every plate and piglet, to his children, and trusteeship of the lot of it to his brother. Guardianship of the children, control of the children’s money, all of it is in the brother’s hands, when Fromm assured me the situation would be otherwise. Daisy keeps what I was able to negotiate for her in the settlements, but having her household under an in-law’s thumb will vex her sorely.”
Such an arrangement would have made sense if the lady were a spendthrift, though Lady Daisy was by her own lights a competent manager. That the children’s guardian also controlled their property was less than ideal, but not unheard of outside the peerage.
“Is the brother a decent sort?”
“That remains to be seen. Even Fromm’s brother will tread lightly in the early days of a widow’s mourning, but he’s a cold fish, and Daisy doesn’t particularly care for him.”
Fabianus nearly hated the fellow sight unseen. This brother-in-law had apparently been no sort of steadying influence on his younger sibling.
“Is her ladyship destitute?” An extremely personal question, but relevant to the topic at hand.