The Countess of Casriel stood at the window of her private sitting room, a space Grey regularly invaded at her invitation. The chamber had been his father’s study and boasted both abundant light from being situated in a corner of the Hall and proximity to the front foyer one floor below.
Papa had been able to see all and hear all from his study—a father of nine needed every parental advantage—and when Grey had considered rooms to offer his countess for her personal headquarters, Papa’s office had come to mind first. Grey had dominion over the estate office on the first floor, but he much preferred to work where Beatitude could answer the occasional question or steal an occasional kiss.
“Yonder comes your viscount,” she said as Grey set aside the latest epistle from his youngest brother, Sycamore.
“Good of him to walk Daisy home,” Grey said. “I did not find a way to broach the topic of Eric’s will with her.”
Beatitude remained at the window. In later pregnancy, she tended to not need the shawls, extra stockings, or lap robes winter usually called for. She was not due for several weeks, else Grey would never have yielded to Penweather’s request for hospitality. To Grey’s husbandly eye, the baby nonetheless looked to have settled.
He took the place behind his wife at the window, looping his arms around her. A lone figure marched where the park and the paddocks met. The falling snow already blanketed the landscape and would soon fill up the viscount’s footsteps.
“Did Daisy even mention the will?” Beatitude asked, nuzzling Grey’s shoulder.
“A child running naked through the garden rather upstaged all other topics. Then Penweather sat down to tea with us, and Fromm’s will is not a subject to air before a guest. Are you in need of a nap?”
Lovemaking with a gravid wife was a whole new vista of tenderness and passion, and if anything, pregnancy turned Bea’s already-healthy intimate appetites voracious. A loving husband bore up as manfully under the onslaught as he could.
“I am restless,” Beatitude replied, “and I am not certain what to make of our guest. How well do you truly know Lord Penweather?”
“Not that well. He was one of those bright boys sent up to university at a precocious age, while I was stumbling through my final year of wenching and philosophy later than most. We bumped into each other periodically in London, and our political views tend to coincide. I would call us cordial acquaintances, rather than best of friends.”
And yet, Grey liked Penweather. Liked a man who brought his small daughter along on a short jaunt into a neighboring county, liked a fellow who wasn’t daunted by widow’s weeds.
“Theodosia Tresham speaks well of him,” Beatitude said, naming her best friend, who also happened to be some sort of former in-law to the viscount.
Penweather paused beside the mare’s paddock and spared a moment to scratch old Guinevere’s withers.
“You have reservations, my lady?”
“I suspect if you aren’t of an age with Penweather, then you aren’t acquainted with the exact metes and bounds of his reputation. Would you mind…?”
She did not have to be more explicit. Grey braced one hand on her shoulder and applied the other to the small of her back. In bed, this variety of backrub had become a nightly ritual that often presaged other intimacies.
“Merry widows gravitated to him,” Grey said, “but then, they gravitate to the young men-about-Town generally. Witness, my handsome self was ensnared by just such a lady.” He punctuated that observation with a nuzzle to his wife’s neck.
“The ensnaring, my lord, was mutual, but Penweather’s reputation went a bit further. He specialized in widows, not necessarily merry ones, and a lady didn’t have to summon him or in any way indicate an interest in him. He would just know she was ready for a frolic, and he sensed without being told exactly what manner of frolic. With some, I gather he didn’t even frolic.”
She fell silent while Penweather gave the old mare a final pat and resumed his progress toward the Hall. His stride was brisk, but when he reached the formal garden, he detoured to the fountain. He stripped off his gloves and used a bare fist to break up ice all around the fountain, doing a more thorough job than Daisy had done with her stick. Then he gathered up the ice in his hands and dumped it on the snowy grass, ensuring the water would take longer to refreeze.
When Grey expected Penweather to continue on to the house, his lordship instead dusted off a bench and sat alone in the snowy garden.
“What do you mean?” Grey asked. “He didn’t even frolic with some?”
“I gather in some cases he was a sort of platonic cavalier servente. I don’t know if there was cuddling involved, philosophy, intimacies that fell short of copulation… The ladies he dallied with invariably recalled him fondly, said little about the particulars, and found his attentions fortifying in some regard. A few spoke as if they’d taken him for a lover, but by no means all or even most.”
Beatitude sounded puzzled, and she was a particularly discerning woman. She leaned forward, bracing her hands on the windowsill so Grey could use firm pressure on her lower back.
“Were you tempted to dally with him?” Have you dallied with him? The notion ought to be upsetting, except that people who married well into adulthood did so knowing their spouse hadn’t sprung, fully formed, from Zeus’s forehead.
“He was married by the time I was bereaved,” Beatitude said, “and devoted to his wife. God, that feels good. Have I ever told you how much I love your hands?”
“Your rhapsodies are usually reserved for my other attributes,” Grey said, detouring south to provoke sighs by squeezing her muscular fundament. “My excellent mind, my fine baritone, my sibling loyalty.” He wrapped her in a hug. “My exquisite swordsmanship.” The baby kicked him. He straightened, knowing even braced on the windowsill, Beatitude could not remain comfortable for long in any one position. “Our offspring is restless.”
“I have to pee,” she said, straightening. “I am nothing but a peeing, napping asteroid of maternal anticipation. How can you stand me?”
“I adore you, that’s how, and if you are an asteroid of maternal anticipation, that is mostly my paternal fault, and to my eyes, a beauteous state of affairs. So whom did Penweather marry?”
“Marianne Mortenson,” Beatitude said, crossing to the door, and heaven help a besotted husband, Grey even liked watching her walk in her present state. “She was pretty, just out of mourning, and determined to have him. The rumor was, he fell hard for her, and then they were off to his family seat in Hampshire. I think he came into the title about the same time.”
Hampshire, where the fair Pandora of the minimal wardrobe had been born, apparently. Grey’s older daughter was already off at boarding school in the Midlands, and the baby—soon to be no longer the baby—had progressed from barely walking to charging about only recently.
Grey doubted his offspring would ever storm the garden in the altogether, but a father learned not to tempt fate with such predictions.
“And now Penweather is himself a widower,” Grey said. “Are you telling me to turn him loose on Daisy, or warning me to keep him away from her?”
Beatitude braced her hands on her lower back and stretched. “That is for Daisy to decide, isn’t it? How long will he be here?”