Duke and His Duchess Read Free Page B

Thursday was their day to spend time with the children en famille, though lately Percival had been absent at those gatherings more than he’d attended them. The dead leaf in Esther’s hair took on particular significance.
    “Esther? I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant to dine with Arbuthnot, but the man is a font of information, and if I can get the high meadow drained, it’s excellent pasture. We need more pasture… I am sorry, though. I’ll tell the boys tomorrow morning.”
    He rolled over and slipped an arm around her waist. Was she losing flesh, or had he just forgotten what she felt like when she wasn’t carrying?
    “Esther?”
    She twitched. In sleep, his composed, poised wife twitched a fair amount. She also sometimes talked in her sleep, little nonsense phrases that always made him smile. He kissed her cheek and rolled onto his back.
    “I miss my wife.” Lying naked in the same bed with her, Percival missed his wife with an ache that was only partly sexual.
    He considered pleasuring himself and discarded the notion. The flesh was willing—the flesh was perpetually willing—but the spirit was weary and bewildered. He’d blundered today, as a husband and a father. He’d blundered as a son, too, in his father’s estimation, and very likely he was blundering as a brother in some manner he’d yet to perceive.
    Beside him, Esther’s feet twitched. She’d told him once she often dreamed of their courtship, a brief, passionate, fraught undertaking that now seemed as distant as Canada.
    Percival rolled away from his wife and let her dream in peace.
    ***
    Esther felt a wall rising in the middle of the Windham family, for all they appeared to be placidly consuming a hearty English breakfast.
    His Grace commandeered the head of the table, of course. Esther tried to picture quiet, soft-spoken Peter in that location and couldn’t. Opposite His Grace, at the foot, the chair remained empty, though as the senior lady of rank and next duchess, the position belonged to Peter’s wife, Lady Arabella.
    Peter sat at his father’s right hand, Arabella next to her husband, and Esther below Arabella. Across the table, Percival hid behind a newspaper on the duke’s left, Tony inhaled beefsteak and kippers next to his brother, and across from Esther, Tony’s wife, Gladys, took dainty nibbles of her eggs.
    Had Esther wanted to, there was no way she could have nudged her husband’s foot under the table, casually touched his hand, or murmured an aside to him. When had they decided to sit as far apart from each other as possible? When had she decided to sit on the side of the invalided heir?
    “You’ll be going up to London, Pembroke.” His Grace glowered at a buttered toast point while the rest of the table exchanged glances at this news. “I’ve been asked to sit on a commission to study the provisioning of the army overseas. Damned lot of nonsense, but one doesn’t refuse such a request.”
    He bit off a corner of the toast while a pained silence spread. Peter hadn’t been off the property even to go to services for at least two years. A trip to the stables left him exhausted, and if he missed an afternoon nap, he had to absent himself from dinner.
    Esther lifted the teapot. “More tea, Your Grace?”
    “I don’t want any damned tea. If you bothered to familiarize yourself with the indignities of old age, you’d never offer such a thing.”
    Gladys shot Esther a sympathetic look. Percival slowly, deliberately, folded his newspaper down and stared at his father.
    Please, Percival, I beg you do not—
    “I’ll thank you not to rebuke my lady wife for a proper display of table manners, sir.”
    Lady Arabella laid her hand on Peter’s sleeve; Tony paused in the demolition of his breakfast.
    “Perhaps I might serve on this committee?” Tony suggested. “Been to Canada, after all, and it’s not as if I’m needed here.”
    “You?” Tony might have been old Thomas the footman for all the incredulity in the Duke’s