Whisper To Me of Love Read Free

body would cease. There was so much love that she would have lavished on her little daughter, so much laughter they would have shared, so much that she wanted to tell Morgana about her father ... so much that she wanted to protect her small daughter from—especially the lies and gossip about Andrew’s death. But there was nothing she could do; she was dying, and she hadn’t needed the grave expression on the physician’s face, nor the pain in Stephen’s gray eyes, to tell her that the time left to her in this world was to be measured in minutes.
    It eased Hester’s mind somewhat to know that at least Morgana would be well provided for—Stephen would be her guardian, and Hester had no doubt that he would prove to be a kind and loving one. She worried about Lucinda, though, fearful that Stephen’s wife would resent and bully her little daughter and make Morgana’s early years unpleasant. But then she reminded herself that Stephen would not allow Lucinda to mistreat Morgana. And as for material things—upon her twenty-first birthday, or upon her marriage, whichever happened first, Morgana would come into the vast fortune that Hester had willed to her, a fortune that Stephen would manage during the years of her minority.
    Materially, Morgana would want for nothing, but Hester, having grown up without a mother herself, knew that objects could never take the place of a loving parent, and she was conscious of a great sadness that she would not be there to watch her daughter grow into adulthood.
    While Hester did not look forward to dying, if it weren’t for Lucinda’s unaccountable antipathy toward her, she might have faced her own death more peacefully and with less fear for her infant daughter’s future. The situation with Lucinda worried her immensely; she had never quite understood why Lucinda had taken such an immediate dislike to her and been unwilling to meet her many overtures of friendship. It had been months before she had learned from the squire’s wife that Andrew’s name had once been connected with Lucinda’s. “It caused quite a bit of talk, I can tell you!” the squire’s wife had said forthrightly. “Lucinda had met Stephen first, you see, and they were already engaged when Andrew came on the scene. Andrew seemed quite enchanted with her and paid her marked attention for several weeks before the wedding. She certainly did not discourage his attentions either! I personally think that Lucinda decided she might prefer being a Countess instead of the wife of a penniless younger son—no matter how charming and handsome the younger son might be! But nothing came of it, of course.” Adding with a kind glance at Hester, “I wouldn’t dwell on it, my dear—it happened years before the Earl met you!”
    Even telling herself that Lucinda’s dislike might simply be based on the fact that she had been jealous of the woman Andrew had eventually married did not quite explain to Hester why Lucinda acted as she did—after all, she had presumably married the man of her choice, Stephen. So why did she now so obviously resent Andrew’s wife? Her open malice had not bothered Hester overmuch in the beginning, and she had assumed that eventually she would be able to dispel Lucinda’s animosity and that, in time, they might even become friends. But now that she was dying and the unpleasant realization that Lucinda would be rearing her daughter passed through her brain, Hester was filled with foreboding.
    Desperately she tried to rally her fading strength, the driving need to speak to Stephen, to beg him to watch over her daughter, making her more aware of what was happening around her. Rousing herself, she became conscious now of the soft crying of her newborn daughter, and a wave of love flooded through her as she looked at the cradle and caught a glimpse of the infant’s surprisingly full head of black hair. Morgana