“Better, but too stuffy. Besides, someone might think you are a French Revolutionary.”
“Viva la revolucion! Had it succeeded, we might not be in our current plight.”
“Plight. Perhaps you are Orlando. Yes, I think you are, and I shall call you Lan for short.”
“And you shall be Rosalind. My sweet, sweet Rose.”
“I like that. How did we come to such a pass as this, Lanny?”
“Your father did not think me good enough for you or for his pocket-sized Duchy. So he insisted on this sham of a marriage for you.”
“I’m not sure I always like being a Duchess, Lanny. It isn’t nearly as much fun as I thought it would be.”
“I know, Love. But soon all shall be yours. All we have to do to make sure you are with child.”
“But Lanny, I’ve done nothing with the Duke to make me so. He knows that. He will surely know it isn’t his.”
“I’ll not fault you for your choices, but that does make it a bit difficult. We must simply, therefore, convince him that he has made you pregnant. Then we can clear the road for your baby to inherit.”
“That is a lovely plan, Lanny. But how shall we do it?”
“Wait and see. I don’t show all my cards at once. The first part is to ensure the baby.”
“But…but Lanny, I don’t want to be pregnant. I don’t like babies. My mother died having me, and I don’t want to die!”
“Sweet, you were the second baby. The women in your family only die with the second baby. The old Duke of Mabway made a mistake when he tried to get a second child from her.”
“But I don’t want to! I’ve seen the bellies of women who had babies. When we went to Bath to take the waters, there were young mothers in the ladies bathing area. Their tummies were all misshapen and one showed me her stretch marks. I don’t want stretch marks!”
Margery began to cry.
“Shh, shhh, love. It will be all right. I would never ask you to do something that would hurt you. We will have a little bit of fun, and you will enjoy it. Then, by and by, you will have our baby, and he will be a Duke one day.”
Margery rubbed her head against the shadow man’s shoulder. “It won’t hurt?”
“Not a bit of it. You shall see.”
The shadow man put his arms around Margery and kissed her gently. “You are my love, you are my only love. I will make you a Duchess, and I will be your consort. We just have to take care of a few little inconvenient details.”
“It’s just I don’t see why I must have a baby. I don’t want a baby. I don’t even like them.”
The shadow man brushed the hair out of Margery’s face, then kissed her again. Inwardly, he sighed. This could be harder than he thought. The serving girls were a lot easier to please. But Margery was the love of his life, and they had come this far. He just needed to get her talked around to his point of view.
She was always difficult, temperamental, and hard to please. But she is in every way worth it. Even with spending almost every cent I make on her tonics, she is definitely worth it.
As he held her, somewhere high up on the mountain, a wolf howled. “I don’t like it when the wolves howl,” Margery whimpered. “I think my father threw me to the wolves to save himself or to save his precious Mabway. Only then it burned, and only the big tower is there. I don’t even like to think about it.”
“Shh, shh, love. No one is getting thrown to the wolves. That wolf is high up on the mountains. He probably has a den of babies somewhere to take care of. You would not begrudge him that, would you?”
“Yes!” Margery said, “Yes, I would begrudge it because if he has babies, then soon there will be more wolves. I don’t like wolves at all. I like them even less than babies.”
Then, almost as if on cue, another wolf howl answered the first.Well, at least that is one thing that is on track.That means that the good batch of false coins are ready.
Margery buried her face in the crook of his arm, trembling at the sound. He gently rubbed the back of her neck. It never occurred to him to think that the last wolf in Scotland had been killed several years before. Or perhaps he didn’t know.
Chapter 36
The following morning, Celeste realized that she had an exceptionally busy schedule ahead of her. “I do believe that competence is its own punishment,” she murmured to the dim mirror in her room as she put up her hair and tied on her cap.
