He stood there a moment longer, looking so intently at her that she glanced down to see if her dressing gown had slid off her shoulders and puddled on the floor. It hadn’t. She looked back at Peter, whose encompassing gaze took her in for another heartbeat. Then he turned and was gone.
She and Emmie made rapid work of her toilette, Selina talking all the while, explaining Lucinda and Freddie to her pragmatic lady’s maid. In minutes, she too was downstairs.
Where had Humphrey put them? There was a sitting room, to be sure. A large, chairless sitting room with a cold hearth. Thedining room featured a sad deficit of chairs as well, and no breakfast for two growing children. Surely not the portrait gallery? She prayed Humphrey had not put them in the portrait gallery.
She found them still standing just inside the front door, Peter on one side of the entry, Freddie and Lu facing him. They had one trunk between them. Freddie carried a satchel in his hands. And—her heart twisted in her chest—they wore the same finery that she’d picked out for the wedding breakfast.
They had come, with their things, dressed in their very best clothes.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
Lu turned to her, regal and cool as a queen, her chin high. “Great-great-aunt Rosamund is dead.”
The words were small shocks in the air, rattling everything that had come before.
“Oh no,” Selina said reflexively. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“We came here,” said Freddie. His voice sounded smaller than Selina remembered, as if the house’s cold marble floors muffled it. “We didn’t know where else to go.”
“We’ve brought our cat,” Lu said. “We will remain with the cat or not at all.”
“You brought the cat?” Peter said, sounding stupefied. “The gray kitten I gave you?”
“It isour cat.” Lu’s voice was fierce, her green eyes bright. “We aren’t going to leave him behind.”
“Of course not,” Selina told the girl, trying to make her voice soothing. “Of course you must not leave him. Of course he may stay.”
“We’ve named him Peter,” said Freddie proudly, flipping open the satchel.
Selina choked on air.
Peter’s eyebrows ascended heavenward. “You namedthe catPeter?”
Freddie nodded. A pair of gray ears emerged from the top of the bag. And then with a hiss, Peter-the-Cat shot out of the satchel like a rocket, leapt onto Peter-the-Duke’s shoulder, rebounded to the ground, streaked around the corner, and vanished into the portrait gallery.
Chapter 21
Dear Duchess—how is Peter? (I mean, of course, the cat.)
—from Will to Selina
Selina had taken all of them shopping.
She’d managed it seamlessly. Almost before he knew it, Peter was fully attired and handing Lu up into the Stanhope carriage, while Selina followed behind with Freddie beside her and a carnet under her arm.
“Lucky for you,” she had said to the children, “that we were on our way to purchase furniture just this very moment. Now you can choose the finishings for your own bedrooms, rather than having your stodgy duke of a brother select them for you.”
He’d had no idea she meant for them to go shopping that day.Hadshe? Or was she simply inventing the errand to fold the children into their morning’s activities?
Freddie and Lu were where they were supposed to be, she told them without words. They had bedrooms. They had a brother who wanted them. They belonged.
He swallowed back the tightness in his chest and tried to answer Lu when she asked if her bedroom could include a collection of ropes. She had, she informed him, taken up learning marine knot-tying.
Of course she had. Visions of himself tied hand and foot, at the point of Lu’s practice foil, flitted alarmingly through his head.
Across the carriage, Selina sat beside Freddie, their heads bent over her carnet. She seemed to be showing him a list of furnishings she and her lady’s maid had drawn up.
“For the sitting room,” she said, “I had thought to have the walls re-covered in dark green.”