“None of Them Will Be My Mother!” the Duke’s Son Declared — Until the Cook Brought an Apple Pie
Chapter 12
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He covered her with his coat very gently, and he sat down on the hearth rug to watch the last of the fire, and the thing he had been refusing to look at for three months came and sat down beside him, and would not be moved: he loved her.It was not a flash or a thunderclap; it was a quiet, final arrival, like a tide that has been coming in for hours and is suddenly at the door.He did nothing at all about it. That was his fault, and he would acknowledge it later with a bitter exactness. He told himself that he was protecting her: he knew what London did to women who rose a single rung above their station, and he had watched a hundred fine ladies cut a hundred lesser ones to ribbons over a teacup. A cook who became a duchess would be eaten alive in a season. He told himself that he would find a way to shield her first.And so he waited, and watched, and said nothing. And in the waiting, he gave his aunt exactly the time she needed.In the second week of April, the Lords sat for three weeks on a matter that required his vote, and Theodore went up to London with a heavy, reluctant heart, leaving Master Edmund with Mrs. Hollis and the household in Rosamund's capable hands.The morning after his carriage rolled out of the gates, another rolled in. Lady Honoria Pelham descended from it in black silk, with Lord Pelham behind her looking faintly seasick; and the footmen who carried in her trunks noted that she did not look at the house the way a relative looks at a home—she looked at it the way a general looks at a field.She found her opening in two days.It was a pleasant, ordinary Wednesday afternoon, and she came down to the kitchen with the cane tapping, and found the Duke's son standing on a stool at the great table with flour to the elbows, his sleeves rolled up, and a cook guiding his hands over a lattice crust. Master Edmund was laughing: he had a streak of flour across his nose, and Lady Honoria stood in the doorway and saw her nephew's heir, the future Duke of Ashborne, wearing a kitchen apron and calling a servant by her Christian name."Miss Vale," she said in a voice like cold iron. "A word."In the stillroom, among the dried lavender and the sharp scent of vinegar, she made no speech. She laid a purse on the shelf—£10—and she said it plainly:"My husband's agent informs me that your sister rents a cottage at Porlock on the Pelham estate on a tenancy at will. A quarter's notice, Miss Vale. Three children and a widow on the road in April."Rosamund went cold from the crown of her head to the soles of her boots."You will leave this house tomorrow morning quietly, without a letter to my nephew and without a word to the child. You will take your £10, and your sister keeps her roof. Do you understand me?"Her voice did not shake, but it cost her. "Perfectly, my lady," said Rosamund.