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“Why not?”
“I have work to do.”
“But you always have work to do,” she pouted. “I’m sure you can make some time for me.”
He took a pause at that, taking in her expression. Something clouded in his eyes, and he took a step closer to her. His gaze fell on her lips, which made her blush.
What was going through his mind? She would give anything to find out.
“Are you complaining?” he said in a soft voice. “Do you feel neglected, dear wife?”
Dear wife.
Heavens. It was spoken so plainly, but it made her cheeks burn.
“I...” she found herself stuttering on her words. “I... don’t believe that I am...”
“It seems like it,” he said, carefully scraping a finger across the line of her jaw. “I wouldn’t want you to feeling like that.”
“Then... you ought to give me...” she gulped, avoiding his gaze. “what I am asking for.”
“Remind me what that is again,” he said, pointedly.
“Tea...”
“You can’t always get what you want,” he smirked. Did he seem to be enjoying whatever hold that he had on her? That would be unacceptable to her usually, but at this moment, she found that it excited her a little.
“We can agree on a bargain if you must,” she replied, flustered. “Tomorrow, then?”
“Perhaps.” He was already moving again, with the smooth, practiced ease of a man stepping around a hole in the road without appearing to notice it was there at all. “I have a great deal on my desk just now.”
She let it go, that first time, telling herself it was only the ordinary business of a duke’s correspondence, and thought no more of it until two days later, when she asked again.
“You had promised me tea,” she intercepted him just outside the main house building, near the gardens. He seemed to be stepping out somewhere.
“Was that today?” he replied, already looking towards his carriage.
“Yes, don’t you remember?” she tried to hide the disappointment in her tone. She had been looking forward to it all day, and thought that perhaps it had been the same for him.
“I do,” he reassured her. “But I am afraid that I am slightly caught up.”
She pouted again.
“Fine then,” she said, watching him leave. The sinking feeling in her stomach was unpleasant, but she tried to push it away.
He is busy, perhaps.
By the third refusal she had begun to understand, with a slow, unhappy certainty, that her husband was avoiding her, and that she had not the faintest idea why.
The following week, Phillipa returned to St. Anthony’s with a wagon of supplies that Gregory had, without being asked, arranged to have sent along with her, blankets, and flannel for the smallest children, and a case of the particular cough remedy Mrs. Fairley had once mentioned in passing as being perpetually short. She found the common room in its usual cheerful chaos, and was very nearly bowled over at the door by a boy of perhaps seven, hurtling past her in pursuit of a somewhat smaller boy who had, by the sound of the shrieking, made off with something of considerable importance.
“Tom! Georgie! Not through the hall, I have told you both a hundred times…” Mrs. Fairley appeared, harried and smiling despite herself, wiping her hands on her apron. “Forgive them, Your Grace. Georgie has taken Tom’s good marble, and Tom takes his marbles very seriously indeed.”
“I take all my possessions seriously,” said Tom, with immense five-year-old dignity, reappearing at his own pace now that the chase had apparently concluded to his satisfaction, the marble once more secure in his fist. He regarded Phillipa with the particular solemn suspicion he reserved for all adults until they had proven themselves, a habit Phillipa had come, over her months of visiting, to find rather endearing than otherwise. “Did you bring peppermints?”
“I did, as it happens.”
“Then you may stay,” Tom informed her, with the air of a magistrate handing down a generous verdict, and stalked off toward the twins’ corner of the room, where two identical toddling girls of perhaps two years old were engaged in the serious business of dismantling a tower of wooden blocks that Joan had spent the better part of an hour constructing.
