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“Good God, Letty, are you increasing?” he blurted without thinking.
She turned from the bell pull and flattened the gown over her stomach. “Yes, how very observant of you, Rome!” She smiled tiredly. “A complete and unexpected surprise. I didn’t discover it until John had left for America. He may have received my letter by now. Though I don’t know, as I have not got anything back from him yet.”
He rose and hugged her again, giving her another kiss on her cheek. “Congratulations. Are you well?”
“Yes, on the whole, just deathly tired. At my age, it’s so much harder.”
“Should you be gallivanting to parties at all?”
“I must. It’s Sophie’s chance. We had to put off her debut last year because John’s sister died, and we were in black for half the year.”
“You rang, my lady?” said the butler, appearing in the doorway.
“Tea, Gordon, and some of Mrs. Hallifax’s egg tarts, please—I’m hungry.”
“At once, my lady.”
“I confess,” she said when he left, “that it will be a relief to know I can rely on you and Ava to squire Sophie about if I should not be up to it some nights.”
He squeezed her hand. “You can rely on us.” He had an odd warmth in his chest at the notion of being of assistance to his big sister, and he was confident that Ava would relish the opportunity to assist Sophie. Letty had always been so formidably competent in his eyes. A force of nature that rushed at life with gusto and beat it into submission. In some ways very like Ava.
As she matured, Ava would likely become more like Letty and her own mother: fiercely protective of her family, strong, and determined. But also, a joyous ray of sunshine that made everyone around her love her. His heart swelled just thinking of her.
“Thank you.” She smiled. “I am hoping that this is the longed-for heir. After six girls, John has been very patient. His mother was most vociferous about it. We never did get on, and she bemoaned John’s choice to marry me from the moment he told her of it. Fortunately, she had a soft spot for Sophie, despite her not being a boy.”
“Are you happy in your marriage, Letty?”
“Yes,” she said, unequivocally.
He raised his eyebrows at her swift and emphatic response, but Gordon reappeared with one of the maids and the tea tray at that moment, and it was several minutes before conversation could be resumed.
Letty pounced on the plate of egg tarts and took two, as well as two sandwich triangles and a slice of cake. “I’m starved. Perhaps this one is a boy, if my appetite is anything to go by.”
Jerome sipped his tea and ignored the food, wondering how to ask the question that had been troubling him. Before he could frame the question, Letty picked up the conversation.
“John fell in love with me at first sight. I confess it took me a little longer. I think it was well into our first year of marriage before I realized what a wonderful man he was. I didn’t realize he had married me for love, you see. He is an extremely reserved man and not very good at expressing his feelings. Took me quite a while to figure him out.”
“So, you didn’t expect it to be a love match?”
“Not at all. I thought it was all organized between John and Papa for the usual reasons: birth, settlements, needing an heir, all that.”
“Why did you accept him?” asked Jerome, puzzled.
“John was a politician, and I wanted to be a politician’s wife. It seemed like the perfect match to me at the time. I had no expectations of a love match as such. I was hoping for affection and a degree of—mutual respect and acceptance? Or peace, at any rate, and John didn’t seem like the quarrelsome sort.”
Jerome smiled. His phlegmatic brother-in-law was indeed not the quarrelsome sort. Letty’s reasons made perfect sense to him. After the strife they had both been raised in, peace was a prize to be sought and treasured. He thought of Ava and his heart leaped with hope that his marriage would be very different from that of his parents.
Letty wiped her fingers on a napkin. “I forgot,” she said gently. “It was worse for you. Papa’s affairs became a lot more blatant after you were born. Their tolerance for each other had worn pretty thin by then, and hostilities became much more open. He abandoned you and Mama at Ravenshaw, didn’t he?”
Jerome put down his cup. “For long stretches, yes. I lived in dread of him coming home. Being sent away to school was a godsend. But then I wasn’t there to protect her from him—”
“God, you don’t blame yourself, do you?”
“Of course I do.” He looked away. I need to tell her what I found out. But how will she take it? It’s one thing to know your father is an intemperate man and somewhat cruel, but to know he is most probably a murderer . . .
“Rome, you were only a boy. She was ill and frail.”
“Because of his abuse!” He sprang up, unable to sit still. He paced to the fireplace, staring into the flames. But it was his father’s rages he saw, the barrage of verbal abuse, the violence.
