The Wyndham Legacy (Legacy 1)

Badger said, “The Duchess is breeding, my lord. She is carrying the heir. The nausea and vomiting are natural. It will pass within a short time. Mr. Spears says another three weeks and she’ll be perfectly fine again. Well, perhaps longer, but we know she’s superior and thus the three weeks will apply to her.”

There was utter silence in the room. From a great distance, Marcus heard the Duchess say, “I am fine, Spears. Please, Badger, Maggie, please leave now. It’s important. Please leave.”

The three marched out, but their pace was slow.

Marcus very slowly closed the bedchamber door. He then turned the key in the lock. “Are you going to be ill again? Do you need something to eat?”

She shook her head.

It was then he realized that she was utterly without color, her eyes dilated, her body hunched over itself.

“Did you know?” he asked, his voice as quiet as a leaf quivering in a breeze.

“No.”

“How can I believe you?”

“You can’t. You said yourself that all Wyndhams were excellent liars, myself included.”

“You are carrying my child. That isn’t possible. The three meddling idiots must be wrong. You vomited because of that blow to your head.”

“Very well, it isn’t possible. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s true. Now, is it to be an immaculate conception or have I cuckolded you? Ah, don’t forget my generous lover at Pipwell Cottage.”

He sliced his hand through the air. He looked bewildered, disbelieving; he looked like a man who’d just been shot but didn’t yet feel the pain. “I don’t understand this. It’s true I took you a few times, a very few times, and I didn’t have the fortitude to withdraw from you as I do now, but it takes much longer to impregnate a woman, surely it must take many, many times and many, many months.”

“Evidently not.”

He began to pace. She looked at his flapping dressing gown, his black hairy legs, his bare feet. He was beautiful, this man who didn’t want her to have his child. Ah, she was pregnant. Her body had accepted his seed. On their wedding night? That second night he’d come to her? She wanted to sing and shout and dance. Instead she felt a stirring of the nausea and began to breathe deeply and slowly.

“You didn’t have your monthly flow after we were married in Paris?”

She shook her head.

“You’re a damned woman. Didn’t it occur to you that something might be different? Namely, me, the man who spilled his seed inside you?”

“I’m not always as predictable as many women.”

“You mean in that oblique way of yours that your monthly flow doesn’t occur necessarily when you expect it to?”

She nodded, staring him straight in the eye.

“I don’t want this child and you damn well know it!”

She held silent, though the words were near to breaking through, but she was concentrating too hard on not throwing up to speak.

“You did this on purpose.”

Ah, he’d finally swung his axe. The look on her face was bleak and accepting, then just as quickly shifted to utter red-faced rage. Even then the old Duchess peeked through as she shrugged saying, “I wondered how long it would take you to fix the blame firmly on my head. My mother told me several times that a man couldn’t bear to be in the wrong. She said a man would say whatever he had to say in order to put the woman in the wrong instead.” Then, miraculously, even the rage disappeared. She actually smiled at him. “You will be a father, Marcus, and I will be a mother. I am pregnant with a child, our child.”

“I refuse to accept that your bastard father has won. Forgive me. You’re the bastard, but only by birth. He is one in mind and in act. I won’t accept it, Duchess. Do you hear me? I don’t accept that you’re pregnan

t.” He slapped his palm to his forehead. “I have done nothing to deserve this, nothing, dammit. I was quite happily going about my life when your father died and I had to be the heir, there was no choice for anyone. Then because he’s bitter and twisted, he unleashed his venom on me. He hated me and he proved it, stripping me of all means to maintain and support all the Wyndham estates and properties, unless I married you, his precious bastard. You, the one woman in the bloody world I never wanted, or if I did want you from the time I was fourteen years old and randy as a young stoat, I wouldn’t have any longer than it took him to humiliate me to my soul. And yet you forced me to take you.

“I want my life back in my control. I want you and your damned child out of it.”

He stomped toward the adjoining door, only to draw up at her quiet voice. “I see. Do you wish me to leave tomorrow, Marcus?”

“I would that you leave tonight, right this bloody instant, but that would be cruel. You would probably faint on the front steps.”