Trencher came bustling up to where Lenore had collapsed in a chair. Chafing her hands, the maid eyed her with concern.
“Now don’t you go getting up. I’ll just duck downstairs and get some weak tea.”
Lenore opened her eyes in alarm.
Trencher saw her horrified look and smiled reassuringly. “Take my word for it—me mam says it works every time.”
Ten minutes later, fortified with sweet weak tea, Lenore did, indeed, feel more like herself. “Is that going to happen every morning?”
“For a while, at least. Some, it goes most of the way.”
Closing her eyes, Lenore shuddered. Did Jason know, she wondered, what she was going to have to go through to provide him with his heir? She hoped so—in fact, if he didn’t, she would make sure she told him.
No, she wouldn’t. What could he do about it? She couldn’t run from town the day after making her curtsy as the Duchess of Eversleigh—what would all the ladies who had invited her to tea think? If she admitted to this weakness, Jason would feel honour-bound to send her back to the country. He had been so generous—she could not contemplate letting him down. Particularly after yesterday afternoon.
Eyes still closed, Lenore heaved a weary sigh. She had yet to settle her accounts from yesterday afternoon.
Recalling the incident, she frowned. Ever since she had told him of her pregnancy, Jason had not come to her bed. She had explained his absence first on the grounds that he had clearly made the decision to leave early the next morning and had decided not to disturb her, and later, when he had returned to the Abbey but not to her bed, because they were travelling the next day. At Salisbury they had been given separate rooms, of course. But, if he had wished to exercise his conjugal rights, why had he not come to her last night, or at the very least, this morning? Clearly, he had not thought her too tired yesterday afternoon.
Rubbing her fingers across her brow, Lenore admitted to her mind a series of facts she had been staunchly ignoring for the past week. Jason had not been the least reluctant to leave her at the Abbey. He had only come to fetch her to town at the behest of his aunts. Yesterday afternoon had merely been an opportune moment. There was no evidence that he bore any deep-seated wish to maintain a close relationship with her now the business of his heir had been satisfactorily set in train. In short, his interest in her had waned.
Why had she thought otherwise?
Because she loved him and had entertained hopes beyond the possible.
Drawing a shuddering breath, Lenore forced her eyes open. “Perhaps, Trencher, I should lie down again—just for a while.” Until I can face the day, she thought, as Trencher helped her to her bed.
Downstairs, in the sunny breakfast parlour, Jason studied the remnants of his substantial breakfast with a jaundiced eye. The fact that his wife had decided to adopt the habit of most fashionable women and stay in bed until noon, and thus would not be joining him, had finally sunk in.
“No, Smythe. No more coffee.” Waving his butler away, Jason rose and, picking up the Gazette, headed for the library.
Once there, he prowled the room before settling, reluctantly, in the chair behind the desk. He frowned at the correspondence Compton had neatly stacked by the blotter. With a frustrated sigh, Jason swung his chair about and stared out of the long windows. He could not go on like this.
He had gone down to the Abbey with high hopes, only to have them dashed. What had he expected? He had given Lenore not the slightest indication that his interest went any deeper than the conventional affection a gentleman was supposed to feel for his wife, in the ill-judged expectation that his affliction would pass. It had only grown stronger, until now it consumed his every waking hour, leaving him bad-tempered and generally confused. Leaning his elbows on the arms of the chair, he steepled his fingers and rested his chin on his thumbs. As the long-case clock in the corner ticked on, his grim expression slowly lightened. Eventually, taking his hands from his face, Jason allowed his lips to relax in a small, self-deprecatory smile.
He would have to see the Little Season out; impossible to achieve anything in town—not with every man and his dog, let alone the gossip-mongers, watching. The fact that His Grace of Eversleigh was stalking his wife would make the most sensational on-dit. Once they were back, alone at the Abbey, he could lay siege to her sensibilities in earnest, rekindle the embers of passion that had burned so brightly and make her want him as much as he wanted her. Until then, all he needed to do was make sure she came to no harm and that no harm, in the form of the wolves of the ton, came to her.
With a decisive nod, Jason turned back to his desk. After a moment’s consideration he drew a sheet of paper towards him. Dipping his pen in the inkstand, he wrote a short note to Compton, instructing him to deal with affairs as he thought best until further notice as his employer had weightier matters on his mind. Leaving the note in a conspicuous spot, Jason rose and, feeling as if he was seeing daylight for the first time in weeks, strolled out.
* * *
“PASS ME that pot, Trencher.”
With a sigh, Lenore held out her hand for the small pot of rouge she had sent Trencher to buy that morning. She had never used the cosmetic before but there was no denying she needed it now. Her cheeks were pallid, her eyes too large.
Hesitantly, Trencher handed her the small jar. “Are you sure, Y’r Grace? You’ve got such lovely skin—seems a shame, somehow.”
“It’ll be an even greater shame if Lady Albemarle and her guests see me like this.” With a grimace, Lenore opened the pot and picking up a haresfoot, dipped it in. Carefully, she brushed the fine red powder across her cheekbones, trying to make the addition as inconspicuous as possible.
It was the end of her first week in London as the Duchess of Eversleigh. She had been fêted and, to her dismay, positively fawned upon by some of the more select of the ton’s hostesses. Being Jason’s wife, she had realised, made her something of a drawcard, a fact which had left her at the centre of attention for far longer than she liked. Thus far, she had coped.
But her morning sickness was tightening its grip. Not only was sh
e unable to rise much before noon, a fact camouflaged, luckily, by fashionable habit, but in the last two days she had started feeling nauseated in mid-afternoon. Today she had tried not eating at luncheon, taken at Lady Harrison’s small town house with a gaggle of other young ladies, and had nearly shamed herself by fainting in the park. How to overcome her increasing problems without absenting herself from a full schedule of visits was a quandary she had yet to solve. But if her illness became any worse, she would have to do something.
Studying the effects of her ministrations, Lenore laid the rouge pot aside and stood. “My gown, please.”
Trencher hurried over with a gown of silver spider gauze. Once encased in the scintillating folds, Lenore paraded before her cheval glass. It was her fervent hope that her undeniably elegant body would deflect notice from her less than healthy countenance.