Page 50 of Kathryn

Katie didn’t even try to explain. Mrs. Stone, Becky’s mother, was a loving, kind woman. Even though she had been forced by financial exigency to send Becky out to work at such a young age, she had never withheld love to bend her daughter to her will.

She turned away from Becky’s importuning look and stared out the window, her brooding gaze again and again returning to her husband’s distant, unreadable profile.

***

By the end of the first day of traveling—which was three hours longer than the six hours Gerrit had allotted due to heavy rain—he was relieved that he had decided to break the journey into two days.

Even though he made frequent stops to allow Kathryn to stretch her legs and take sustenance, she looked exhausted by the time they reached the inn he favored.

“Take your mistress up to her chambers and I will send a meal to her private parlor,” he’d instructed Kathryn’s maid the moment he’d seen the dark smudges beneath his wife’s eyes.

It was a sign of how tired she was that Kathryn meekly obeyed.

Gerrit ate his own meal in the public room and spent the night in his own room half-hard for her. But even an insensitive oaf like him knew she needed her rest far more than he needed a rut.

The following morning, he delayed their departure by an hour to allow her more sleep—an impromptu change to the schedule that made him itch as if he were covered with lice—but she still looked fatigued when they set out. And by the time they reached Briarly, just after dusk, Gerrit could see that she could scarcely keep her eyes open. Even though the trip had taken twice as long, he knew that he had still pushed her too hard and should have taken three days.

Guilt and relief vied inside him the closer they got to Briarly. Surely it had been better to spend fewer days traveling? Lord. He’d never given so much thought to a simple bloody carriage ride.

The sound of hooves approaching pulled him from his thoughts. It was Jeremy, whom he’d sent ahead an hour ago to alert the servants that their master and mistress were on the way.

He was surprised the man had ridden back to meet them. As Jeremy came closer, Gerrit felt a stirring of alarm at the grim expression on his normally gregarious servant’s face. “Is aught amiss?”

“The Dowager Duchess is at Briarly.”

“My mother is here?” What a stupid question. What other dowager duchess would the man be talking about?

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Blast and damnation! What on earth was she up to? She had never come to Briarly before—at least not in his lifetime and only once when the old duke had been alive. Briarly had always been his father’s sanctuary, the only place he could be sure to avoid his wife’s distracting presence. Indeed, Gerrit had not seen his parents in the same room—or in the same house or even in the same part of the country—since he was nine years old.

Why was she here now, for God’s sake?

He was seized by an irrational urge to wheel his horse around and ride hell-bent for leather back to London.

The uncharacteristically reckless thought sobered him. He was behaving like a child. If the dowager was here, he would simply need to send her back home. Immediately.

Gerrit’s thoughts had just begun to settle when the brightly lit entrance to Briarly came into view. There, standing on the flagstone in front of the house, torches blazing behind her, was the woman who’d so disordered his mind.

“Your Grace?” Jeremy said, his face wreathed in confusion.

Gerrit only then realized that he’d stopped Centurion a good thirty feet away from the entrance to Briarly. From his mother.

Feeling leaden, he urged his mount into a trot and reached the coach just as Jacob handed Kathryn out of the carriage.

He dismounted and was on the verge of offering his wife his arm when his mother hurried toward them, hands flapping and her typically gauzy, untidy garment fluttering around her as she reached not for Gerrit—she knew better—but his wife.

“Welcome! Welcome!” she chirped. “Oh, look at you!” His mother rarely spoke if she could exclaim. She reached for his wife’s face, cupping it in her small pale hands. Gerrit flinched in sympathy although Kathryn looked more surprised than alarmed. “You are so lovely!” the dowager twittered in the breathless voice that irritated Gerrit almost beyond bearing. And then she gave one of her brainless, tinkling laughs and stood on her toes. “I am too short to reach your cheek, my dear. You will have to meet me halfway.”

Kathryn smiled. “Of course, Your Grace.”

“Oh, I do hope you will call me Mama!” his mother insisted, kissing both Kathryn’s cheeks. “If you do not wish to call me that, then please, please, please call me Betje!”

“Thank you, Betje. Please call me Katie.”

His mother looked delighted. “We are going to be the best of friends, aren’t we, Katie?”

Inexplicably, Kathryn laughed, the sound genuine. “Yes, I believe we are.”