He thought about the endless hours he’d wasted thinking about his own parents. He nodded. For all her innocence and guileless speech, she could be extraordinarily astute.
“My mother can nag a bit,” she said. “Well, more than a bit. But my father seems not to mind. He knows it is only because she feels it her duty to see all of her daughters settled. Which is of course his wish as well. He just doesn’t wish to be involved in the details of it.”
Thomas found himself nodding approvingly. Daughters had to be an incredible amount of work.
“He humors her for a few minutes,” Amelia continued, “because he knows how much she likes an audience, but then he most often just shakes his head and walks away. I think he is happiest when out of doors, mucking about with his hounds.”
“Hounds?”
“He has twenty-five of them.”
“Gad.”
She grimaced. “We keep trying to convince him it’s got a bit excessive, but he insists that any man with five daughters deserves five times as many hounds.”
He tried to suppress the image in his mind. “Please tell me none are included in your dowry.”
“You should verify,” she said, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “I’ve never seen the betrothal papers.”
His eyes held hers for a long, steady moment, then he said, “That means no.” But she held her blank expression for long enough to make him add, “I hope.”
She laughed. “He could not bear to part with them. Me, I think he will be happy to get off his hands, but his dogs…Never.” And then: “Did your parents get on well?”
He felt himself go grim, and his head began to pound anew. “No.”
She watched his face for a moment, and he was not sure he wanted to know what she saw there, because she looked almost pitying when she said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said briskly. “It is done, and they are dead, and there is nothing to be done about it now.”
“But-” She stopped, her eyes a little sad. “Never mind.”
He didn’t mean to tell her anything. He had never discussed his parents with anyone, not even Harry, and he’d been witness to it all. But Amelia was sitting there so silently, with an expression of such understanding on her face-even though…well, she couldn’t possibly understand, not with her gloriously boring and traditional family. But there was something in her eyes, something warm and willing, and it felt as if she knew him already, as if she’d known him forever and was merely waiting for him to know her.
“My father hated my mother.” The words fell from his lips before he even realized he was saying them.
Her eyes widened, but she did not speak.
“He hated everything she stood for. She was a cit, you know.”
She nodded. Of course she knew. Everyone knew. No one seemed to care much anymore, but everyone knew that the most recent duchess had been born without even a connection to a title.
The title. Now that was rich. His father had spent his entire life worshipping at the altar of his own aristocracy, and now it seemed he’d never really been the duke at all. Not if Mr. Audley’s parents had had the sense to marry.
“Wyndham?” she said softly.
His head jerked toward her. He must have drifted off in his own thoughts. “Thomas,” he reminded her.
A faint blush spread across her cheeks. Not of embarrassment, he realized, but of delight. The thought warmed him, deep in his belly and then deeper still, to some little corner of his heart that had lain dormant for years.
“Thomas,” she said softly.
It was enough to make him want to say more. “He married her before he gained the title,” he explained. “Back when he was the third son.”
“One of his brothers drowned, did he not?”
Ah yes, the beloved John, who might or might not have sired a legitimate son of his own.
“The second son, was it not?” Amelia asked quietly.
Thomas nodded, because there was nothing else he could do. He was not about to tell her what had transpired the day before. Good God, it was madness. Less than twenty-four hours earlier he’d been happily kissing her in the garden, thinking it was finally time to make her his duchess, and now he didn’t even know who he was.
“John,” he forced himself to say. “He was my grandmother’s favorite. His ship went down in the Irish Sea. And then a year later a fever took the old duke and the heir-both within a week-and suddenly my father had inherited.”
“It must have been a surprise,” she murmured.
“Indeed. No one thought he’d be the duke. He had three choices: the military, the clergy, or marriage to an heiress.” Thomas let out a harsh chuckle. “I cannot imagine anyone was surprised that he chose as he did. And as for my mother-now here’s the funny part. Her family was disappointed as well. More so.”
She drew back, faint surprise coloring her face. “Even marrying into the house of Wyndham?”
“They were wildly rich,” Thomas explained. “Her father owned factories all across the North. She was his only child. They thought for certain they could buy her a title. At the time, my father had none. With little hope of inheriting.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. My mother was pretty enough. And she was certainly wealthy enough. But she did not take. And so they had to settle for my father.”
“Who thought he was settling for her,” Amelia guessed.
Thomas nodded grimly. “He disliked her from the moment he married her, but when his two older brothers died and he became duke, he loathed her. And he never bothered to hide it. Not in front of me, not in front of anyone.”
“Did she return the sentiment?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas replied, and he realized that it was odd, but he had never asked himself the same question. “She never retaliated, if that is what you are wondering.” He saw his mother in his mind’s eye-her perpetually stricken face, the constant exhaustion behind her pale blue eyes. “She just…accepted it. Listened to his insults, said nothing in return, and walked away. No. No,” he said, remembering it correctly. “That’s not how it happened. She never walked away. She always waited for him to leave. She would never have presumed to quit a room before he did. She would never have dared.”
“What did she do?” Amelia asked softly.
“She liked the garden,” Thomas recalled. “And when it rained, she spent a great deal of time looking out the window. She didn’t really have many friends. I don’t think…”
He’d been about to say that he could not recall her ever smiling, but then a memory fluttered through his head. He’d been seven, perhaps eight. He’d gathered a small posy of flowers for her. His father was enraged; the blooms had been part of an elaborately planned garden and were not for picking. But his mother had smiled. Right there in front of his father, her face lit up and she smiled.
Strange how he had not thought about that for so many years.
“She rarely smiled,” he said softly. “Almost never.”
She’d died when he was twenty, just a week before her husband. They’d been taken by the same lung fever. It had been a terrible, violent way to go, their bodies wracked by coughs, their eyes glazed with exhaustion and pain. The doctor, never one to speak delicately, said they were drowning in their own fluids. Thomas had always thought it bitterly ironic that his parents, who spent their lives avoiding each other, had died, essentially, together.
And his father had one last thing to blame her for. His final words, in fact, were, “She did this.”
“It is why we are here now,” he said suddenly, offering Amelia a dry smile. “Together.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He shrugged, as if none of it mattered. “Your mother was supposed to marry Charles Cavendish, did you know that?”
She nodded.