Page 49 of Mr. Cavendish, I Presume

“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.

“He died four months before the wedding,” he said softly and without emotion, almost as if recounting a bit of news from the newspaper. “My father always felt that your mother should have been his wife.”

Amelia started with surprise. “Your father loved my mother?”

Thomas chuckled bitterly. “My father loved no one. But your mother’s family was as old and noble as his own.”

“Older,” Amelia said with a smile, “but not as noble.”

“If my father had known he was to be duke, he would never have married my mother.” He looked at her with an unreadable expression. “He would have married yours.”

Amelia’s lips parted, and she started to say something utterly deep and incisive, like, “Oh,” but he continued with:

“At any rate, it was why he was so quick to arrange my betrothal to you.”

“It would have been Elizabeth,” Amelia said softly, “except that my father wished his eldest to marry the son of his closest friend. He died, though, so Elizabeth had to go to London to look for a match.”

“My father was determined to join the families in the next generation.” Thomas laughed then, but there was an uncomfortable, exasperated note to it. “To rectify the unfortunate mongrelization caused by my mother’s entrance into the bloodlines.”

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