Page 17 of A Wicked Duke's Arranged Marriage
Henry found himself amused by how she laid it out, her opinion so freely given where he had been starting to think that perhaps he had been too avid in his hoping for someone amiable and been given instead someone with little to no opinion of their own.
“More children,” Lord St Vincent groaned.
Simon looked on in understanding.
“I should have liked not to have been an only child,” Henry admitted, surprising himself with his speaking up at all. “I always envied those families with any number of siblings to cycle through for company when I was younger.”
And he had. It was one of his main motivations in searching for a wife willing to give him children, plural. It was an odd conversation they were all having before dinner, though – more forthright than any that Henry could remember of the dinner parties of his past.
“Oh, I don’t know. You never shared a house with three female siblings clearly,” Josephine joked. “I don’t suppose you ever had to time your bathing either.”
“Josephine!” Lady St Vincent exclaimed while nearly everyone else broke out in amused laughter.
Henry felt even his lips curving upwards at the blunt question.
“I don’t suppose I did,” he returned amusedly.
“Sisters,” Lisbet said emphatically, “are very different from brothers. And I cannot tell you which I prefer more.”
“You have both, then?” Lady St Vincent asked in interest.
“Oh yes, two brothers and two sisters,” Lisbet sighed dramatically. “My sisters were liable to steal all the attention and God knows what out of my wardrobe and then claim it was their own. My brothers, though? You could not convince them that we girls were ladies and therefore we were victims to their treatment of one another any time my mother didn’t intervene quick enough.”
Lady St Vincent looked amused but scandalized, while her daughter’s smile only grew and grew.
Henry found himself drawn to it. She wasn’t smiling prettily like the society ladies he was used to. Her smile was too wide, showing too many teeth, and there was no artifice or thought behind the motion, either. She had dimples on bothsides of her cheeks, he realized, and she even half-snorted when she leaned forward to address only Lisbet.
“There was a boy from the village that I used to think of as a brother,” she confided through her grin. “He had nine siblings. Nine! And sometimes, when I was over, I think they quite forgot I wasn’t one. Why this one time –”
“Oh, Josie,” Lady St Vincent cried, “not the pig pen story!”
Lord St Vincent was already laughing under his breath, and Josephine, rather than back down, seemed to take her mother’s words as a challenge.
“Oh, yes, Mother, don’t spoil the story!” Josephine’s dimples deepened. “We were arguing over who was allowed to take the last tart that his mother had made. He, two of his sisters, and one of his brothers. I must’ve only been seven or eight. Well, we’re outside while all this is happening, and I decided to grab it. Next thing I know, he’s pushed me! I’d never been treated such, you understand, so I froze for a moment, but then I realized he had nicked the pastry and was taking a bite. So I pushed him back and tried to steal it. Next thing I know we’re fighting over it, and my mother is yelling at us from across the street.”
Lisbet had tears in her eyes as she laughed, clearly identifying with the story in a way that Henry couldn’t quite understand. He and Simon, surely, had fought in such a way. Butthey were both boys and friends since boyhood. Did boys really treat their sisters in such a manner? Henry couldn’t imagine having ever fought with a girl, no matter how young he had been.
“You were behaving abominably,” Lady St Vincent sniffed. “And the next thing I knew, you were swinging fists at the little boy even when he tried to diffuse it!”
Josephine grinned. “I got carried away. And Johnny, despite how this story sounds, really was a little gentleman. When I punched him in the face, he got so mad. I knew he wanted to hit me back; he even told me so later. But he remembered that I was a girl at the last second, and instead of hitting me … he just pushed me back into the pigpen.”
Gasps and snorts of laughter filled the room as Josephine shrugged, her grin still in place.
“It was humiliating,” she said, giggling. “Moreso because they had just wet the whole thing down for the pigs earlier that morning. So I’m covered head to toe in pig mud–”
“And still trying to get that pastry!” Lady St Vincent groaned. “Oh, Lord, Josie, what a story to tell at a dinner party! Whatever must they think of us now?”
Henry couldn’t help noticing the fondness in Lady St Vincent’s words, despite her chastisement.
“Well, I, for one, think it sounds terribly normal,” Lisbet chimed in, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief as she calmed from her laughter. “I can think of ten million similar stories regarding my brothers.”
“And several more still just from home between our two oldest,” Simon interjected with a weary laugh.
All of them were interrupted by the door opening, Harbuttle appearing out of nowhere once more with a deep bow of his head.
“Dinner is served,” Harbuttle announced gravely, stepping back to hold the door open behind him.
“And it smells heavenly,” Lord St Vincent declared, standing with a jovial grin.
