Dunham

Chapter 37

I will give it some thought, Admiral, but your daughter is nigh thirty and I need a countess who has better childbearing odds.

I understand your position, Commander, but with your history, you may not have a choice.

According to Elliott's mother, he thought wearily as he relaxed back in his desk chair long after this morning's interview with Admiral Lord Hylton, one always had a choice.

She was a very bright little girl, astonishingly bright, in fact. It's possible her mind could be rehabilitated, but even if it is not, her madness cannot be passed on.

That was of some comfort, provided the woman could bear children at all. And tupping her—

Tavendish, please, I beg you, take care of my daughter.

He sighed. Well, that was what darkness was for.

The sounds of women returning after their first evening of Society rounds wafted to him and he looked at the clock. Two in the morning. He had spent hours crafting the speech he intended to give on the House floor in the morning, and still was not entirely happy with it.

He began putting away his writing tools, losing himself in the soothing routine of it, and thought of Fury and her rituals. He was just finishing when the sharp rap of knuckles on the door startled him.

"Who's there?" he barked.

"Milly."

He sighed. "Come."

Camille swept into the library, this decidedly not-hoydenish sister of his, in a dressing gown, her hair in a braid that fell over her shoulder. She, like the rest of them save Sophie, had raven hair that gleamed iridescent blue in the right light, complimented by ice blue eyes set in a pale face that would tan nicely if ever exposed to the sun.

She plopped down in the chair across from Elliott's desk. He watched whilst she arranged her gown and fussed with her hair. His eyes narrowed when he saw a bit of red around her eyes.

"You've been crying."

Her mouth tightened and she looked away.

"And you want to tell me why, but you're embarrassed."

She said nothing for a moment and he sat looking at her profile, suddenly remembering the summer nearing his twenty-fifth birthday when he had returned home for shore leave. His much younger brother had not been in residence for years, as he was at Oxford. Sophie was occupied with Lucy's three oldest daughters, all of whom were older than Sophie, and their higgledy-piggledy dawn-to-dusk adventures about the estate. Which left Camille alone and lonely, particularly when her little sister and nieces taunted her for her bookish ways, and pinched her when she would not rise to their taunts.

Now, tonight, he saw in her the embattled six-year-old who had clung to her much-older brother—the one she had never met—like a lifeline when he demonstrated he would not discourage her in her books, sternly ordered Sophie and his nieces to be nice to her on pain of a thrashing, then sought Lucy out to make sure she knew of it. As his reward, Camille had solemnly informed him he may address her as Milly, a nickname she hated.

Since he had found himself as out of place at the Grange that summer as she seemed to be, he did not mind when she made herself his shadow and he her champion. It was difficult, she had informed him with a child's wisdom, to be an aunt to two people older than she was and two who were barely younger.

That, he had informed her in turn, is an unfortunate consequence of having parents who decide to begin another family fifteen years after their first three children were born.