The Fairy Tale Bride

Chapter Thirteen

Miranda’s breath caught in her throat. Somehow the long ago death of the brother seemed to make Simon’s own impending death a reality. Her sympathy was entirely genuine when she said, “How awful for you.”

But the dowager seemed to have recovered from any passing weakness that came from strong emotions. She waved her hand in dismissal. “He was not my son. Sinclair’s first wife was his mother. He was older than I by several years.”

Miranda had no answer for such a cold statement. “Then I’m sure it was difficult for the late duke.”

The dowager gave a tiny, graceful shrug. “I’m sure he grieved — in his own fashion. But he had Simon as an heir to replace him.”

Miranda thought of Valentine and the girls. They were irreplaceable. Were she to lose one, it would be a permanent and irredeemable loss. As would Simon’s death, if she could not prevent it.

If she and Katherine could not cure Simon, she would soon be without him. The sense of loss took her breath away. How had she come to care for him so much in such a short time?

Certainly he was a brave and honorable man, his loss would be a grave one to society. But it was not a general sense of loss that she felt. Her feelings of loss came from the thought that she would not be able to receive one of his quick smiles, and from the realization that she might soon hear only in her memory the rich voice that set her nerves a-tingle.

She pressed a hand below her heart to ease the ache. Not being kissed by him ever again. Not touching him, smiling at him across the table. No, her feeling of loss was personal indeed, for a husband she had not really wanted and who was, for the most part, maddening in the extreme.

She looked at the portrait again. The man in it had the slim build of a young man still approaching his majority. And he had died before he’d had the chance to know love and have a family of his own. She would do her best to see that the same was not true for Simon.

Idly, trying to stifle the grief that lingered at the edges of her consciousness, she said, “If only Peter had lived long enough to marry and have a son, Simon would not have to scour the hillside for suitable heirs.”

The dowager’s reaction was remarkable. Her eyes closed and her voice hushed to a whisper. “Sometimes I imagine that he did. He was far away in France then, and we did not hear from him. He could have married and been happy for at least a short while before his death. Sometimes I pray it was so.”

There was a tremor of sadness that could not be dismissed. For the first time, Miranda realized that the dowager duchess of Kerstone was still a fairly young woman. No more than forty-five at most.

The thought that Simon might have an unknown niece or nephew set fire to her imagination. “Did he investigate the possibility?”

“No. I don’t suppose he ever thought of it.” With an almost invisible struggle, the dowager regained the cold demeanor that Miranda suspected now was only a facade to hide a lonely and sad woman. “Certainly I didn’t mention the possibility to him. It was merely a foolish fancy of mine.”

Unbearable sadness swept over Miranda. “I don’t suppose it is very likely. Even if he were to have been married, how often does a short marriage produce a child?”

She was not thinking of his brother, though, but of herself. In this gallery of Watterlys, generation after generation, the ache for Simon’s child was sharp.

She fancied, as she glanced from portrait to portrait, the eyes that judged her — women as well as men — seemed to have made up their minds as to her failure. And she was fearful that there was nothing she could do to avert that failure. She could not get close enough to Simon to do her wifely duty without causing him to become overwrought.