Lord Greywell's Dilemma by Laura Matthews Read Free Book Online

“Thank you for coming, Abigail. I hope you won’t take a chill.”
    “I never take a chill,” she asserted as she settled back against the squabs. “And the sooner you take care of this business, the sooner you will be able to get on with your life. That’s the responsibility the living have to the dead, Greywell, getting on with life.”
    His murmur was neither consent nor disagreement. He closed the carriage door firmly and nodded to the coachman to start. Inside the carriage Abigail had her eyes closed again, and he watched the vehicle draw away with a troubled frown before he hunched his shoulders against the cold and took the stairs two at a time back into the house. Selsey inquired if he was ready for his dinner, which had been waiting these twenty minutes past.
    “Very well. I’ll just have a look in at the nursery first.”
    His habit of checking on his son just before each meal was not conducive to leaving him in good appetite, but then that wasn’t why he went. If he went after his meals, he felt guilty looking down at the pale, undernourished child who seemed unable to gain weight despite the wet nurse’s assurance that he suckled reasonably well.
    What was the matter with Andrew? The question was never far from his mind, though the doctor told him some children were simply born with weak constitutions and there was nothing he or anyone else could do to make the child healthy.
    Greywell watched the small bundle that was his son, tightly wrapped and sleeping in the beautiful, lacy cradle Caroline had prepared for him. The baby’s tiny lips were in motion even as he slept, making sucking noises accompanied by an occasional whimper. Andrew slept a great deal, and when he was awake he seldom cried. Instead he lay quietly, his dark eyes looking enormous in his pallid face, gazing about the small area his vision covered. The room was kept in semi-darkness, as though a perpetual sickroom, and a disagreeable odor of burned pastilles frequently greeted Greywell’s nostrils as he entered.
    He touched the soft skin of his son’s cheek now, almost wishing he would wake. If the child’s eyes were open Greywell felt some special kinship with him when their gazes met. And when Andrew was awake, he would talk to him, awkwardly urging him to grow strong. Sometimes he would tell the uncomprehending babe about his mother and how much she had wanted to have him. Sometimes he would speak of the pleasures that awaited Andrew when he was older—the angling and horseback riding and cricket and dozens of other activities he himself had enjoyed when he was a boy. The child watched him when he spoke, the large eyes almost unblinking.
    When he visited the nursery, Greywell always sent the wet nurse and the nursery maid from the room. Things were difficult enough without their curious, pitying stares. He wished one or the other of them would take more interest in his son, would feel the kind of devotion a mother might have given the lad. But they did their jobs, and assumed the child would die because they had seen it happen before. It was the strong who survived, not the puny, sickly ones like Andrew.
    Even the housekeeper, Mrs. Green, who had been at Ashfield for twenty years, showed less interest in the babe than he would have expected. They were all convinced the child would die, and they weren’t going to invest any special emotion in a lost cause. Their unspoken but clearly entrenched fatalism disturbed him so much he was tempted to send them all packing, despite Mrs. Green’s years of devoted service to his family.
    The sleeping baby turned his head restlessly as Greywell gazed down at him. The very helplessness of the infant overwhelmed him, and his own impotence made him feel nervously restless. Was there truly something he could be doing for the child that he wasn’t? Abigail was undoubtedly a little loose in the haft, but she had seemed so sure about the Parkstone girl. Would someone with a sympathetic heart make a