But four years ago Selina had been experiencing a difficult third pregnancy and on medical advice had reluctantly agreed to return to London, taking the two little girls with her.
The baby had lived, but Selina had died shortly afterward. Childbed fever, they said. Her parents blamed him, even though he’d been a continent away, risking his life for king and country, and Selina was in London in the care of her parents, with the best medical attention available.
James dragged his thoughts back to the present. He neither wanted nor needed his in-laws’ approval. He was here for one thing only: his daughters. He glanced at the doorway. “Where are the girls?”
“Would you like tea?”
“Later, perhaps, but first I would like to see the girls.”
Lord and Lady Fenwick exchanged glances. “They’re not here at the moment.”
James frowned. They wouldn’t be outside at this time of the evening. “Where are they?”
There was an awkward silence.
His voice hardened. “Where are my daughters?”
“Attending Miss Coates’s Seminary for Young Ladies. It’s a very genteel establishment—”
“At school? Judy and Lina?” Judy was eleven and Lina only seven. They were far too young to be sent away to school.
James tamped down on his anger. He was here for his girls, not to argue with his in-laws. “Then I’ll just see Deborah.”
His mother-in-law glanced away. “She’s with her sisters, of course.”
He rose to his feet, rage coursing through him. “Deborah? In a boarding school? Dammit, she’s only four years old!”
His mother-in-law shrank from him. His father-in-law bristled with righteous indignation. “Language, sirrah! And you cannot expect a frail, elderly lady like my wife to care for someone else’s children.”
James cast his mother-in-law a scornful look. “Frail and elderly, my foot! As I recall, you turned fifty-four last month. In any case, I haven’t noticed a shortage of servants in this establishment. And they’re not ‘someone else’s children’—they’re your grandchildren!”
Lady Fenwick snorted. “They’re a trio of young hoydens, more like—and no wonder, dragged up in the wake of an army of rough soldiers, living in frightful conditions in close proximity to foreigners instead of being raised as decent Christian young ladies. School was the only possible alternative.”
“And yet Deborah has been entirely in your charge since birth.”
“Yes,” she said disdainfully, “but she carries your blood.”
He clenched his jaw. “I doubt very much whether you had the raising of her anyway. Your own daughter was raised by nursemaids and governesses—oh yes, I know all about her upbringing. But at least you never sent her away to live with strangers.”
She shrugged a thin shoulder. “There was no need. Selina was a quiet, well-behaved, well-bred gel—until she met you.”
He let that pass. The woman knew next to nothing about her own daughter. “There was no need to send the girls away from all they knew, especially since they’d lost their mother.”
She dismissed that with an airy wave. “Children adjust. They’re perfectly happy there.”
He pulled a worn, stained letter from his breast pocket and held it up. “And yet these ‘perfectly happy’ girls wrote to me saying they were miserable and begging me to come and get them.”
Lady Fenwick frowned and sat forward. “They can’t have. They were given—” She broke off.
“Given letters to copy?” He nodded, remembering the short, bland, almost formal letters his daughters had written each week. “I thought as much. They didn’t sound at all like my lively little Judy, and Lina used to draw pictures all the time. I haven’t had a single picture from her in months—until this.” He held up the letter showing a brief letter in childish script and a drawing of three small girls of varying heights, all looking sad.
“Children always complain—” his father-in-law began.
“Enough.” James cut him off with a curt gesture. “I have no interest in your excuses. Just give me the address of that school, and I’ll be gone.”
Lord Fenwick glanced at his wife, then rose and took a pen and paper and ink from the drawer in a nearby table. He scribbled the address and handed the paper to James.
James glanced at the address and almost crushed it in his fist. It was another day’s travel away. He stalked to the door.
Lady Fenwick rose and followed him. “What are you planning to do with my grandchildren?”
James snorted. “It’s too late to pretend any concern for them. You’ve shown your hand. Goodbye. My daughters and I shan’t bother you again.”
She drew herself up indignantly. “You—you can’t mean to deny me their company, surely?” There was a thread of anxiety in her voice.
He knew the real source of her concern: How would it look to outsiders for a grandmother whose only granddaughters had nothing to do with her? He let her stew for a minute, then said evenly, “If the girls want to see their grandparents, of course I will allow it. Despite what you seem to think, children need family.”
* * *
* * *
James gave instructions to his driver, and the coach headed off into the night, the coach lights glowing gold against the darkness. He would stop at the first decent inn he came to; he refused to spend a single night with his in-laws.
Brooding, he stared through the coach window at the shifting shadows of the passing countryside. He thought of his daughters, the last time he’d seen them. Seven-year-old Judy and three-and-a half-year-old Lina, with her shabby, much-loved dolly, standing at the rail of the ship, clinging to their mother’s hands, Selina standing straight, red-eyed but calm, the swell of her pregnancy outlined by the wind pressing her dress against her.
Now Selina was dead, and Ross and his parents, too, drowned in a boating accident. Not to mention all the friends he’d lost during the war. So much death . . .
James’s girls were all he had left. Sending them away at such a young age, when they could have stayed with family—that he couldn’t forgive. Three little girls in a seminary for young ladies, one of them just four years old—still a baby.
Why, why, why had they been sent away? He couldn’t understand it.
He knew his girls weren’t hoydens—or if they were, it was a reaction to their mother’s death. But that was no reason to send them away. Servants could be hired who would care for children with all the warmth their grandparents lacked.