Free A Duke for Christmas by Cynthia Bailey Pratt

retained the piquant interest in everything that had always been her leading characteristic.
    Sophie, younger and shorter, couldn’t help comparing their lives as well as their appearances. One had an adoring husband, a child on the way, a place in the world that was hers irrevocably. She would remain Lady Danesby until the end of her days. For herself, she had a dead husband, no children, no place except that of a fallen leaf, wafted by a wind into a river, there to float unmemorably until sunk. At most, she would rate a footnote in some future writer’s history of Broderick Banner’s brief life and tragically early demise.
    Maris had by now absorbed the details of Sophie’s appearance. “Do you have your dressing gown on? In bed?”
    “And my thickest knitted bed socks and two petticoats.” “But it’s quite warm in here,” Maris said, glancing at the fireplace with a housewifely eye.
    “Would you believe I’d quite forgotten how beastly the winters are in England? When I think how I used to complain when the temperature would fall to forty!”
    “I suppose your blood became rather thin living there. But think of all the lovely sunshine in the summer. We had nine wet days in a row in the middle of June.” She sat down on the edge of the bed.
    “I’m hard to please,” Sophie confessed. “I always found the summers too hot.” She didn’t add that it was because her stuffy little room never felt a breeze and all the heat from the stoves, along with all the torturing smells of good Italian cooking, collected there. “But enough of my nonsense. Tell me about you. What does Dr. Richards say?”
    “About what one would expect. Stay quiet, no violent exercise, drink milk. How tired I am of milk!”
    “But all is well?”
    “So far as anyone can tell. What I hope is that once the baby is born, people will start fussing over it and not me. Between Mother and Ken, I hardly dare move without one or the other of them reminding me I should sit down.”
    “Everything is prepared, then?”
    “Prepared and overprepared. One would think I was expecting the Heir of England,” Maris said, then broke off, her eyes shadowed.
    Though it had been three years and more since Princess Charlotte had died in childbirth, her fate hung like a sword over the heads of young women. She’d had the best attendants, the most famous obstetrician in England, Sir Richard Croft, to deliver the child—everything, in short, suitable for the Heiress of England. She had perished nonetheless, and the child with her. The Regent had been inconsolable. The unfortunate doctor had committed suicide a year and half later, despite being absolved of all blame in the case. If such wealth and care had brought about so grievous an outcome, what chance did lesser women have?
    “By all I have heard,” Sophie said, hoping to give her sister’s thoughts a more cheerful direction, “men do behave as if a baby were all their own doing.”
    “Indeed, yes,” Maris said. “A rooster crowing his own glory is nothing compared with it. The number of waistcoat buttons that I have sewn on is incalculable, his chest swelled so with pride.”
    “And you are no less excited about it, or so I gathered from your letter.”
    Maris leaned against the bottom post of the bed. “I was excited at the beginning. And I daresay I shall be
excited once more at the end. But the months in between, my dear! So lengthy. So dull. One is advised not to ride. We went to Brighton. One is advised not to
bathe. We went to London. One is advised not to dance. One mustn’t read any invigorating literature for fear of
the harm it might do the developing mind. Improving books only—and a duller occupation I should be hard-
pressed to find. I could go to the theater, thank God, but only until my condition began to be apparent. A woman of quality, it seems, is never glimpsed when she is increasing.”
    “Poor Maris!”
    “Poor Ken! I’m afraid I’ve not been the easiest person to