It seemed a suitable moment for intervention. Cato reached the head of the stairs in the nick of time and swept the little girl off the banisters the instant before she was about to be set in motion with a helpful brotherly hand on her back.
Cato surveyed Rufus Decatur’s natural sons with a raised eyebrow. They stared back at him with their father’s bright blue eyes under tangled thatches of strawberry curls.
“That was not a good idea,” Cato declared.
“But Evie likes it,” one of the pair informed him solemnly. “She cries if we won’t let her do what we do.”
“Clearly her mother’s daughter,” Cato muttered. Still carrying the child, who seemed perfectly content to be sitting in a stranger’s arms, he turned back down the stairs. At the bottom he became aware of his own two small daughters standing to one side of the hall, eyes as round as saucers. They were clearly too timid to participate in the circus-Diana’s daughters, although a year or two older, lacked the intrepid nature of Portia’s-but there was no mistaking their fascinated envy.
They came forward when Cato beckoned them, offered him shy little curtsies, and then scampered back up the stairs to their own domain. Eve wriggled to be set down, obviously intending to follow them.
Cato hung on to her. “Portia!” he called in ringing accents.
A door burst open to the right of the hall and a thin young woman with a shock of orange hair, a mass of freckles, and bright green eyes seemed to leap into the hall. She was wearing leather riding britches, boots, a white linen shirt, and doublet. Cato found nothing surprising in this attire. Portia Worth had been married in britches on a battlefield with a sword at her hip.
“Oh, Lord Granville, I do beg your pardon. If I’d known you were coming, I wouldn’t have let them loose like this. You must have wondered if you’d come to the right house.” She came towards him, holding out her hand.
Cato took it and leaned over to kiss his niece. “It had crossed my mind.”
“It’s been raining, you see, and they haven’t been able to go out.” Portia offered the explanation with a cheerful smile.
“They were about to launch this little one hurtling to perdition down the banisters.” He regarded her quizzically, reflecting that marriage to the earl of Rothbury had wrought no obvious changes in his half brother’s illegitimate daughter. She looked no different now from the scrawny, undernourished creature who’d turned his house upside down that memorable first winter of the war.
“Oh, they’re very careful of her,” she said blithely, taking Eve from him. “But she really doesn’t like to be left out.”
“Mmm. Her mother’s daughter,” Cato repeated, half to himself.
Portia’s responding grin was complacent. “She’s Rufus Decatur’s daughter too, sir.”
“Is your husband here with you?” A note of gravity entered his quiet voice.
“No,” Portia answered in much the same tone. “He left us at the gates. He had business in London. A meeting with Lord Manchester about pressing men for the army. Rufus is not in favor,” she added.
“Neither am I, but I see little choice,” Cato responded. War talk with Portia was so natural he didn’t even realize how unusual it was for him to share such thoughts with a woman.
“He said he’ll come back for us at the end of the week.”
Cato nodded. He and Rufus Decatur had buried the blood feud that had torn their lives and their families asunder for two generations. They had buried it on the battlefield when Portia Worth, Cato’s brother’s child, had married Rufus Decatur at a drumhead wedding. Now they would be courteous to each other in company, had worked together in amity in the interests of negotiating a peace between the king and his parliament and would do so again, but they would not seek each other out in private, and Rufus would no more accept Granville hospitality than Cato would accept his. But Rufus did not prevent his wife and his children from accepting that hospitality, and that was enough. The old vendetta would not touch the new generation.
“My lord, you’re back. I wasn’t expecting you.” It had taken Phoebe a minute to compose herself at the unexpected sound of Cato’s rich, tawny voice. Now she hurried into the hall aware that her cheeks were warm and that the pulse in the base of her belly was beating a drumbeat of anticipation and delight.
“I didn’t expect to be… careful!” Cato saw the danger in the nick of time and stepped forward just as Phoebe’s foot caught in the fringe of a tapestry rug. She tripped, arms flailing, and he grabbed for her before she tumbled in an ignominious heap.
Instinctively Phoebe hung on to him, her arms tightly encircling his waist, and for a minute neither of them moved. She inhaled his scent, heard the beat of his heart beneath his jerkin, reveled in the firm hands planted squarely at her back. He had never held her before. Maybe clumsiness had its advantages, she thought wryly. At present it seemed the only way to achieve her heart’s desire.
Then Cato righted her, his hands fell from her, and she was obliged to step back on her own two feet.
“Your pardon, sir,” Phoebe said breathlessly. She managed a curtsy and tried to think of some appropriate greeting for a returning husband. “Did your business fare well, my lord?”
Cato did not immediately answer. He surveyed her with a little frown. Something was wrong with her face. He peered at her a little more closely. Her mouth was blue with ink.
“Is something wrong?” Phoebe asked a mite anxiously.
“Have you been drinking ink?”
“Oh!” Her hand flew to her mouth. “I was writing my pageant.” She scrubbed at the stain, succeeding only in spreading blue across her chin. “I must have been sucking the wrong end of my quill.” She gave a little shrug as she examined her now blue palm. “It often happens when I’m concentrating.”
Cato supposed it sufficient explanation. Phoebe certainly seemed to think so. He noticed absently how his wife was dwarfed by Portia’s height and, he thought, overshadowed by her vibrancy. Phoebe’s pale coloring and light hair were lost against Portia’s orange halo and bright green eyes. Not that one would ever consider Portia to be beautiful, and she certainly wasn’t pretty. But there was something striking about her.
However, it occurred to Cato, rather to his surprise, that Phoebe didn’t lose on the comparison. Her style was altogether gentler, but it had its own appeal. Odd that he should have noticed it now for the first time despite the ink and her unprepossessing stuff gown that looked, like so many of her clothes, as if it had been made for her when she was an altogether different shape. Another example of Lord Carlton’s economy presumably.
“As I was saying, I didn’t expect to be back so soon. But we stormed Basing House three days ago.” A shadow crossed Cato’s countenance. It had been a grim business. The house had held out and Cromwell had showed them no mercy once he’d forced their surrender. They’d put most of the garrison to the sword, taken the household prisoner, marching them away in chains. It would set an example for the other royalist houses holding out against their besiegers throughout the country. The war was now mostly one of sieges-a tiresome and long, drawn-out business that wasted manpower and resources. Cato understood the strategic importance of the lesson of Basing House, but he deplored it nevertheless.
There was a thud behind him. The two boys had tired of adult conversation and had resumed their banister sliding. A gleeful shriek from the head of the stairs was joined suddenly by the insistent wail of a baby from somewhere above.
“Oh, it’s Alex. He’s woken up.” Portia set Eve on the floor and hurried to the bottom of the stairs. “Luke, Toby, that’s enough now,” she instructed, to Cato’s relief. “You can go outside. It’s almost stopped raining.”