Page 59 of The Secret Love of a Gentleman (The Marlow Family Secrets #3)

Caro watched Drew sort through the morning’s letters at the breakfast table as keenly as Mary.

‘Is there a letter from Rob?’ Mary asked.

He looked up. ‘No, my dear.’

‘It has been four weeks,’ she complained.

‘That is not long to wait to hear from a young man in town.’

Mary sighed. ‘Yet it is not like him. I am worried.’

Every time Mary spoke of it, a heavy pain settled in Caro’s chest. She was worried too – she worried he would never contact Mary because he knew she would read the letters in front of Caro.

‘You should go to town and visit him,’ Mary told Drew. ‘At least then I would know he is well.’

‘He is well. Your father has written and told you so. They have seen him.’

Caro folded her napkin and lay it on her half-full plate. She was not hungry. Her stomach had been bilious every morning for three weeks. ‘I am going to the nursery for an hour then I plan to spend the day with Isabella and Pauline.’

Drew smiled at her sympathetically. Drew knew Caro was the cause for the wedge between Mary and Rob, but he had no idea how awful the mess she had made was.

When she walked upstairs, her hand rested over her stomach. She believed there was a child within her. Her courses had stopped. When she counted back, she realised the last had been at the end of July.

She could not carry a child full-term. Five small graves in the grounds of her ex-husband’s home attested to it.

So, there was no need to speak of it to anyone, it would be her secret.

To believe there was a child within her flooded her heart with joy.

She would embrace it and love the child for however many months it lived inside her.

In the nursery, she sat with Iris on her knee. Iris clapped as George ordered her to. Iris had become his playmate, or perhaps another toy, now she could clap on command.

Whenever Caro sat with the children, thoughts of Rob filled her mind, she enjoyed memories, and wondered what he was doing, hoping he was happy.

What would he think if he knew they had created a child?

She imagined a look of wonder in his eyes.

But how could she speak of it to him? He would want to marry her now, and have to endure the hurt when the baby died, and possibly, they would both endure a marriage which he might later decide had been a mistake.

Caro stood by the window in the nursery looking at the dusting of snow covering the gardens. It had been six weeks since they left town. Caro continued to carry the child, and Rob had still not written to Mary.

Caro’s hand often hovered near her stomach.

She loved the child with all her heart. At night when she lay in bed she would lie with her palm on her stomach and sing to the child within her.

She wished her child to feel loved for every minute of the months it was alive in her womb, to know her love as much as it might.

‘Caro, I meant to say, there is a dinner dance next week at the Morrisons’. Will you come with us?’

Caro turned from the window and smiled at Mary, who was kneeling on the floor playing a game of spillikins with George.

Before Rob came to stay last summer, she would not have gone, out of fear, but now she simply felt no desire to go.

‘I would prefer to stay at home, but not because I am hiding, Mary.’

‘Very well.’ Mary looked away, her concentration returning to her game with George.

When the pile of sticks collapsed, George broke into giggles, which made his sister clap.

Caro’s hand stroked across her stomach, it was more rounded, but not obviously so.