Storming the Castle (2 page)

Chapter Two

Pomeroy Castle

Lancashire

M
r. Jonas Berwick, known to his half brother Gabriel as Wick, and to the castle at large as Mr. Berwick, the majordomo to Prince Gabriel Albrecht-Frederick William von Aschenberg of Warl-Marburg-Baalsfeld, was never at a loss for an answer. Well, rarely.

“What am I going to do?” Gabriel demanded again. His hair was standing on end, and under his eyes were dark circles that looked like bruises. “The baby cries, and then
she
cries, and—” He turned away abruptly, but not before Wick saw the gleam of something that looked like tears.

“Aw, hell, Gabe,” he said, reaching out and pulling his brother into his arms. “Your son is going to make it. You named him after me, and that alone will give him the balls to push on through.”

“He’s suffering,” Gabriel said flatly. “He pulls up his legs and he cries so desperately that it would make you ill to hear it.”

Wick knew. He kept breaking off his duties to dash up the stairs, to walk past the nursery, silently begging, praying that he wouldn’t hear his namesake crying in that desperate, pain-filled wail. “How is Kate?”

“Kate is Kate,” Gabriel said wearily. “She holds him, and she walks, then she cries, but she keeps walking. I can’t get her to sleep properly, and I’m sure it’s affecting her milk. And yet she will not allow him to be nursed by anyone else, not after the time when he cried all day after we tried a wet nurse. She’s convinced that because the poor woman reeked of garlic, her milk didn’t agree with the baby.”

“What does the new nursemaid say about it?”

“I just sent her away,” Gabriel said.

Wick made a mental note. He’d have to find the woman and pay her a week’s wages.

“I was decent about it,” Gabriel said, wearily running a hand through his hair. “I know it’s not her fault. But she kept shaking her head, and she had such a sad look about her . . . I couldn’t stand it. Besides, Kate won’t put Jonas down anyway, not unless she gives him to me. I should go back up there.” Instead, he slumped into a chair.

“I’ll go,” Wick said. “I’m the boy’s uncle. You’ll have to force Kate to give him up. I’ll walk him while the two of you nap for a couple of hours. Tell her that. I will walk up and down in the portrait gallery.”

Gabriel looked up, his eyes heavy. “She’ll never accept it.”

Wick pulled him to his feet. “Assert yourself, Gabe. Remember, you’re the master of the house, the
paterfamilias,
king of the castle, and all the rest of that rubbish. Grab your son, hand him to me, and take your poor wife off to get some proper sleep. You’d better go to your old chambers up in the tower because she won’t be able to hear Jonas cry from there.”

When Wick let go of his arm, Gabriel actually tottered.

“How long has it been since you slept?” Wick demanded, taking hold of his arm again and hauling him along the corridor.

“Exactly how old is Jonas? I’ve lost track.”

“Not even a fortnight. You need to get yourself and Kate to sleep,” Wick said, pushing him through the nursery door. A moment later, he was holding his nephew.

“I’ll sleep for one hour, then I’ll be back,” his sister-in-law stated. She was a beautiful woman, but just at the moment she resembled one of those weird sisters in the Shakespeare play. Wick couldn’t remember which play it was, but there were three of them in the production he’d seen, and Kate would have fit right in. Her eyes were red, her face drawn, and grief and fear vibrated in the air around her. “He just had some milk . . . at least I think he did.”

“More than an hour,” Gabriel said firmly, pulling her toward the door.

She managed to stop her husband in the doorway. “Don’t let anyone else touch him,” she told Wick in a threatening tone.

He nodded.

“And whatever you do, if that doctor comes, don’t let him give the baby anything. I’m certain his dose made Jonas sicker, and he wanted to try opium. I
know
that’s a bad idea.”

“I already forbade him entrance to the castle,” her husband said, managing to get Kate into the hallway.

As the sound of their footsteps receded, Wick looked down at the baby, and Jonas looked back at him. Then Jonas opened his mouth so wide that Wick could view his interesting lack of teeth and screamed until his face turned red.

Wick’s ears hurt. But something hurt in his chest too. Jonas looked thinner now than he had when he was born. His eyes were sunken, and there seemed to be a little less fire in his cry. He looked like a wizened old man, as if he’d lived an entire life in a week or two.

Wick swore under his breath and set off down the corridor, then down a flight and into the portrait gallery. After he had walked for five minutes, Jonas settled down some. He turned his face against Wick’s chest and sobbed more quietly. He curled his finger around Wick’s rather than flailing it in the air.

“Just don’t die,” Wick found himself whispering. “Please don’t die.”

Jonas gave an exhausted sob.

Wick walked for another half hour or so, up the portrait gallery, out into the corridor, around the bend, back down the corridor, back into the portrait gallery . . . at last, Jonas slept.

Sometime later, footsteps sounded in the stone corridor behind him. “Mr. Berwick, oh, Mr. Berwick,” panted one of the footmen, as Wick turned toward him. “My apologies, Mr. Berwick, but Mrs. Apple says that the first of the new nursemaids has arrived, and she’d like you to be there for the interview.”

“How can that be?” Wick whispered. “I sent off to Manchester only yesterday.”

The footman had just realized what—or rather
who
—Wick held in his arms. He started walking backwards on his toes. “Don’t know,” he whispered back. “Shall I tell her you’re unavailable?”

Wick looked down at Jonas. The baby was turned against his chest, a fold of Wick’s shirt clutched in one tiny hand. “I can’t stop walking,” he said. “Send the woman up here. Mrs. Apple can see her first, then I will.”

Fifteen minutes later, Wick had just reached the far end of the gallery for the twentieth or perhaps fortieth time and was turning around to walk back the other way when the door opened and the nursemaid entered. His first thought was that she was too young.

He had sent a footman to Manchester with explicit instructions to find experienced nannies and doctors, at least two of each. The baby didn’t need a pretty bosom to nestle against: he needed someone who could figure out what was wrong with him.

But Wick walked back across the room, maintaining the same even stride with which he’d lulled Jonas to sleep. The girl didn’t meet his eyes; she was staring at the baby.

“Your name and your experience with children?” he asked briskly, thinking to get the whole thing over within two minutes. There were strands of bright hair peeking out from the girl’s cap, and her eyes were moss green. Plus, she had an entirely delectable bosom . . . she would never do. She’d have the footmen at fisticuffs within the week.

She didn’t seem to hear his inquiry. Instead, she came straight up to him and peered at Jonas’s face. “He’s wanting water, that’s for certain.”

“Babies don’t drink water,” Wick said, and never mind the fact that he’d never held a baby before this one. “Babies drink milk.” Her ignorance of this obvious truth was another strike against her employment.

“If they have the collywobbles, they need water as well.”

“How much experience have you had with infants?” He could see the nape of her neck as she peeked more closely at his nephew. It was delicate, pale, and translucent, like the finest porcelain. “Have you been a nursemaid for long?” Then, annoyed by the fact he was looking at her neck, he added, “You’re far too young.”

“I don’t have much experience, but what I have is the right sort,” she said, looking up at him, finally. He mentally revised his assessment of her eyes: they were not the green of moss, after all, but the green of the sea on a stormy day.

Wick felt an altogether uncomfortable warmth in the area of his groin. He’d be damned if he would line up with the footmen to ogle one of his fellow servants.

He’d accepted long ago that ladies were not for him. True, he was the son of a grand duke, albeit a grand duke in far-off Marburg. But he had been born on the wrong side of the blanket. Raised in a castle and yet a bastard—which meant that he couldn’t marry anyone of respectable birth. And he was too educated to settle for a milkmaid who wouldn’t mind his questionable parentage.

“What sort of experience is the
right
experience?” he asked.

But she had bent near again and was studying the baby’s face. “I don’t like the look of him,” she said, pursing her lips. They were rose-colored, those lips.

Wick looked past her lips to Jonas. “At least he’s sleeping,” he said. “He cried all night.”

“That’s because of the pain,” she said. “You’d better give him to me. We have to get some water in him, first thing, then we’ll deal with the milk.”

Before he knew what was happening, she slipped her hands around the baby and lifted him deftly out of Wick’s arms. “Here! You can’t do that,” he said, alarmed at the very thought of Gabriel or, God forbid, Kate, knowing that he’d allowed a stranger to take the baby.

But the girl—

“What did you say your name was?” he asked.

She finished tucking the fold of the blanket under Jonas’s face before she looked at him. “I didn’t,” she said. “I am Philippa Damson.”

“Like the jam?” Wick asked. She was sweet as jam, and that part of her name suited her. He’d like to lick—

He wrenched his mind away.

“Exactly like the jam,” she said, turning toward the door. “Now come along, Mr. Berwick. This baby needs water immediately.”

Wick stared after her for a moment.

At the door, she looked over her shoulder. “You have to show me to the kitchen.”

“Kitchen?” he echoed, trying to figure out how to get Jonas from her arms without waking him. Gabriel would never forgive him. He didn’t even want to think about how Kate would react. “Look, you must give the baby back to me. I promised His Highness that I, and I alone, would hold Jonas—that is, the young princeling.”

“He needs water,” Miss Damson said. “Or he will die.” She looked down again. “I think there’s a chance he won’t live through the night, actually. Babies die awfully quickly if they don’t drink enough.”

Wick walked forward and pushed the door open before her. “Straight to the end of the corridor and down two flights.”

When they reached the kitchen, nine or ten heads swiveled almost in unison. The castle’s kitchen was a vast space with a stone floor. Worktables were arrayed around the room, scrubbed to a fare-thee-well, and covered with copper pans of all sizes and shapes. It was full of people, as always: the cook, three kitchen maids, a dairymaid, and a couple of scullery maids working at the sink to one side.

They all snapped upright at the sight of Wick, except for Madame Troisgros the cook, who considered herself his equal, if not his better. The already complex hierarchy of castle staff was further complicated by Wick’s relationship to the prince. Even had Gabriel (who showed no such inclination) wished to keep their fraternity a secret, one of his elderly aunts regularly took pleasure in shocking polite company by announcing that she preferred Wick to his brother Gabriel.

By rights, a young nursemaid would find herself quite far below the cook, though certainly above the dairymaid. And yet Philippa Damson walked into that kitchen like the lady of the house. She unerringly put her eye on the cook, a lady twice as broad and four times as fierce as anyone else in the room.

“
Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?
” snapped Madame Troisgros.

Without pausing for breath, Miss Damson broke into charming, if urgent, French. As all could see, she had the little prince in her arms. He needed water, but it must be special water, water boiled, then cooled. And she also needed a cloth, a clean linen cloth, to be boiled in a different pot of water, then cooled.

Madame Troisgros had the eyes, Wick thought, of a rabid French weasel, if such a thing existed—small and rather crazed-looking. As she opened her mouth, undoubtedly to refuse, Miss Damson walked across the kitchen to her.

“
Regardez,
” she said, drawing back the cover that protected the prince’s face.

Confronted by that tiny, exhausted face, Madame Troisgros flinched and pointed with her ladle to a chair. Miss Damson obediently sat down. A few minutes later, an immaculate piece of linen was shown to Miss Damson for her approval, then carefully placed in a pot of boiling water.

Even more servants began drifting into the kitchen, although the room remained as silent as a church as everyone strove to keep Jonas asleep. The housekeeper appeared and hovered in the background; two or three footmen had apparently deserted their posts in the front hall as they now stood quietly against the walls. The knife boy had stopped sharpening his wares and was sitting on a three-legged stool, his mouth open.

“Stop hovering!” Miss Damson ordered Wick in a low voice. “Babies don’t like nervous influences.”