“I’ll be fine,” Eloise said. Already the stinging pain was giving way to a duller ache. But it still hurt, enough so that when Sir Phillip lifted her into his arms, she let out a little cry.
And his fury grew.
“I’m putting you in bed,” he said, his voice rough and curt.
Eloise offered no disagreement.
A maid appeared on the landing, gasping when she saw the darkening bruise on Eloise’s face.
“Get me something for this,” Sir Phillip ordered. “A piece of meat. Anything.”
The maid nodded and ran off as Phillip carried Eloise into her room. “Are you hurt anywhere else?” he asked.
“My hip,” Eloise admitted as he settled her on top of her covers. “And my elbow.”
He nodded grimly. “Do you think you’ve broken anything?”
“No!” she said quickly. “No, I—”
“I’ll need to check, anyway,” he said, brushing aside her protests as he lightly examined her arm.
“Sir Phillip, I—”
“My children just nearly killed you,” he said, without a trace of humor in his eyes. “I should think you could dispense with the sir.”
Eloise swallowed as she watched him cross the room to the door, his strides long and powerful. “Get me the twins immediately,” he said, presumably to some servant hovering outside in the hall. Eloise couldn’t imagine that the children hadn’t heard his earlier bellow, but she also couldn’t blame them for attempting to delay judgment day at the hands of their father.
“Phillip,” she said, trying to coax him back into the room with the sound of her voice, “leave them to me. I was the injured party, and—”
“They are my children,” he said, his voice harsh, “and I will punish them. God knows it’s long past due.”
Eloise stared at him with growing horror. He was nearly shaking with rage, and while she could have happily swatted the children on their bottoms herself, she didn’t think he ought to be meting out punishment in his state.
“They hurt you,” Phillip said in a low voice. “That is not acceptable.”
“I’ll be fine,” she assured him again. “In a few days I won’t even—”
“That is not the point,” he said sharply. “If I had . . .” He stopped, tried again with, “If I hadn’t . . .” He stopped, beyond words, and leaned against the wall, his head hanging back as his eyes searched the ceiling—for what, she didn’t know. Answers, she supposed. As if one could find answers with the simple upward sweep of the eyes.
He turned, looked at her, his eyes grim, and Eloise saw something on his face she hadn’t expected to see there.
And that was when she realized it—all that rage in his voice, in the shaking of his body—it wasn’t directed at the children. Not really, and certainly not entirely.
The look on his face, the bleakness in his eyes—it was self-loathing.
He didn’t blame his children.
He blamed himself.
Chapter 6
. . . should not have let him kiss you. Who knows what liberties he will attempt to take the next time you meet? But what’s done is done, I suppose, so all there is left is to ask: Was it lovely?
—from Eloise Bridgerton to her sister Francesca,
slid under the door of her bedroom
the night Francesca met the Earl of Kilmartin,
whom she would marry two months later
When the children entered the room, half dragged and half pushed by their nursemaid, Phillip forced himself to remain rigidly in his position against the wall, afraid that if he went to them he’d beat them both within an inch of their lives.
And even more afraid that when he was through, he wouldn’t regret his actions.
So instead he just crossed his arms and stared, letting them squirm under the heat of his fury, while he tried to figure out what the hell he meant to say.
Finally, Oliver spoke up, his voice trembling as he said, “Father?”
Phillip said the only thing that came to mind, the only thing that seemed to matter. “Do you see Miss Bridgerton?”
The twins nodded, but they didn’t quite look at her. At least not at her face, which was beginning to purple around the eye.
“Do you notice anything amiss about her?”
They said nothing, forcing a silence until a maid appeared in the doorway with a “Sir?”
Phillip acknowledged her arrival with a nod, then strode to take hold of the piece of meat she’d brought for Eloise’s eye.
“Hungry?” he snapped at his children. When they didn’t reply, he said, “Good. Because sadly, none of us will be eating this, will we?”
He crossed the room to the bed, then sat down gently at Eloise’s side. “Here,” he said, still too angry for his voice to be anything but gruff. Brushing aside her efforts to help, he set the meat against her eye, then arranged a piece of cloth over it so that she would not have to dirty her fingers while keeping it in place.
Then, when he was done, he walked over to where the twins were cowering, and stood in front of them, arms crossed. And waited.
“Look at me,” he ordered, when neither removed their gaze from the floor.
When they did, he saw terror in their eyes, and it sickened him, but he didn’t know how else he was supposed to act.
“We didn’t mean to hurt her,” Amanda whispered.
“Oh, you didn’t?” he bit off, turning on them both with palpable fury. His voice was icy, but his face clearly showed his anger, and even Eloise shrank back in her bed.
“You didn’t think she might possibly be hurt when she tripped over the string?” Phillip continued, his sarcasm lending him a controlled air that was even more frightening. “Or perhaps you realized correctly that the string itself wasn’t likely to cause injury, but it didn’t occur to you that she might be hurt when she actually fell.”
They said nothing.
He looked at Eloise, who had lifted the meat from her face and was gingerly touching her cheekbone. The bruise under her eye seemed to be worsening by the minute.
The twins had to learn that they couldn’t continue like this. They needed to learn that they had to treat people with more respect. They needed to learn . . .
Phillip swore under his breath. They needed to learn something.
He jerked his head toward the door. “You will come with me.” He walked into the hall, turned back at them, and snapped, “Now.”
And as he led them from the room, he prayed that he could control himself.
Eloise tried not to listen, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from straining her ears. She didn’t know where Phillip was taking the children—it could be the next room, it could be the nursery, it could be outside. But one thing was certain. They were going to be punished.
And while she thought they should be punished—what they had done was inexcusable and they were certainly old enough to have realized that—she still found herself oddly worried for them. They had looked terrified when Phillip had led them away, and there was that niggling memory from the day before, when Oliver had blurted out the question, “Are you going to hit us?”
He had recoiled when he’d said it, as if he were expecting to be hit.
Surely Sir Phillip didn’t . . . No, that was impossible, Eloise thought. It was one thing to give children a spanking at a time like this, but surely he didn’t strike his children habitually.
She couldn’t have made such a misjudgment about a person. She had let the man kiss her the night before, kissed him in return, even. Surely she would have felt that something was wrong, sensed an inner cruelty if Phillip were the sort who beat his children.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Oliver and Amanda filed in, looking somber and red-eyed, followed by a grim-faced Sir Phillip, whose job at the rear was clearly to keep the children walking at a pace that exceeded that of a snail.
The children shuffled over to her bedside, and Eloise turned her head so that she could see them. She couldn’t see out of her left eye with the meat covering it, and of course that was the side the children had chosen.
“We’re sorry, Miss Bridgerton,” they mumbled.
“Louder,” came their father’s sharply worded directive.
“We’re sorry.”
Eloise gave them a nod.
“It won’t happen again,” Amanda added.
“That’s certainly a relief to hear,” Eloise said.
Phillip cleared his throat.
“Father says we must make it up to you,” Oliver said.
“Er . . .” Eloise wasn’t exactly certain how they meant to do that.
“Do you like sweets?” Amanda blurted out.
Eloise looked at her, blinking her good eye in confusion. “Sweets?”
Amanda’s chin shook up and down.
“Well, yes, I suppose I do. Doesn’t everyone?”
“I have a box of lemon drops. I’ve saved them for months. You can have them.”
Eloise swallowed against the lump in her throat as she watched Amanda’s tortured expression. There was something wrong with these children. Or if not with them, then for them. Something wasn’t right in their lives. With all of her nieces and nephews, Eloise had seen enough happy children to know this. “That will be all right, Amanda,” she said, her heart wrenching. “You may keep your lemon drops.”
“But we have to give you something,” Amanda said, casting a fearful glance at her father.
Eloise was about to tell her that that wasn’t necessary, but then, as she watched Amanda’s face, she realized that it was. In part, of course, because Sir Phillip had obviously insisted upon it, and Eloise wasn’t about to undermine his authority by saying otherwise. But also because the twins needed to understand the concept of making amends. “Very well,” Eloise said. “You may give me an afternoon.”
“An afternoon?”
“Yes. Once I’m feeling better, you and your brother may give me an afternoon. There is much here at Romney Hall with which I’m unfamiliar, and I imagine you two know every last corner of the house and grounds. You may take me on a tour. Provided, of course,” she added, because she did value her health and well-being, “that you promise there will be no pranks.”
“None,” Amanda said quickly, her chin bobbing in an earnest nod. “I promise.”
“Oliver,” Phillip growled, when his son did not speak quickly enough.
“There will be no pranks that afternoon,” Oliver muttered.
Phillip strode across the room and grabbed his son by the collar.
“Ever!” Oliver said in a strangled voice. “I promise! We shall leave Miss Bridgerton completely alone.”
“Not completely, I hope,” Eloise said, glancing up at Phillip and hoping he correctly interpreted that to mean, You may now put down the child. “After all, you do owe me an afternoon.”
Amanda offered her a tentative smile, but Oliver’s scowl remained firmly in place.
“You may leave now,” Phillip said, and the children fled through the open doorway.
The two adults remained in silence for a full minute after they left, both staring at the door with hollow, weary expressions. Eloise felt drained, and wary, almost as if she’d been dropped into a situation she didn’t quite understand.
A burst of nervous laughter almost escaped her lips. What was she thinking? Of course she had been dropped into a situation she didn’t understand, and she was lying to herself if she thought she knew what to do.
Phillip walked over to the bed, but when he got there, he stood rather stiffly. “How are you?” he asked Eloise.
“If I don’t remove this meat soon,” she said quite frankly, “I think I might be sick.”
He picked up the platter the meat had arrived upon and held it out. Eloise put the steak down, grimacing at the wet, slopping sound it made. “I believe I would like to wash my face,” she said. “The smell is rather overwhelming.”
He nodded. “First let me look at your eye.”
“Do you have very much experience with this sort of thing?” she asked, glancing at the ceiling when he asked her to look up.
“A bit.” He pressed gently against the ridge of her cheekbone with his thumb. “Look right.”
She did. “A bit?”
“I boxed at university.”
“Were you good?”
He turned her head to the side. “Look left. Good enough.”
“What does that mean?”
“Close your eye.”
“What does that mean?” she persisted.
“You’re not closing your eye.”
She did, shutting them both, because whenever she winked only one eye she ended up squeezing it far too tightly. “What does it mean?”
She couldn’t see him, but she could feel him pause. “Has anyone ever told you you can be a bit stubborn?”
“All the time. It’s my only flaw.”
She heard his smile in the tenor of his breath. “The only one, eh?”
“The only one worth commenting upon.”
She opened her eyes. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’ve quite forgotten what it was.”
She opened her mouth to repeat it, then realized he was teasing her, so she scowled instead.
“Close your eye again,” he said. “I’m not yet finished.” When she obeyed his command, he added, “Good enough meant I never had to fight if I didn’t want to.”
“But you weren’t the champion,” she surmised.
“You can open your eye now.”
She did, then blinked when she realized how close he still was.
He stepped back. “I wasn’t the champion.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t care about it enough.”
“How does it look?” she asked.
“Your eye?”
She nodded.