She rang for Bailey and told her to please send her married sister to her room. Minutes later, Flossie swept in, with a robe tied loosely over her nightgown and chubby Michael on her hip. Normally, Hattie would have rushed to her baby nephew to kiss all the small fingers and toes peeking from his lacy hems, but tonight she barely raised her head.
“Nerves?” Flossie asked. “Cold feet? All quite normal, my dear. Especially under the circumstances.”
Of all her family members, her older sister had seemed the least overcome by recent developments, and Hattie had never been more grateful for her presence.
“Mama gave me this … book,” she said, and nudged it. “I find it very unhelpful.”
She kept her gaze on the wall as her sister stepped closer.
“Oh, that awful thing,” she heard Flossie say.
Hattie peered at her. “You know it?”
Her sister skimmed the first page while absently bouncing Michael on her hip. “Hmph,” she said. “It’s as dramatic as I remember it.” She shook her head and pulled one of the chairs from the wall closer to sit. “I was needlessly overwrought on my wedding day because Mama had left it on my bedside table,” she said. “I’m glad you called for me.”
“So am I.” Hattie shuddered with cautious relief. “But should we, erm, speak of this in front of Michael?”
“He’s ten months old,” Flossie said. “Babies are sweet creatures, but incapable of understanding a thing. Aren’t you,” she crooned down at her son in her lap and giggled when he waved a fat little fist at her face. “The truth is,” she said, “I cannot deny that it will be awkward at first, but I daresay you will soon find it rather funny.”
“Funny …”
“Perhaps pitiful is the better word,” Flossie allowed. “Men are very keen on it, and they become, how to put it … a bit silly in the process.”
Silly? She couldn’t envision a silly Lucian Blackstone. He was hard-muscled, steely-eyed intimidation.
“He will groan and pant,” Flossie said, “but with a few little tricks, you can hasten it along, reduce it to a few minutes, even.”
“Oh, good.”
“And never let what happens in the bedchamber ruin your esteem for him outside of it. I confess I still have trouble reconciling these two versions of my clever van der Waal: a cunning man of business during the day, a needy creature at night. Truly, Hattie, we can be grateful to be women and that by nature we aren’t afflicted by such urges.”
She couldn’t comment on this, since her urge to kiss an unsuitable man had put her into this situation in the first place. “How do I … hurry it along?” she brought herself to ask.
Now Flossie’s cheeks reddened. “Allow him to look at you.”
“How … could he not?”
“I mean in the nude, dear.”
She had fancied herself quite adventurous and open-minded. Now her instincts, rigorously schooled since girlhood to keep her hands gloved, her necklines high, and her legs covered down to her heels to protect her modesty, shrieked in dismay at the word nude.
“Don’t look so discouraged, Pom Pom,” Flossie said. “If your nerves are too shaky, you could try ether to ease you through the first encounter.”
Hattie’s eyes grew round. “You mean … ether?”
Flossie nodded. “I haven’t heard much about it in my circles in Amsterdam, but I understand here in London, doctors will sometimes prescribe it for nervous new brides. I feel as though I know someone who knows someone who employed it to great effect, though I can’t think of the name …”
“But I would be unconscious!”
“Precisely. You would wake up a wife in all ways and not have felt a pinch.”
“Thanks,” she said, filled with horror at the thought of Blackstone laboring away over her incapacitated body.
“Whatever you do,” Flossie said, “do not imbibe too heavily. Before, I mean.”
“Why not?” A champagne haze sounded mightily more tempting than a dose of ether.
“Because the scientific community believes that children, when conceived while husband or wife is intoxicated, will become slovenly and mean-spirited adults.”
“Oh.” No drink for her, then.
“One last piece of advice,” Flossie said, and now she was covering Michael’s ears. “When you act as if his efforts please you, you mustn’t exaggerate it, or else he might think he married a wanton, and you do not wish to create that impression. And whenever you find it bothersome, keep in mind that you might get a darling baby from it by the end.” She planted kisses on top of Michael’s lace cap, and Hattie was accosted by the image of a robust toddler on her own knee. Her insides seemed to weigh a hundred stone. He will give her coarse-looking, disagreeable children!