Three formidable Dorning women had rendered judgment. Not long ago, Sycamore would have brushed aside their pronouncements as so much casual matchmaking. He knew better now. If a woman deigned to offer her considered judgment on a delicate matter, a man of sense listened to her.
“Wish me luck,” Sycamore said, setting aside his drink. “I’m off to woo a damsel who has professed an abiding desire to remain independent.”
Ash cuffed him on the shoulder. “Which is precisely why you and she are perfect for each other. Give her the words, Sycamore. You are magnificently honest even when those around you wish you’d keep your mouth shut. Don’t turn up reticent and retiring on us now, and if the lady accepts, you and I will have a long talk about where I fit into the future of this club.”
“You’re scarpering on me?” The idea ought to engender panic and bluster, possibly even outrage. The past months had proved that Ash did not need the Coventry, though, and—apparently—the Coventry did not precisely need Ash.
As a brother, Sycamore would always need Ash. As a business partner, he could accept that priorities changed, and sometimes that was a good thing.
Ash affected a severe expression, though his eyes were dancing. “I do not scarper on my siblings.”
“We’ll talk,” Sycamore said. “And please give Della my regards.” He went up to the office to retrieve a box, checked his appearance in the cheval mirror, then gathered up hat, gloves, and walking stick and prepared to make a cake of himself.
The fellow who admitted him to the Tavistock town house was young and spry. “Where’s Peem?” Sycamore asked.
“Off to Derbyshire, sir. He’s taking the dower house in hand. Has family in the Peak and was happy to quit London.”
Sycamore passed over his hat and cane and peered past the butler. “I’ll announce myself.” For there was Jeanette across the foyer, amid big copper pots, a liberal sprinkling of dirt, and several large ferns removed from their pottery containers.
“My lady, good day.”
Jeanette popped to her feet and brushed at her skirts. “Mr. Dorning. The hour is early for a social call.”
One knee of her long white apron was damp, and dirt streaked both her hem and her cheek. Her hair was in its tidy chignon, but her hands were gloriously dirty.
To Sycamore, she had seldom looked more wonderful. “You’re repotting the old guard,” he said, stripping off his gloves. “I can help with that. They want room to breathe and grow, but not so much room that they’re lonely.”
“You did not come here to repot ferns, Mr. Dorning.”
Proposing marriage while the butler remained ever so attentively by the front door did struck Sycamore as imprudent.
“I came here to give you the rest of your knives,” Sycamore said, “and to see how you’re getting on. You want to tell me that you are perfectly capable of managing this job on your own, and you are, of course. How about if we send that helpful fellow for a tray, and I simply keep you company while you muck about?”
“Do you want a tray?”
Sycamore stepped closer. “I want to be private with you on any terms I can finagle, even if that means enduring the pretense of the tea tray. I’ve missed you abominably.”
Finally, a smile. A mere seedling of a smile, but all Jeanette. “Feeney, please excuse us.”
The butler bowed and withdrew, bless the fellow.
“Where shall I set these?” Sycamore asked, hefting the knife case.
“May I see them?”
He put the box down on a windowsill. “If you see them, you will want to throw them, and you can’t leave these poor fellows lying about with roots exposed for all the world to see. How are you, my lady?”
She surveyed the foyer, which bore the fecund scents of dirt and greenery. “I felt guilty every time I came in my own door. I imagined the ferns chiding me for my neglect of them, and nobody calls at such an early hour.”
“Friends call at such an early hour,” Sycamore said, unbuttoning his coat. “Friends who need not stand on ceremony. I have your dinner invitation. Is that how we’re to go forward now, Jeanette? An occasional quadrille, all smiles when we encounter each other in the park, and nothing more?”
He draped his coat over the bannister of the curved stairway, slipped his sleeve buttons into a pocket, and turned back his cuffs. Jeanette hadn’t made much progress with her project, but she’d nearly left it too late. Each of the plants showed yellowing foliage, and an abundance of tangled roots conformed to the shape of the old pots.
“I will happily offer you an occasional quadrille or a smile in the park,” Jeanette said, “but I had hoped to offer you a proposition. That invitation was for a private dinner, Mr. Dorning.”
Sycamore did not want another perishing proposition from her. He knelt among the ferns and chose the largest of the lot.
“You got to this fellow just in time,” he said, gently brushing dirt away from the roots. “When the roots in the center go weak, you know the plant’s in distress. He’s still managing, but it’s a near thing. Were you thinking to divide your ferns or simply repot them?”
“I was thinking to offer you one slightly used marchioness,” Jeanette said, coming down beside him. “I was wrong, Sycamore. I should not have tried to manage Beardsley, Jerome, and Viola on my own. I wanted to protect you, Orion, and Tavistock, but I was not thinking clearly.”
Sycamore pried patiently at tightly bound roots, an operation that took all of his focus when Jeanette was kneeling at his side. He detected her jasmine fragrance blending with the earthy scent of the ferns, his new favorite perfume.
“The business wants patience,” he said, untangling roots, “or you do more harm than good. My father claimed the plants preferred to be transplanted at night under a new moon, but how is one to see in such limited light?”
He fell silent lest he descend into outright babbling. The collective fraternal chorus in his head was shouting at him to tell Jeanette he loved her, but listening to what she had to say mattered more.
“I did not want you involved in my messes,” Jeanette said. “I did not want Beardsley to have an excuse to go after you and your club. He threatened to, before you arrived.”
“We should have sent him to darkest Peru,” Sycamore muttered, gently peeling the fern into two halves. Dirt showered the marble floor, and not a little of it got onto Sycamore’s breeches. “When does the great French exodus take place?”
“A fortnight hence. About my proposition?”
He set aside the two halves of the plant and sat back on his heels. “I don’t care to be propositioned, Jeanette.” Not a statement he could have made before he’d started courting her.
“You offered me marriage once.” Jeanette made the observation quietly, very much on her dignity.
“I realize you don’t want to be married, that the old marquess was a horror, the Vincents an embarrassment to the concept of family, and Goddard a less than exemplary brother, but, Jeanette…”
“Yes?”
Tell her you love her. “I have been wrestling with a question of logic,” Sycamore said, dusting the dirt from his hands. “Though my family does not account me a very logical fellow.”
“You are logical,” Jeanette said, arranging her skirts to sit tailor-fashion on the floor. “You are frightfully good at seeing logic that eludes others.”
“I’m not feeling very logical at present, but here is my conundrum. You sent me on my way because you sought to protect me from Beardsley. I understand that and thank you for it, but why was I not permitted to protect you as well? All I wanted—all I needed and asked for—was the chance to keep safe the woman I love to distraction, to have the right to face your battles with you, and yet, you banished me. I was left to make shift with half measures taken from the periphery.”
He moved to sit beside her, resting his back against the wall and his wrists on his bent knees, when he wanted desperately to take Jeanette’s hand. More half measures.
“Yo
u can protect me,” he went on, “but I cannot protect you. If that is your proposition, then I ought not to take up more of your time. Friends don’t behave like that, as if one is some noble martyr and the other a bumbling incompetent. Family certainly doesn’t behave that way—my family doesn’t—and I cannot imagine a marriage on such terms.”
The plants lay about them in dirty disarray, roots exposed, pots half full of soil, a general mess. This was not the genteel drawing-room proposal Sycamore had aspired to, but that performance would have been wrong for the conversation he needed to have with Jeanette.
This was the discussion he and Jeanette needed to have, or at least begin. A discussion of trust and expectations, rather than hearts, flowers, and empty poetry.
Jeanette had planned candlelight, excellent vintages, superb cuisine, and an intimate dining parlor for her next encounter with Sycamore. Instead, she was sitting on the floor in the foyer, where any footman might come upon them, dismembered plants creating a spectacular mess.
And Sycamore wanted to talk about… Jeanette could barely fathom the question he was asking.
“Of course I sought to protect you,” she said. “The Coventry is all you have, and Beardsley could have wrecked its reputation as surely as if you’d turned up drunk at Almack’s. At the time I refused your proposal, I thought Beardsley—or Viola—was willing to nearly kill me to bring me to heel.”
Though Beardsley hadn’t been the sum of Rye’s troubles apparently, merely a badly timed makeweight.
Sycamore leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He was a strikingly attractive man, and also toweringly unhappy—with her. His posture was one of weary defeat, and that was Jeanette’s fault.
“As the threat to you increased,” he said, “your determination to bear your troubles alone also increased. Do I have that right?”
“I could not risk that you…” Jeanette stopped, marshaled her courage, and tried again. “What if you abandoned me too? What if you decided that a woman you married in well-intended haste—a difficult, barren widow with a pack of lying, impecunious in-laws—was a mistake? I was the girl child my father never needed, the sister Rye considered a pest, the wife who’d failed her lordly husband, the step-mother of no particular use… I am good for little more than making up numbers at house parties and managing charities. What if you rode to my rescue and then cast me off, Sycamore?”
Jeanette drew her legs up to wrap her arms around her knees. “I could not bear your polite tolerance, could not bear to become another woman wishing you hadn’t tired of her. To know I had become a burden to you would break my heart.”
The floor of the foyer was cold and hard, like the floor of a prison cell, nothing of softness or comfort to be had. The silence stretched as Jeanette’s heart did break. She had betrayed Sycamore’s trust, and still he had come uninvited to avert disaster.
“Say something,” Jeanette muttered. “Get up and leave, tear up my invitation, but don’t simply sit there wishing you hadn’t paid this call.”
“Say something.” Sycamore scrubbed a hand over his face. “Right. Very well. Here is what I have to say: In what strange and forbidding world are women only lovable if they are perfect? Am I perfect, Jeanette?”
“You very nearly are, to me.”
“You are being polite and I am far from perfect. And yet, you sent me a dinner invitation, suggesting that even with my myriad flaws—my big mouth, my horde of siblings, my flair for blunt speech, my vanity, and on and on—I am somehow desirable company. Do you expect perfection of me?”
“No. I expect you to be yourself.”
“How fortunate for me, because I can be none other than who I am. You, however, expect yourself to be…” He flung a hand toward the ceiling. “A pattern card of self-sufficiency, feminine perfection, never cross or ill-spoken. You are to be an automaton whose knives never bounce off the target. Why, Jeanette? Why put such unreasonable demands on yourself?”
Sycamore hunched forward, drawing his finger through a sprinkling of dirt across the marble squares. “Don’t answer that, because I know what you’re thinking. If you are perfect enough, mannerly enough, smart enough, charming enough, maybe somebody will love you, or at least stick by you for a time. Well, I’m not perfect either, Jeanette. I badly bungled my first offer of marriage to you, and I am probably bungling this one too.”
Jeanette wiped her fingers across her cheek. “You’re not bungling, Sycamore.” He wasn’t leaving, and at that moment, not leaving counted for everything.
“Yes, I am, because what matters is that I love you. I love you, I love you. I worry for you, I desire you. I want to know what you think of every stupid article I read in the paper. I want to consult you on all the petty annoyances that come up at the club. I quote you to my brother, and his wife likes you already. All the wives do. They vote by letter. I will soon descend into spouting gibberish, but I want you to grasp one thing before I do.”
Jeanette wiped away another tear. “You love me.”
“I absolutely do, and I should have told you that. I should have been honest about my sentiments and begged you to humor me enough that we could sort through Beardsley’s foolishness together. I am proud, though, and I worry too much, so instead I flung a proposal at you like I hurl my knives. Badly done of me, but here’s the thing: We will disappoint each other, Jeanette. We already have disappointed each other. Perhaps to love is to be disappointed. God knows I’ve disappointed my family, and they regularly vex me, but that’s not what matters.”
Jeanette took his hand, though both of them had dirt in the creases of their palms. “What matters, Sycamore?”
“To love anyway. I will get it wrong again, Jeanette. I will speak intemperately or say something ill-advised about your favorite bonnet. You will criticize a play I adore, and we will bicker and make up, and feud and stumble. But I know this about myself: I will love you madly through it all and count it my greatest blessing if you can love me too.”
Jeanette tried to think, to find logic in what Sycamore said, to make his words fit a new definition of herself—as a woman who was loved, flaws and all—but her mind was not up to the challenge.
“You want me to trust you, to trust us.”
“I am begging you for the chance to deserve your trust, and I am freely offering you mine.”
She cuddled close, and Sycamore looped an arm around her shoulders. “You unnerve me, Sycamore Dorning. You utterly unnerve me.”
He sighed and something soft brushed Jeanette’s temple. “Well, thank God for that. I wouldn’t want to be the only person in this foyer feeling witless and muddled.”
“You are witless and muddled, and perfect, Sycamore.”
He bent near. “Say that again.”
A deep, quiet joy came over Jeanette, a letting-go of old sorrows and a welcoming of new challenges. “I said I love you, Sycamore Dorning. I love you, I love you.”
He scooped her into his lap and gathered her close, and then nobody said anything—with words—for the next little while.
Epilogue
“I cannot understand her French,” Tavistock said, sounding slightly dazed, “but she is so earnest about it, I feel I must try.”
“Have another glass of champagne,” Sycamore said. “Tabitha is equally voluble in English, Latin, and German. We are hoping as my niece matures, her verbal engines acquire some lower gears.” Though not just yet.
Casriel had decreed there was to be a massing of his troops in London for Sycamore and Jeanette’s wedding, and thus Tabitha had been hailed from school, the infants rounded up, and the countess given field marshal responsibilities.
Valerian and Emily had arrived a week ago, claiming Valerian needed to meet with his publisher, and Emily needed to do some shopping. In that regard, she was abetted by Jacaranda and Della, while Margaret—wife to Hawthorne—was making an inspection tour of London’s apothecaries and herbals.
Penweather and Daisy had also come up to Town, in separat
e coaches from separate abodes, but they had already acquired the look of a settled couple, and Penweather certainly exhibited paternal patience with Daisy’s brood. Oak and Verity, Penweather’s neighbors in Hampshire, had journeyed with him to Town as well.
Even Willow and Susannah had torn themselves away from their rural pursuits, the requisite wedding mastiff trotting at Will’s heels. Susannah had disappeared with Della and Verity to make a circuit of their favorite bookshops, and they’d dragooned Jeanette into joining them.
The wedding, a quiet ceremony at the Dorning town house, had been attended by every Dorning to which Sycamore could claim a near relation. Tavistock and Goddard had stood up with the bride, and—in a gesture of goodwill Sycamore would not have thought to offer—Jeanette’s nieces and nephew had also been invited.
The wedding breakfast was held at the Coventry, which showed to good advantage when full of loud, happy Dornings. The staff looked happy too—extra wages were always cause for joy—and Sycamore had given orders that Goddard’s excellent champagne was to flow freely in the kitchen too.
“She’s quite lovely,” Casriel said, taking the place on Sycamore’s right. “Your marchioness, that is. Has an air of friendly dignity about her.”
“She has a head for numbers,” Ash added from the right. “Always a fine quality in a woman.”
Hawthorne, who had made the supreme sacrifice of pulling himself away from his acres in springtime, peered over Sycamore’s right shoulder.
“She’s good with children,” he rumbled. “Margaret noticed that right away.”
“Well-spoken,” Valerian added from Ash’s right. “Likes books and doesn’t babble. I could listen to her speak French all day.”
Willow, holding a flute of champagne, gazed over Sycamore’s left shoulder. “The pup likes her. No more need be said, though Susannah also claims Jeanette has excellent literary tastes.”
A double endorsement, coming from dear Willow.
The Last True Gentleman: The True Gentlemen — Book 12 Page 28