A Marriage of Inconvenience

by Susanna Fraser

  It had been an impulsive gesture, a simple act of comfort and kindness, nothing more. Yet she couldn’t quite drive it from her mind. When she fell asleep, her last waking thought was not of Sebastian, but of Lord Selsley and his dark blue eyes and mischievous grin.

  “That was a pleasant evening,” Uncle Robert said as the carriage began to roll away from Almont Castle.

  “Very pleasant,” Anna agreed with a smile that was at once smug and dreamy.

  “In love, are we, sister dear?” James asked.

  She put out her tongue at him. “You spent a great deal of time with his cousin.”

  “She’s bashful and unused to society. I thought she would benefit from the attention.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Very charitable of you, I’m sure.”

  “In any case, I didn’t make a cake of myself over anyone. I hope it gives you satisfaction to know that everyone in every carriage must be talking of you and Lieutenant Arrington.”

  “Children,” Aunt Lilias said mildly. “I thought Lieutenant Arrington charming, and certainly bonny to look upon, but the younger son of a baronet, and an Englishman? Anna, I needn’t tell you how much higher you might raise your eyes. As for you, James, I had it from Lady Marpool that the little cousin, Miss Jones, is utterly dependent upon the Arringtons and doesn’t have so much as a penny for her dowry.”

  “I have no plans to marry her or anyone else.” Trust his aunt to move straight to thoughts of matrimony from the slightest hint of admiration.

  “Now, Lilias,” Uncle Robert said, “surely Anna and James have as little cause to be concerned about the fortune of a prospective partner as anyone alive.”

  “But to think of the alliances they could make, with their fortunes!”

  James and Anna exchanged amused glances. This was a well-trodden road. Their aunt loved them and only wished for their happiness, but if that happiness could involve marriage into wealthy ducal houses, preferably Scottish ducal houses, so much the better.

  “Their father thought it worthwhile to make an alliance with a good family of small fortune, and we have eternal cause to be grateful he did so,” Uncle Robert said.

  “To be sure,” Aunt Lilias said, though reluctantly.

  “Margaret and Selsley were happy together. I’ll be satisfied if their children find the same happiness with their partners in life, though of course I hope that happiness is of far greater duration.”

  “Hmph. Sometimes I think you’d let Anna marry a stable boy if you thought it would make her happy.”

  James, Anna and Uncle Robert dissolved into laughter. “Anna,” Uncle Robert said when he could speak, “don’t marry a stable boy.”

  “Must I not?” she said in mock anguish. “But James’s Sam is so very handsome.”

  “Anna!” Aunt Lilias’s eyes rounded with shock.

  “Don’t worry, Aunt. You know Sam is walking out with my Sally, and I make it my rule never to steal another lady’s beau.”

  James thought of all the wistful, worried looks Miss Jones had cast in Anna and Arrington’s direction and shook his head. He thought of warning Anna she was in danger of breaking her rule—but, no. If no one else had noticed Miss Jones’s admiration of her cousin, he was doing her no kindness by talking of it. Just because Miss Jones fancied herself in love with him did not make him her beau. James had no reason to believe the attachment was mutual.

  Aunt Lilias shook her head. “The three of you are incorrigible,” she said, though her eyes twinkled with reluctant amusement. “All I ask is that you children never forget that you are—”

  “—descended from kings!” James and Anna chorused.

  When they arrived at Orchard Park, Anna and their aunt and uncle all went yawning to their beds, but James lingered in the library, penning a letter to his cousin Alec, who was serving with his regiment somewhere in Portugal. Even as his pen flowed swiftly over the page, he knew it was almost certainly futile. The letter would take weeks to reach the army, and he would have to wait at least as long for a reply. By that time James reckoned Anna would have either forgotten Sebastian Arrington or married him. But still he mentioned meeting the lieutenant, described his interest in Anna and asked what Alec thought of Arrington as a man and an officer.

  After he sealed the letter and placed it with the rest of his correspondence for the butler to post in the morning, he leaned back in his chair and listened to the silence of the slumbering house. It was times like this he most missed Eleanor. Though they had maintained separate households, during his first three years in the Lords they had spent more nights together than apart. Their nights had always been as much for conversation as for bedsport. She had been his chief mentor, guiding him on whom to cultivate and whom to avoid as he found his footing in Parliament. After the first year he hadn’t needed her guidance quite so urgently, but he’d still trusted her advice above anyone else’s.

  He wondered what she would think of the Arringtons and how she would go about separating Anna from so unsuitable a suitor. She could have managed it so cleverly that the pair would never have noticed her maneuvering. He could almost hear her laughing at him and saying, “Subtlety, my dear James, will you never learn subtlety?”

  Yet there had been nothing subtle about their parting. When he had offered marriage, she had grown severe and told him she loved him too much to spoil his promising career in the Lords by allowing him to become a laughingstock as a young man with an aging wife. None of his pleas had persuaded her to reconsider.

  He still missed her. But when at last he lay alone awaiting sleep, he did not imagine himself laughing with Eleanor. Instead he thought of Lucy Jones, of her quiet courage, her beautiful hair—what would it look like down? He shook off the fancy. She wasn’t at all the type of woman who would suit him, and she’d doubtless be shocked to her innocent soul if she knew he was imagining her in his bed.

  The next morning Lucy followed through on her previous day’s intent of sketching Almont Castle. She grew so absorbed in her work that she did not hear the approaching footsteps.

  “Good morning, Miss Jones.”

  “Lord Selsley!” She turned to smile at him. He looked quite the country gentleman this morning, in buckskin breeches and simple brown coat. “You aren’t riding today? I hope your mare didn’t prove lame from yesterday’s exertions after all.”

  “No, she is quite well. I simply decided to walk this morning.” He indicated a spot beside her on the stone wall. “Do you mind if I sit and watch you sketch? I promise I won’t hover.”

  “Please sit,” she said. Really, she was inordinately pleased to see him. She supposed she was simply relieved that he still treated her as a friend after hearing the worst of her past.

  He sat, close enough to see her work but not so near that he crowded her arm. Before he joined her, she’d been busy drawing the oldest part of the castle, the tall keep on the southwest corner, and she resumed her work.

  “Did you know that all the Almont balls are held in the keep?” he asked after a moment.

  “Yes, Lady Marpool mentioned it. It seems a most unusual ballroom, not that I’ve seen so very many.” Portia’s betrothal ball next week would be Lucy’s very first ball, though she hesitated to admit it to a sophisticated man like Lord Selsley.

  “I’ve never seen another one like it.”

  “Will you be at the betrothal ball?”

  “Of course. I have two ladies staying with me, after all. Anna and Aunt Lilias would have my head if I begged to be excused from a dance.”

  Lucy laughed.

  “Are you looking forward to the ball?” he asked.

  She considered the question. Was she? If she had felt secure in Sebastian’s affections, a ball would be delightful, but now…She summoned a smile. “Certainly,” she said. “I love to dance.” That much, at least, was true. She had been allowed to share Portia’s dancing-master, though her cousin had made a point of asking why a girl who would surely be a governess for all her life needed such
lessons. By then—Lucy had been fourteen and Portia fifteen when the dancing-master first came—Lucy had grown accustomed, and to a degree numb, to such comments. She had ignored Portia and enjoyed the lessons. She only hoped she would remember the steps, since she had not danced in years.

  “I would be honored if you would save two dances for me,” Lord Selsley said. “Any two you choose.”

  She looked up from her drawing and was struck again by what beautiful eyes the viscount had. So dark a blue without a hint of gray, they should have seemed cool, fathomless, but instead they were warm and expressive. She felt a faint blush overspread her cheeks.

  With the power to name her dances, she could secure the first dance and the supper dance with her new friend. It would be pleasant to open a ball with Lord Selsley, both for his own sake and to see the look on Portia’s face. But no, she must save the two most important dances for Sebastian. His leg might not yet be healed enough to allow him to stand up in the set, but surely he would ask her to sit with him. She simply smiled and said, “I’d be delighted,” without specifying which dances.

  “Good.”

  They sat in silence as Lucy added to her drawing, sketching in the stables and a groom leading out a pair of carriage horses. After a moment she spoke without looking up. “I wanted to thank you again, Lord Selsley, for your kindness last night.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said. “It was my pleasure, I assure you.”

  There was an intensity in his voice at odds with his commonplace words, and it made her remember how he had touched her hair. She looked at him and found that he was staring at her, too.

  After a moment he cleared his throat and stood. “I must be going. I promised one of my tenants that I would visit him this morning.” He made a slight bow. “I bid you a good morning, Miss Jones, and I look forward to seeing you this evening at the Cathcarts’.”

  Tonight’s entertainment was to be a card party at the squire’s home. “Likewise.”

  Lucy tried to resume her drawing but found herself too restless to continue. Before Lord Selsley was quite out of sight, she closed her sketchbook and walked back, taking a circuitous route. She was in no great hurry to rejoin the somewhat oppressive company at the castle, and what she truly wished for was simply movement.

  But she could not delay forever, and eventually she entered the castle, put her sketchbook and bonnet away and sought her breakfast. The breakfast room door stood slightly ajar, and as she was about to enter, Lucy was arrested by Lady Marpool’s clear, carrying voice.

  “For my part, Lady Arrington, I’ve never thought Miss Wright-Gordon a beauty.”

  Her aunt murmured something Lucy couldn’t quite hear.

  “Why, I do not deny that she is a pretty girl in her way, especially if one likes a lush figure, but she falls short of the classical ideal. Your daughter is a true beauty, ma’am, as you must know, and for my part I think your little niece is just as pretty as Miss Wright-Gordon—no, prettier.”

  “Lucy?”

  Though Lucy would never have dreamed of comparing herself with Miss Wright-Gordon, the sheer incredulity in her aunt’s voice stung.

  “Yes, Miss Jones. She’s not so flashy, but she’s very pretty, and many gentlemen prefer a modest, quiet girl. Did you not mark how the young men hovered about her last night?”

  “I suppose…”

  “Now, Lord Selsley is above the touch of an orphan with no portion, even with an Almont connection, but she would be quite an eligible match for Ned Cathcart. Only a squire’s heir but you shall see tonight what a very pretty property they have.”

  “I suppose I’m unaccustomed to thinking of Lucy in such terms,” Aunt Arrington said slowly. “She has blossomed out wonderfully over the past year or two—if you could have seen the plain brown mouse she was as a child. But I hadn’t thought of her as a good match for a man of property.”

  “You should do so,” Lady Marpool said briskly. “Particularly here, where her connection with my brother will make her so eligible. And believe me, she is a very well-looking girl. The only advantage Miss Wright-Gordon has over her is fortune, though I do not deny that is a great advantage indeed.”

  “What is Miss Wright-Gordon’s fortune?” A rare hint of sharpness tinged Aunt Arrington’s voice, normally so vague and abstracted.

  “One hundred thousand pounds.”

  Lucy gasped at the monstrous sum.

  “One hundred thousand?” Aunt Arrington’s voice was now so faint Lucy could barely make it out.

  “I don’t know what her father was about, leaving so much to a daughter. It’s a miracle some fortune hunter hasn’t abducted her and spirited her off to Gretna Green will she, nil she, before now.”

  “One hundred thousand,” Aunt Arrington repeated.

  “Yes.” Lady Marpool chuckled. “She’d be an even finer thing for your son than Ned Cathcart would be for your niece.”

  Lucy decided she wasn’t very hungry after all and sought sanctuary in the library.

  When they walked together in the garden that afternoon, Sebastian was as attentive as Lucy could wish. She had brought her sketchbook along, though at first they simply walked back and forth among the rose-lined paths. They talked quietly of their plans for the future when they were sure no gardeners were within earshot.

  After about a quarter hour, Sebastian began to limp noticeably. “Lucy, shall we sit on that bench there? I could look at your sketches, if you’d like.”

  He indicated the same bench where she had sat with Lord Selsley the night before. She couldn’t quite fathom why, but the sight of it gave her a guilty start. Had she betrayed her betrothal to Sebastian by telling her deepest secrets to Lord Selsley? Or was she betraying her friendship with him by sitting on that same bench for a perfectly commonplace conversation with Sebastian, who would certainly not tell her how brave she was or offer to touch her hair?

  She looked about and found another bench. “May we sit in the shade instead? It’s a rather warm day.”

  “Of course.”

  They made their way to the shaded seat, Lucy slowing her pace because of Sebastian’s limp. She handed him her sketchbook and waited while he paged through. He spent less time on each drawing than Lord Selsley had, at least till he found a rough sketch she had drawn from memory the previous afternoon. She ground her teeth together when he lingered over it. She’d forgotten all about that one.

  It was a sketch of Lord Selsley and his sister, the latter waiting on her bay mare while the former prepared to mount his beautiful dappled gray. To Lucy’s mind, Miss Wright-Gordon was incidental to the composition, though she had done her best to capture the other young lady’s good-humored smile, not to mention her confidence in the saddle and the excellent cut of her riding habit. Lucy always tried to draw accurately, and at the time she had made the sketch she’d had no reason to envy Miss Wright-Gordon. But her purpose in taking up her pencil had been to see if she could do justice to the horses’ beauty and to try to reflect something of Lord Selsley’s energy. She thought she had done rather well on both counts—at least, it was good for a hasty sketch done entirely from memory—but she didn’t think Sebastian lingered over it to admire the horses.

  She wouldn’t do anything so blatant as clear her throat, but she fidgeted slightly, and Sebastian turned the page. Next she had drawn Portia waiting with Lord Almont in the receiving line—the marquess’s round ruddy face glowing with pride, Portia even more cool and aloof than her usual wont.

  Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t think Portia would like this one very much.”

  “I’m certain she would not.”

  “You should destroy it before she sees it.”

  Lucy sat up straighter. But—the drawing was good. “I’ll certainly burn it if you think it wise,” she said reluctantly. “But Portia never looks at my sketchbook.”

  “I do think you should. I’d hate to see a true quarrel develop between you, now that you’re to be sisters.”

  He was rig
ht. As much as she hated to admit it—it was such a very good drawing—he was right. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll be rid of it as soon as I can. But, Sebastian, I’m not sure Portia and I can ever be friends. I hope I’ve never done anything to deserve her antagonism, but…”

  “I know, Lucy. She never welcomed you as she ought, even from the beginning, and I do not expect her to begin now. All I ask is that you continue to act in such a way that none of the blame can be placed on you.”

  “Very well.” She studied the offending sketch. “Do you think it possible that they can be happy together?”

  He shook his head. “I cannot think my mother was wise to agree to the match. But Portia has a most unwomanly stubbornness to her nature—I must say, I’m glad you’ve never taken her as your model—and Mother has always given way to her too readily.”

  It crossed Lucy’s mind that Portia might have been better off had her mother not been so very feminine and yielding. Aunt Arrington had been widowed four years after Lucy came to live at Swallowfield. Even at thirteen or fourteen, Lucy had been able to see that her aunt had been far too dependent on her husband for everything, that she scarcely knew how to think for herself or make simple decisions without his guidance. Lucy thought that she and Sebastian had turned out well enough—Sebastian because he was already in the army, and she because she relied upon him and her governess for guidance. But Hal was an utter rakehell and Portia too proud and ambitious, and their mother never lifted her hand to check either. Now Lucy thought it was too late to change either of them.

  “I cannot imagine agreeing to marry a man I did not even like,” she said, “not unless I was very desperate. Even then, it would be for my brothers’ sake, and I would feel it as a sacrifice.”