“It isn’t that.” There was a part of her that had always mourned that the price of her independence was losing the chance to have a family of her own. The part of her that grew uncomfortably wistful around babies and large families. That saw small children toddling with their mothers and thought … that. Someone who belonged to her. To whom she belonged in return.
But she could bear not to have a family. What she could not bear was to inflict the paltry, distant kind of upbringing that she’d endured on her own child. An “heir” was no less a person than any other baby, and she would not subject a child to a life of being treated like some dreaded obligation.
And what if she had daughters?
“Perhaps I don’t strike you as maternal, but I lost my parents as a child—”
He cocked his head before she could go on. “What in my suggestion that you bear my child makes you think you don’t strike me as maternal, Cavendish?”
“The fact that this view is shared by everyone in Wiltshire? Even you call me Cavendish, like a man.”
“Cavendish,” he said softly, his coldness melting away all at once. “Trust that I have never doubted you are every inch a woman.”
She crossed her arms. “You are evading the point. I know what it is to be unwanted. I could not in good conscience agree to a scheme that would deprive my own children of a loving family.”
His eyes bored into hers, unflinching. “Our child would have as much a family as any other. I will of course look after my own issue, to the extent it is required, and you may be as tender and devoted a mother as you wish. My only requirement is that we afford each other space for private lives.”
His meaning was clear. She could love her child, but he would not. Just as he would not love her. She looked at him for a long time, trying to understand him. Trying to make out what he must think of her to believe she would accept what he proposed.
“And what guarantee can you provide that you will honor your word? Wives have no recourse from husbands under the law.”
He met her eye. “No,” he said. “You are correct. I suppose you will simply have to trust me.”
Trust him.
But that was just the point. She had no faith in others. She trusted just one person: herself.
A bit of shadow fell about his face, and the longer she hesitated, the more he seemed to falter. Finally, he let out a breathy kind of laugh. The kind one allows to escape when one has done something embarrassing, and one is the last to realize it. He quietly snapped the ring box closed.
“I understand. And I sincerely regret that your excellent work at Westhaven has caused you this inconvenience. I will not insult you by offering ‘rescue,’ but please know that should you require any assistance or funds, you need only write to me in care of Grouse.”
He gave her a tight smile and a nod and rose on his knees to stand, and the sight of it was so grim and terminal and sad that her heart made the decision for her, and she knew it was the wrong one even as she said: “Wait, Archer.”
He paused, half-crouched.
It seemed as though any number of futures danced in the air between them, and regardless of the choice she made, all of them were colored with shades of loss. Only one glimmered with the possibility of new-budding, springtime things. Of joy rising up amidst the sorrow like a weed.
God forgive her, she seized it.
“What if I wanted to build a nursery on the Thames?” she blurted out.
She avoided his eyes, as shocked as she had ever been by her own conduct. Despite her every instinct to the contrary, she was considering this notion he proposed. She had her scruples and her fears. But she also had a dream. Perhaps what he offered was as good as any other way of getting it. Perhaps she might get even more than she had ever dared to hope for.
He smiled. “I would see that you had every resource at your disposal to build a nursery wherever you desire.”
“I would not want you or anyone else interfering in my vision. I would insist on total control over my affairs.”
“This may come as a surprise, but I haven’t the slightest interest in plants.”
She found it within herself to meet his eyes. They were smiling.
“No one else has stumbled yet on the promise of an international subscription scheme for exotics. There is a hefty advantage to be won in being first. I want to break ground in time for winter planting.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “Then we shall find a way. I’ll put my best men on it, at your direction.”
She closed her eyes and abandoned herself to fate. “I will require a ship fitted with compartments of my own design capable of transporting plants efficiently across the Atlantic.”
“I imagine you will get it.”
“And a conservatory in which I can grow exotic trees, with an unlimited budget for glass.”
“Then ours shall be notable among marriage contracts for enumerating the bride’s portion in windowpanes. Or mulch. Or whatever else your heart desires.”
It occurred to her that he would accede to everything she wanted. That she could think of nothing else to demand.
She opened her eyes. He offered her his outstretched hand.
In it was the ring box.
She took the only option she had left herself.
She plucked the ring from its nest of satin and put it on her finger.
Archer walked into the drawing room to the sound of his sister singing to her guests. High and determined and not within a trace of being in tune.
Her fingers landed on the keys with a discordant thwack at the sight of him.
She rose, nearly knocking the elegant hand of the Earl of Apthorp out of the way with her shoulder.
“Archer!” she cried with a clap of her treacherous hands. “And here I thought you were never coming back so long as you lived.”
He scowled at her.
She grinned at him. “Well? Tell me you have news for us!”
“A word, Constance. In my study. Immediately.”
She smiled indulgently at her guests. “Excuse us.”
He strode down the hall to his desk and poured himself a generous slug of brandy.
She perched beside him on his desk. “Are we toasting to your betrothal?”
He examined her slowly, in the way he might inspect a lurid crop of algae that had bloomed on his lake and killed his fish. She looked every inch as colorful and guilty.
“Before you say another word, I would like to make it clear that one simple fact became apparent to me today as I was riding here. And that, Constance, is the location of your bedchamber.”
She sucked in her lips with a guilty pop.
“Desmond Flannery—and, indeed, all of our guests—slept in the east wing the night of the ball. I know, because, if you recall, you plagued me for a fortnight with their sleeping arrangements. The eastern rooms lack views of the forest. In fact, only one person has such a stunning vista from her window. You.”
He watched his sister’s face flicker from guileless denial, to feigned offense, to acceptance of her doom, and finally placation.
She flopped down into an armchair, caught.
“I will not contest your deduction, Archer. I will merely say in my defense that if meddling is what I have to do to make you see there are less depressing possibilities than the utterly preposterous notion of marrying Miss Bastian, then I congratulate myself for my success. There are plenty of Lord Apthorps in this world for its supply of Miss Bastians. But there are not so many Archer Stonewells, and precious few women like Poppy Cavendish who might, dare I say, have some chance of making them happy.”
She looked tempted to bow, so pleased was she with the fluency and touching nature of her oratory.
He was not moved.
The sight of Poppy crouched around her seeds and crates, trying not to be disconsolate at the fact of her diminished future, had been unbearable. He never wanted to see a sight like that again.
He slammed his brandy on the desk.
“You could have destroyed Miss Cavendish’s life irreparably with that gossip. Do you understand the magnitude of what you’ve risked?”
She made her eyes into hostile little slits. “I understand far more than you think I do, Your Grace.”
“Then I hope it has not escaped your notice that our name is synonymous in this country with the hurt and pain our father caused by doing exactly what he pleased with no regard to the cost on others. I will not see that legacy continued. Decency is the highest and only value I have ever asked of you, Constance, and I’m appalled at what you did. Appalled.”
She folded her hands demurely in her lap. “I never could live up to your standards. Not even as a child. God forbid one simply live.” She looked up at him, her face impassive. “Did you offer for her or not?”
His mouth fell open at her audacity. How it could still have the power to shock him, he could not reckon.
“Of course I did.”
She raised an amused brow at him. “And she accepted?”
“What choice does she have?”
The truth was that he was offering Poppy less than she deserved, and they both knew it. She had made no secret of her clear-eyed views of his inadequacies. He had never felt less wanted nor less deserving in his life, and he was half-sure she would change her mind yet.
Constance’s smile bloomed into an all-out beam. “Oh, good. Your mood was so dark that for a second I thought she declined. What a relief. I shall accept my thanks in the form of a niece or nephew.”
“I am not offering you my thanks. I have no desire to marry Miss Cavendish.”
She squinted at him. “Is that truly what you think? You poor, daft man. You’ve been wandering around this estate like a condemned man ever since she threw you off.”
The undeniable truth of this observation did nothing to decrease his anger at having to listen to it.
“Hear this, Constance. You are forbidden to have anything further to do with Desmond Flannery.”
Her mouth fell open. “What?”
“I forbid you to feed him information. I forbid you to set foot on Grub Street. I have given you far too much liberty and I can now see that you are not mature enough to inhabit it gracefully.”
“Archer! You can’t forbid me.”
Oh, he could. He should have done so ages ago.
“I am your guardian. I have a moral obligation to prevent you from harming the lives of others—or your own—with actions that are cruel and reckless. If I catch wind you have given Flannery so much as a loaded stare, I will move you into my house in Hoxton, where I can keep an eye on you myself. Do you understand?”
“I understand you perfectly, Your Grace. Now may I return to my guests? I was just in the midst of a very moving country ballad, and they are no doubt in an agony awaiting its conclusion.”
“Go.”
When she had completed stomping down the hall, he sank back against the edge of his desk and tried to catch his breath, thoroughly shaken.
With the crisis settled and the future resolved, all the urgent clarity that had compelled him to race back to Wiltshire in a furious all-night lather deserted him.
Perhaps he had embarked on something foolish.
For Constance, despite her recklessness, was a preternaturally observant person. If she thought she’d engineered some kind of love match, perhaps she saw something that he didn’t.
He recalled Poppy’s face, arranging itself in mute horror at his ring box.
No. Her views were clear enough.
Could Constance have perceived some unsuitable fondness in him?
He took a swig of brandy and tested the theory, worrying the key around his neck.
Certainly he thought highly of her. He would see to it that the arrangement suited her wishes and addressed her scruples.
And yes, he had felt reduced when she greeted his offer with dismay. Had found himself making arguments he couldn’t precisely defend in order to convince her to agree despite her better judgment.
Then again, had he not done that same thing a thousand times in negotiating with reluctant sellers, and made them all rich?
He had, without a quibble of conscience.
He felt his shoulders relax.
Constance was a twenty-year-old girl who acted rashly and thought she knew more than she did. That did not make her correct. He held Poppy Cavendish in high regard because she was clever and steely and unlikely to get the wrong impression.
And as with any valuable asset, he would invest in her, for their mutual benefit.
His plan held. Nothing was at risk.
He tucked the key back inside his collar and sat down to write to his solicitors about a wedding contract sealed in panes of glass.
Chapter 17
Peerage marriage settlements were meant to be drawn by solicitors in austere London offices and signed by the signet-banded hands of noble relations in plush drawing rooms. Brides took no part in these activities. Surely they did not do so in the flickering light of a tallow candle in a drafty outbuilding that smelled of moss and soil.
But Poppy Cavendish had no intention of leaving her fate in the hands of others. If marriage was to be a business, she would see that her interests were protected. Whatever Westmead proposed, she would begin by doubling it.
Except. Oh.
The figures on the page made her eyes water.
Thirty thousand pounds would transfer to a new concern, under the direction of the Duchess of Westmead. She would be granted signatory rights over her husband’s capital and made a principal of Stonewell Holdings, his investment concern. She would receive her ship and land and glass in addition to a lavish personal allowance, her own carriage and six, agents to run the ducal homes. It went on and on, in such sumptuous and implausible detail—imagine, her, needing eighty pieces of millinery in a year, needing livery for her private servants. It seemed she had not understood the scale of her future husband’s life, or his wealth.
Archer meant these pages as a message to her: if he could not wield the power to preserve her independence under law, he could transform her—an orphaned, grass-stained spinster with only a shambling farmhouse and a hundred pounds of seed debts to her name, save for a banknote from his sister—into an unfathomably wealthy woman.
It was chilling in its exactitude.
Was this what her autonomy was worth?
She walked slowly through her dark workshop, remembering her excitement at finding the shillings to purchase each tool pegged to the wall. She fingered the waxen leaves of hybrid plants she had imagined and brought to life like a demigod. She would lose all this. She would lose the fine feeling that every box and packet and leaf and flower on this small property had been earned outright and against the odds. That she owned it free and clear.
She would trade it for a man who saw her as the solution to a problem. A bill of goods.
Why, then, could she not dismiss him? What tempted her?
Blast him. Blast him and the molten feeling that had risen in her chest when he had walked into this room five days before, unsure if he was wanted.
The truth was that she did want him. She had wanted him since the day he had stood outside his house in the sunlight waiting for a carriage and told her the truth about herself. And that made her doubly foolish. For she wanted the only thing he wasn’t offering her: his heart.
Wrong, Cavendish, he would surely lecture her. A clever businesswoman does not base decisions in emotion.
She had a predicament indeed. She wanted to preserve herself, and she wanted to unravel him. She wanted to be fierce and fearless, and she craved to be undone.
I suppose you will have to trust me, he had said.
Don’t do it.
The thought came pure and unbidden from a place so deep inside her it must have been her soul that spoke. For her soul had kept an eye on him, when her heart was too fluttering to see clearly.
Her soul was not seduced by promises. It knew that wives had no legal r
ights and no recourse against their husbands. It knew that she had no power once she signed. This bargain was hers to lose.
She returned to her desk and began to write a letter.
Your Grace,
After much consideration of your generous offer, I regret I cannot accept it.
“Poppy.”
She whirled around.
Tom Raridan was standing in the doorway, leering with a smile that made her want to cover up despite the heat of summer.
That so large a man could move so silently must defy the laws of sound.
She did not move. “It is much too late for calling.”
“That’s no way to welcome your future husband. I’ve come to say my offer for you stands.”
There was an insolence to his tone that she remembered in his father when he’d been drinking.
He reached in his pocket and produced a thin, gold ring. She recognized it—he must have plucked it off his mother’s finger. He reached out and snatched her hand.
“Stop it,” she snapped, wrenching backward. He persisted, all but pinning her against the wall as he fumbled with her finger. His breath smelled of gin.
“Stop.” She used all her strength to whirl away from him, maneuvering so that there was a table between them and a spade in her hand in case she need fend him off more forcefully.
“Understand this, Tom. If you wish to remain my friend, you will leave here now without another word save for an apology. And you will never, ever lay a hand on me again.”
He waved this off with the expansive, unsteady gesture of a man deeper in his cups than he’d originally appeared.
“Meant no offense. Wanted to give you a betrothal ring. I won’t have the town thinking I’ve mistreated you just because you’re ruined. Besides, I’ve gotten my new posting in London. We’ll live well now, we will.”
His speech was slurred with the effects of alcohol. Just as his father’s had been on those days when he’d talked himself into a merry rage and gone about the town looking for the nearest person on which to pour it with his fists. Uneasiness pricked along the back of her neck.
The Duke I Tempted Page 14