by Mary Balogh
Mr. Whitehead was willing to act as Clara’s man of business and discuss the marriage settlement with Mr. Sullivan. He could hardly pretend to be her guardian, he explained, since Clara had been of age for several years. But he could pretend that he was trustee of her father’s estate and fortune and that she was not entirely free to dispose of them as she wished. A generous dowry was to be given at her marriage. The rest of her fortune was to be kept in her name.
Clara pondered the lie. She did not want to enter a marriage of deceit, though of course there would be plenty of that on his side. And yet neither did she want to enter a marriage in which her husband would feel the humiliation of knowing that she was responsible for the fact that he was not to be entrusted with her total care, as other husbands were. She did not want him to know the truth. It must be the lie, then.
Her heir, on Mr. Whitehead’s advice, was to remain a distant cousin, at least for the time being.
Mr. Whitehead rose to take his leave eventually. He leaned over Clara to kiss her cheek once more. “I will meet with the scoundrel once the offer has been made and accepted,” he said. “Consider very carefully, my dear, and listen to the advice of Miss Pope, who is a sensible young lady. Don’t do something you will regret for the rest of your life.”
“I don’t intend to,” she said, smiling up at him. “Thank you for coming so far at a moment’s notice. I will never be able to tell you how grateful I am and how much better prepared I feel to face tomorrow.”
He shook his head ruefully and left the room after promising to return later to take dinner with the ladies.
Clara sat watching the closed door after he had gone. It was all going to be very anticlimactic if Mr. Sullivan failed to put in an appearance tomorrow after all, or if his call turned into merely a social visit. She had not seen him today. Although she had bathed early in the Queen’s Bath, as usual, she had not gone to the Pump Room afterward. She had had her servant carry her out to her carriage and had come straight home.
It was hard now to believe that he really would come. It was hard to believe that she would ever see him again. And would it be a great escape for her if she did not? Harriet would say so, and so would Mr. Whitehead. And her good sense. But she would be disappointed, she knew. Bitterly disappointed. For she had made up her mind, and with the decision had come the full knowledge of just how empty and lonely her life had been for years, especially since the death of her father. It had all come flooding out of her, just as if a dam had been released.
She wanted him. Mr. Frederick Sullivan, that was. She wanted all that health and strength and beauty to belong to her. Almost as if she could make them her own, she thought wryly. Almost as if she could transform herself by marrying him. Common sense told her how foolish she was being, but her heart yearned. And the heart was very difficult to silence when one was twenty-six years old and crippled and unlovely. When one’s life was dull. Totally without excitement.
She hoped he would come. She did not quite believe that he would, but she hoped.
Frederick dressed with nervous care, discarding neckcloth after neckcloth when it would not fall into folds to suit his taste and finally having to call on his valet to do it for him. He was not a dandy and never had been. He despised dandies. Only dandies fussed over their neckcloths on the conviction that a simple knot just would not do.
He wished that he felt a little more alert and peered at himself more closely in the looking glass. Were his eyes bloodshot or did they just feel as if they were? He had sat up late at cards the evening before, though late nights were frowned upon in Bath, and had won again—a mere paltry sum again. And then he had escorted Lady Waggoner home, sensing both that she would allow him to and that she would allow him more than that. It was easy to sense such things when one was experienced at the same sort of game as that played by the lady.
There had seemed no further point in not being reckless and no harm in trying for a last-minute reprieve from an almost certain fate. He had accepted the tacit invitation and spent an energetic and virtually sleepless night in the lady’s bed. Indeed, it would have been a thoroughly satisfactory night if he had not been obliged to make a marriage proposal to another lady the following day. The timing of the start of the affair had been wretched. And of course affair was all it was or ever would be. When he had broached the subject of marriage as though jokingly, Lady Waggoner had settled her ample body against his with a sigh of sleepy satisfaction and put all his slim hopes to flight.
‘‘Marriage is not for the likes of you and me, Freddie,” she had said. “It would drive us both insane within a fortnight. I believe a fortnight is as long as I was faithful to my late husband. He was not at all pleased with me.”
“You are right, of course,” he had agreed, kissing her lazily as they settled themselves for one of the brief interludes of sleep they had allowed themselves. “Far better a torrid and short-lived passion for people like us.”
“Mmm,” she had said. “You are a man after my own heart, Freddie.”
And so he had left her far too late in the morning to make his appearance at the Pump Room, though that perhaps was just as well. And now he was drowsy and eager with anticipation of the coming night all at the same time. Not at all as composed as he would like to feel when on his way to make a marriage offer.
The thing to do was to treat it as a piece of business. The thing was not to stop and think of it. It was, after all, a business proposition he was about to make, though he would not use those words to Miss Danford. Her money in exchange for his name and protection. She would be a married lady. Such a status was important to women. He would have a baroness’s title to offer her one day, though heaven knew he wished no ill health on his father. He was fond of him. Too damned fond. Sometimes he wished there were no such thing as family.
He took one last look at his image in the glass—at the blue coat, Weston’s finest, and white linen, the buff-colored pantaloons and shiny Hessian boots with their white tassels. His eyes were not bloodshot. He put on his hat, drew on his gloves, and took up his cane. It was time to go. She would be expecting him.
He was twenty-six years old, for God’s sake, he thought as his steps took him toward the Circus. He had not expected to have to think of marriage for another five of six years at the least. Whenever his thoughts had touched on his future bride, he had pictured a young girl, exquisitely lovely, an ornament for his life and his home. Not love. He did not believe in love, only in lust and in friendship. But he would have liked a friendly relationship with his bride. He and Jule had always been friends;—but he resolutely put from his mind thoughts of the new Countess of Beaconswood.
He thought with distaste of Miss Clara Danford as he lifted the brass knocker on her door. She was crippled. Did that mean, he wondered, that she would not be able to ... ? He fully expected that it meant just that, or that anyway she was of such delicate health that she would not be able to endure the exertions of the marriage bed. He hoped that was the case, though he bore her no ill will. He intended to treat her with kindness when they were married. But not that. He had never found himself forced to bed a woman he found unappealing. An unconsummated marriage would suit him very well.
But it was not a thought to be pursued at the moment. The door opened and he stepped inside.
Harriet talked determinedly about the weather and about the people she had met during a morning shopping trip on Milsom Street until Clara looked steadily at her and Frederick, more direct, asked if he might have a private word with Miss Danford.
Harriet left them together with obvious reluctance. She glared tight-lipped at Frederick as he opened the door for her.
“I believe I have offended your companion,” he said quietly as he closed the door and turned back into the room.
“Harriet believes I need a chaperon,” Clara said.
He stood looking down at her for a few moments before resuming his seat opposite her. “She has a care for your happiness,” he said. “I can only h
onor her for that. Would she feel better, I wonder, if she knew that I share her concern?”
Clara said nothing.
“You are looking lovely this afternoon, ma’am,” he said.
Without her bonnet, her very dark hair looked even thicker and heavier. It had been dressed very carefully into a topknot with ringlets adorning the back of her head and wisps of waves framing her face. The pale blue of her dress had been chosen with care to take away any impression that her pale complexion was sallow.
“Thank you,” she said, but she did not smile. Such words were blatant flattery and not at all welcome. She might have returned the compliment with perfect sincerity, but one did not pay such compliments to a gentleman.
“I missed you this morning,” he said. “I am sorry that business kept me from the Pump Room.”
“I was not there either,” she said. “I was tired after taking the waters and came home.”
“I trust you are not unwell?” he asked.
“No.” She shook her head.
It was an impossibility, she thought. The difference between them was so extreme that it was laughable. She must find kind words with which to send him on his way. He looked even more handsome and virile sitting in her drawing room than he did in the Pump Room.
“You must know why I asked permission to pay this call,” he said, getting to his feet with sudden agitation. Was it genuine or feigned? she wondered. “You must know that admiration and affection have grown in me during the past week until I can only put the word love to my feelings for you, ma’am. I love you. Do you find my declaration offensive?” He looked at her intently from those dark eyes, which must have been felling female hearts for years. They looked anxious.
She shook her head. “No, sir,” she said.
He closed the distance between them, leaned over her, and possessed himself of one of her hands. His hand seemed very large and very brown in comparison with her own, yet well-formed. And warm. She looked down at it and at her own thin, pale wrist.
“Dare I hope,” he asked her, “that you have any tender feelings for me, ma’am? I know myself quite unworthy.”
She wished she could just look him in the eye, tell him that she understood, and explain that they could marry each other in all honesty for their own very separate reasons. But she could not do so. There were conventions to be observed.
“I am not indifferent, sir,” she said. “Though my feelings are not as violent as those you describe.”
“I would not expect them to be,” he said, setting one knee on the floor. A man kneeling to make a proposal of marriage did not look nearly as ridiculous as she had always imagined, she found. In fact, he looked enormously attractive. “You are a lady, ma’am. You cannot know how you have delighted me by the admission that you are not indifferent to me.”
She watched him raise her hand to his lips and hold it there for a long moment. A man’s lips, she found, were warm, warmer than his hand. His breath fanned the back of her hand. She found herself swallowing involuntarily.
“Miss Danford,” he said, “will you make me the happiest of men? Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” she said. It was a strange unreal moment. She felt almost as if she were standing a distance behind herself, observing the scene. She felt almost as if someone else had spoken the single word. It had happened, then. He had made the offer and she had accepted.
He was gazing up into her face. “Yes?” he said. “You said yes? I have hardly dared hope. Even now I hardly dare believe the evidence of my own ears. Say it again.”
“Yes,” she said. “I will marry you, sir, I thank you.”
He smiled then, slowly, a smile that spread from his eyes to his mouth and finally to his whole face. She could well imagine that a woman with more reason to believe in his sincerity might have her stomach performing somersaults at the expression. She felt a wave of sadness that she could not suddenly be beautiful and youthful and agile. But she would not dwell on it. She had reconciled herself to reality long before.
“You have done it,” he said, and he laughed and tightened his hold of her hand. “You have made me the happiest of men. How—how happy I am!”
She found herself returning his smile. Yes, she thought, he probably was happy. So was she. God help her, so was she. “And so am I, sir,” she said.
“Sir.” He laughed at her again. “My name is Frederick, ma’am. Freddie to my family and friends. You are going to be both.”
“Freddie,” she said. She was going to be his family and his friend. Yes, definitely the first and perhaps the second. There was no reason, surely, why they could not become friends. “I would like to be both. I am Clara.” She smiled again. “To my family and friends.”
“And now,” he said, “the first and highest hurdle safely over, I am all impatience. When will you be my wife, ma’am—Clara? Soon? I cannot bear the thought of waiting even for the banns. I shall go to London for a special license. Shall I? Tomorrow? Don’t say no.”
“A special license, yes,” she said. “But not tomorrow, Freddie. My man of business is in Bath—he arrived yesterday by design, though neither of us realized when it was arranged just how opportune a time it would be for his visit. He is also the trustee of my father’s estate. He will want to talk with you about a marriage settlement.”
She might have imagined the flicker at the back of his eyes since she was looking for it. If it was there, it was well controlled. He laughed. “Marriage settlement,” he said. “How coldly mercenary that sounds. Is it necessary? I suppose it is, but all I can think of is you, Clara, and making you my bride. Are you going to be the voice of good sense in our marriage? Very well, then, I shall delay for one day in order to speak with this ogre who will demand to know how I am to support you. My father will be generous, I do assure you. We will not be paupers, my love.”
My love. She did not realize how much her heart had yearned to hear the words directed at her until Freddie spoke them—and did not mean them. She would have liked so dearly to be some man’s love. But she must not wish for the moon now that she had the stars. She had never expected the stars either. She was going to be married—to the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She would be content with that.
“No, of course we will not,” she said. “My fortune is vast, Freddie, and Mr. Whitehead is not ungenerous. But I warn you that he is very protective of my interests. He will probably treat you as if you are a fortune hunter whose only motive is to part me from all my possessions.”
He took her other hand in his free one and squeezed both. “I like him already,” he said. “I am glad you have had someone to protect you since the death of your father, Clara, and to continue to do so even after our betrothal and marriage. Soon enough he will know that the only treasure I want from our marriage is the one I am gazing at at this very moment.”
“Thank you, Freddie,” she said, drawing her hands from his before she could forget that it was all charade, before she could forget that he would spend an anxious night wondering if he had trapped himself into a pointless marriage, wondering if there were any honorable way out. “I shall try to be a treasure to you.”
He got to his feet and smiled down at her. “I have been so nervous,” he said. “I slept scarcely a wink last night.”
“If you pull the bell rope behind you,” she said, “Harriet will return. I think we should share our news with her, Freddie.”
“Of course,” he said, turning quickly. “I must not keep you too long alone, my love.” He turned back to her after pulling on the rope. “She does not like me, does she? She suspects my motives. She too will learn the truth soon enough. I love you, Clara.”
She smiled at him.
Chapter 3
Frederick had not looked a great way beyond the proposal. If he had, it was with a vague notion that he would rush to London in person for a special license and marry in haste and near secrecy in Bath, only the requisite two witnesses present apart from the clergyman and the two of th
em. Things did not turn out quite that way.
First there was that infernal Whitehead, who turned out to be quite as humorless as Frederick had expected and quite as adamantly protective of Clara Danford’s interests as she had warned. The two men spent all of three hours together on the morning following the proposal, supposedly sitting over breakfast at the White Hart, to which hotel Frederick had been summoned, apparently conversing affably and agreeing on all major items of business, but in fact fencing with each other, sizing each other up, trying to decide if they liked each other and trusted each other. Trying to decide how much the other liked and respected Clara and had her interests at heart.
On one point at least Frederick was relieved. Enormously relieved. Although he was to receive only a dowry with his bride, it was far more generous than he had feared all through a pleasurable but distracted second night with Lady Waggoner. Twenty thousand pounds! It would pay all his debts with some to spare. It was tempting at first to consider which debts were pressing enough that they must be paid immediately and which ones could be conveniently forgotten about until in time they fell into the first category. But he would not give in to temptation. He would pay them all off, every last one of them. It would be a novel feeling to be debt-free.
It was going to be a novel feeling to be married, he thought when he was finally climbing the hill back to his own hotel. He still felt something like panic at the prospect. But he needed to think of it coolly and rationally. There was no getting out of it now. He was going to have to reform his ways. No more gambling, he decided, or not for high stakes, anyway. He had learned his lesson. And no more womanizing, or not to the extent he had carried on during the last several years anyway. He would find himself a mistress, something he was not in the habit of doing, and keep only one at a time. It would be infinitely more healthy than whoring. He had made no further assignations with Lady Waggoner after last night. It was the wrong time for a long-term affair, pleasurable as it would undoubtedly have continued to be.