The Proposal

by Mary Balogh

  Is that what happened to you?

  She did not ask the question aloud.

  “A wife from the middle classes would not be able to help me,” he said.

  “But I would?”

  He hesitated.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “This is not your only reason for wishing to marry me, though?” she asked.

  He hesitated again.

  “No,” he said. “I had sex with you. I put you in danger of conceiving out of wedlock. There is no one else I want to marry—not at present, anyway. There would be passion in our marriage bed. On both our parts.”

  “And it does not matter that we would be incompatible in every other way?” she said.

  Again the hesitation.

  “I thought we might give it a try,” he said.

  She looked up again and met his gaze.

  “Oh, Hugo,” she said. “One gives painting a try when one has never held a brush in one’s hand before. Or climbing a steep cliff face when one is afraid of heights or eating an unfamiliar food when one does not really like the look of it. If one likes it, whatever it is, one can keep going. If one does not, one can stop and try something else. One cannot try marriage. Once one is in, there is no way out.”

  “You would know,” he said. “You have tried it already. I will take my leave, then, ma’am. I hope you will not take a chill from your soaking and from standing in here in a dress designed for summer rather than early spring.”

  He bowed stiffly.

  He was calling her ma’am; she was calling him Hugo.

  “And one tries courtship,” she said and looked down again. She closed her eyes. This was foolish. More than foolish. But perhaps he would continue on his way out of her life.

  He did not. He straightened up and stayed where he was. There was a silence in which Gwen could hear that there had been no abatement in the force of the rain.

  “Courtship?” he said.

  “I could indeed help your sister,” she said, opening her eyes and examining the backs of her hands as they lay in her lap. “If she is pretty and has genteel manners, as I daresay she does, and is wealthy, then she will take well enough with the ton even if not with the very highest echelon. She would take well, that is, if I were to sponsor her.”

  “You would be willing to do that,” he asked her, “when you have not even met her?”

  “I would have to meet her first, of course,” she said.

  Silence descended once more.

  “I daresay that if we like each other I will sponsor her,” she said, looking at him again. “But it will quickly become known who Miss Emes is, who her brother is. You will probably be surprised to find yourself quite famous, Lord Trentham. Not many military officers, especially those who are not born into the upper classes, are rewarded for military service with titles. And when people learn who Miss Emes is and who you are and who is sponsoring her, it will not be long before word will spread of our meeting in Cornwall earlier this year. Tongues will wag even if there is nothing for them to wag about.”

  “I would not have you the subject of gossip,” he said.

  “Oh, not gossip, Lord Trentham,” she said. “Speculation. The ton loves nothing more during the Season than to play matchmaker or at least to speculate upon who is paying court to whom and what the outcome is likely to be. Word will soon have it that you are courting me.”

  “And that I am a presumptuous devil,” he said, “who ought to be strung up from the nearest tree by his thumbs.”

  She smiled.

  “There will of course be those who are outraged,” she said, “at you for your presumption, at me for encouraging it. And there will be those who are charmed by the romance of it all. There will be wagers made.”

  Both his jaw and his eyes hardened.

  “If you really wish to marry me,” she said, “you may court me through the coming Season, Lord Trentham. There will be ample opportunity—provided, of course, your sister pleases me and I please her.”

  “You will marry me, then?” he asked, frowning.

  “Very probably not,” she said. “But a marriage proposal is made after courtship, not before. Court me, then, and persuade me to change my mind if you do not change yours first.”

  “How the devil,” he asked her, “am I to do that? I do not know the first thing about courtship.”

  She smiled with the first genuine amusement she had felt for a long while.

  “You are in your thirties,” she said. “It is time you learned.”

  If he had looked hard-jawed before, he looked positively granite-jawed now. He gazed steadily at her.

  Then he bowed again.

  “If you would care to inform me after you have arrived in London,” he said, “I will wait upon you with my sister, ma’am.” “I shall look forward to it,” she said.

  And he strode from the room and closed the door behind him.

  Gwen sat gazing into the fire, her hands clasped very tightly in her lap.

  Whatever had she done?

  But she was not sorry, she realized. It would be … fun to launch a young girl upon the ton, especially a girl who was not of it. It would brighten the Season for her, make it different from all the rather tedious ones that had gone before it. It would rid her of the low spirits that had been dogging her. It would be a challenge.

  And Hugo would be paying court to her.

  Perhaps.

  Oh, this was a colossal mistake.

  But her heart was thumping with something very like excitement. And anticipation. She felt fully alive for the first time in a long, long while.

  Chapter 13

  Lauren joined Gwen in the library ten minutes later. She closed the door quietly and seated herself on a chair close to Gwen’s.

  “We saw Lord Trentham stride away from the house in the pouring rain,” she said. “We waited for you to come back upstairs, but you did not. You refused him, Gwen?”

  “I did, of course,” Gwen said, spreading her fingers in her lap. “It is what you all expected, was it not? And wanted?”

  There was a slight pause.

  “Gwen, this is me,” Lauren said.

  Gwen looked up at her.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “Yes, I refused him.”

  Her cousin searched her eyes.

  “There is more,” she said. “He has been the reason for your depression of late?”

  “I have not been depressed,” Gwen protested. But Lauren just continued to look steadily at her. “Oh, I suppose I have been. I have been realizing that life is passing me by. I am thirty-two years old and single in a world where it is not comfortable to be single. Not for a woman, anyway. I have been thinking of looking for a husband in London this year. Or at least of considering anyone who cares to show an interest in me. Everyone in the family will be delighted, will they not?”

  “You know we all will,” Lauren said. “But how would this decision have made you so low in spirits that you do not even want to talk?”

  She definitely looked hurt, Gwen thought. She sighed.

  “I fell in love with Lord Trentham when I was in Cornwall,” she said. “There. Is that what you want to hear? I … fell in love with him. And I discovered just ten days or so ago that I was not with child by him, and I was hugely relieved and mortally sad. And … Oh, Lauren, what am I going to do? I cannot seem to get him out of my mind. Or my heart.”

  Lauren was gazing at her in silent amazement.

  “There was a chance,” she said, “that you were with child? Gwen?”

  “Not really,” Gwen said. “The physician told me after I miscarried eight years ago that I would never have children. And it happened only once in Cornwall. But that is not really your question, is it? The answer to your real question is yes. I did lie with him.”

  Lauren leaned forward in her chair and reached out to touch the back of Gwen’s hand with her fingertips. She rubbed them back and forth before sitting back again.

  “Tell me,” she sai
d. “Tell everything. Start at the beginning and end here, with your reason for rejecting his marriage offer.”

  “I have invited him to court me during the Season,” Gwen said, “with no guarantee that I will say yes if he renews his addresses at the end of it. That is not very fair of me, is it?”

  Lauren sighed and then laughed.

  “How typical of you to start at the end,” she said. “Start at the beginning.”

  Gwen laughed too.

  “Oh, Lauren,” she said, “how could I have resisted love all these years only to fall for an impossibility at the end of it all?”

  “If I could fall in love with Kit, considering my frame of mind when I first saw him,” Lauren said, “and considering the fact that he was behaving most scandalously, stripped to the waist in the middle of Hyde Park for all the world to see while he fought with two laborers simultaneously and was using language that shocked me to the core—if I could fall in love with him anyway, Gwen, then why would you not fall in love with Lord Trentham?”

  “But it is an impossibility,” Gwen said. “He has no real patience with the upper classes even though some of his dearest friends are aristocrats. He thinks us a frivolous, idle lot. He is middle-class and proud of it. And why should he not be? There is nothing inherently superior about us, is there? But I am not sure I could be the wife of a businessman, even a wealthy and successful one. Besides, there is a darkness in his soul, and I do not want to have to live with that again.”

  “Again?” Lauren repeated softly.

  Gwen looked down at her hands once more and said nothing.

  “I am not saying another word,” Lauren said, “until you start at the beginning and tell me the whole story.”

  Gwen told her everything.

  And, strangely, they ended up convulsed with laughter over the way he had bungled his marriage proposal earlier by giving the impression that his only reason for asking her was so that his sister might attend a ton ball.

  “I suppose,” Lauren said, drying her eyes, “you will be taking her to a ball?”

  “I will,” Gwen said.

  “It is a good thing I am still firmly in love with Kit,” Lauren said. “If I were not, I believe I might be falling a little in love with Lord Trentham myself.”

  “We had better go back upstairs to the drawing room,” Gwen said, getting to her feet. “I suppose everyone had plenty more to say after I left. Wilma, for example.”

  “Well,” Lauren said, following her out of the room, “you know Wilma. Every family has some cross to bear.”

  They laughed again and Lauren linked an arm through Gwen’s.

  The letter arrived more than two weeks later.

  It had been an endless fortnight.

  Hugo had thrown himself headlong into work. And he was reminded of how he had never been able to do things by halves. When he was a boy, he had spent every spare moment with his father, learning everything he possibly could about the businesses and developing ideas of his own, some of which his father had actually implemented. And when he had taken his commission, he had worked tirelessly to achieve his goal of becoming a general—perhaps the youngest in the army. He might have got there too if he had not first gone out of his head.

  Now he was owner of the businesses, and he was immersed in the running of them, though part of him longed to be back at Crosslands, where he had lived an entirely different sort of life, not driven either by the demands of work or by the press of ambition.

  He took Constance out walking or driving or shopping or to the library almost every day. He continued to take her calling upon their relatives too. He took her to a party at a cousin’s home one evening, and she promptly acquired two potential beaux, both of them respectable and personable enough, though Constance on the way home pronounced one to be a prosy bore and the other a boastful bore. It was just as well she did not wish to encourage them as Hugo had found his fingers itching all evening to plant them both a facer.

  He did not tell her about his visit to Newbury Abbey or its outcome. He did not wish to raise her hopes only to have them dashed again if no letter ever arrived. Though even if Lady Muir did not carry through on her promise, of course, then he was going to have to carry through on his. He had promised to take his sister to a ton ball.

  He must know a few ex-officers who had not been hostile to him and who also happened to be in London. And George had said he was coming to town sometime soon. Flavian and Ralph sometimes came during the spring. There must be some way of wangling an invitation, even if it was only to one of the less popular ton balls of the Season, one to which the hostess would welcome anyone willing to attend short of her chimney sweep.

  He kept his distance from Fiona as much as he could during those two weeks. She was very unhappy to be left alone so often, but she refused to go out with her daughter and stepson. She had long ago broken off all communication with her own family, though Hugo knew that his father had gone to the trouble of raising her parents and her brother and sister out of grinding poverty. He had bought a small house for them and set them up in the grocery shop beneath it. They had managed the shop well and made a decent living out of it. But Fiona would have nothing to do with them. Neither would she consort with her husband’s relatives, who looked down upon her and treated her with contempt, she claimed, though Hugo had never seen any evidence of it.

  She chose to remain at home now and wallow in her imaginary ailments. Or perhaps some of them were real. It was impossible to know for sure.

  She fawned upon him when Constance was present. She whined at him on the few occasions when they were alone. She was lonely and neglected and he hated her, she claimed. It had been a different story when she had been young and beautiful. He had not hated her then.

  He had.

  But then he had been a boy, clever at his schoolwork and astute in business, but naïve and gauche when it came to more personal matters. Fiona, dissatisfied with the wealthy, hardworking, adoring husband who worked long hours and was many years her senior, had fancied her young stepson as he grew closer to manhood and set out to seduce him. She had almost succeeded too, just before his eighteenth birthday. It had happened on an evening when his father was out and she had sat beside Hugo on the love seat in the sitting room and rubbed her hand over his chest while she told him some tale to which he could not even listen. And the hand had slid lower until it had no lower to go.

  He had hardened into full arousal, and she had laughed softly and closed her hand about his erection over his clothing.

  He had been upstairs in his room less than one minute later, dealing with the erection for himself and crying at the same time.

  The next morning he had been in his father’s office early, demanding that his father purchase a commission for him in an infantry regiment. Nothing would change his mind, he had declared. It was his lifelong ambition to go into the military, and he could suppress it no longer. If his father refused to make the purchase, then Hugo would go and take the king’s shilling and enlist in the ranks.

  He had broken his father’s heart. His own too, actually.

  He was no longer a naïve, gauche boy.

  “Of course you are lonely, Fiona,” he said. “My father has been gone longer than a year. And of course you feel neglected. He is dead. But your year of mourning is over, you know, and difficult as it may be, you need to get out into the world again. You are still young. You still have your looks. You are wealthy. You can remain here, wallowing in self-pity and making a companion of your pills and your hartshorn. Or you can begin a new life.”

  She was weeping silently, making no attempt to dry her tears or cover her face.

  “You are hard-hearted, Hugo,” she said. “You used not to be. You loved me once until your father discovered it and sent you away.”

  “I went away at my own insistence,” he said brutally. “I never loved you, Fiona. You were and are my stepmother. My father’s wife. I would have been fond of you if you had allowed it. You did not.
”

  He turned on his heel and left the room.

  How different his life would have been if she had been content with his affection after her marriage to his father. But there was no point in such thoughts or in imagining what that other life might have been. It might have been worse. Or better. But it did not exist. That other life had never been lived.

  Life was made up of choices, all of which, even the smallest, made all the difference to the rest of one’s life.

  The letter came a little after two weeks following his return to London from Dorsetshire.

  Lady Muir was at Kilbourne House on Grosvenor Square, the letter announced, and would be pleased if Lord Trentham and Miss Emes would call upon her there at two o’clock in the afternoon two days hence.

  Hugo foolishly turned the page over to make sure there was nothing else written on the back of it. It was just a formal little note with not a breath of anything personal in it.

  What had he expected? A declaration of undying passion?

  She had invited him to court her.

  That was a thought that needed some examination. He was to court her. With no guarantee of success. He might try his damnedest all spring and then go down on one knee and offer her a perfect red rose and some flowery proposal of marriage only to be rejected.

  Again.

  Was he willing to expend that much energy only to end up making an ass of himself? Did he really want her to marry him? There was a lot else to marriage and to life than what happened between the sheets. And, as she herself had pointed out, one could not give marriage a try. One either married or one did not. Either way, one lived with the consequences.