by Mary Balogh
She curtsied and smiled at them one at a time. “Good afternoon,” she said. “I am Stephanie Gray.”
They all succeeded in looking simultaneously aghast. Their eyes all swiveled to Mr. Munro. But clearly they got no encouragement from that direction. They all looked back at her.
“Mr. Watkins?” she said, looking from one of the men to the other.
One of them half raised a hand, seemed to think twice about acknowledging his identity, and scratched the side of his nose with it. Stephanie smiled at him.
“After I had your letter, sir,” she said, “I decided not to wait for the carriage you offered to send for me. It was foolish of me, as matters turned out.” But no, she would not be abjectly apologetic. “I took the stage, but at the first change from one to the other, I succeeded in having my valise and my tickets and almost all of my money stolen. I had to spend a whole night in a hedgerow beside the road, and during that night I was robbed of almost everything I had left. Fortunately, those assailants were frightened off by the approach of a carriage. They left me with my reticule and my d-dress, but they took my cloak and bonnet and parasol. The occupants of the carriage were very kind. There were actually two carriages. They were a troupe of traveling actors and offered to take me with them. But they were going in the wrong direction. They did give me a cloak and bonnet, though, from the trunk that contained their stage costumes.”
The eyes of all three rose at the same moment to gaze at the plumes of her bonnet.
“It is a monstrosity, is it not?” she said and smiled. “But the cloak has kept me warm and wearing this bonnet has been marginally less shocking than going bareheaded. May we go inside?”
Mr. Watkins cleared his throat, and the other man exchanged glances with the woman.
“Oh,” Stephanie said. She had omitted something, of course. “Mr. Munro very kindly took me up in his carriage when he saw me trudging along the side of the road. And he has very generously brought me the whole way.” She looked them all very directly in the eye. She would omit none of it. Let them make of it what they would. “That was three days ago. Without his help it would have taken me a few weeks to walk here, I am sure, and I might well have perished on the way. I have enough money in my reticule to buy only one small loaf of bread, you see.”
“Mr. Munro?” Mr. Watkins said, looking sharply at that gentleman and frowning. “Munro?”
“Yes,” Mr. Munro said. It was all he said.
“He insisted on bringing me all the way here,” Stephanie said, “even though I have brought him out of his way. I owe him a deep debt of gratitude. May we go inside?”
“Horace—” The woman spoke for the first time, laying her hand on the arm of the man who had not yet spoken.
Horace cleared his throat. “How do we know you are who you say you are?” he asked. “If you will forgive me for saying so, Miss …”
“Gray,” she said. “Stephanie Gray. I suppose I do look like a-an actress. Is this proof enough?” She opened her reticule and took out the letter Mr. Watkins had sent her. She handed it to him.
Mr. Watkins took it and opened it and appeared to be reading it, just as if he had not seen its contents before.
“But how do we know,” the woman said, “that you did not find this somewhere? How do we know that you and this … this gentleman were not the ones to attack Miss Gray and rob her?”
Mr. Watkins cleared his throat. “I believe I can vouch for … er … Mr. Munro, Mrs. Cavendish,” he said.
“And I can vouch for Miss Gray, ma’am,” Mr. Munro said, stepping forward and offering Stephanie his arm. She smiled at him gratefully, even though his voice had sounded very much as if there were ice dripping from it. “Shall we step inside, Miss Gray? It occurs to me that you do not have to stand here waiting for permission to do so.”
“Thank you, sir.” She took his arm.
The other three came up the steps behind them. But she had little time to think about them or the awkwardness of her arrival. Soon they were stepping through the doorway into a marble, pillared hall that quite robbed her of breath. She had expected the whole house to be smaller than just the hall was proving to be.
“Oh,” she said and glanced up at Mr. Munro. His face looked strangely like the marble by which he was surrounded. The hall must have taken his breath too, she thought.
But there was another man standing in the hall, obviously a gentleman rather than a servant. He was younger than the other three, of medium height, almost bald, bespectacled. Stephanie smiled at him.
“Peter,” Mrs. Cavendish said, “this is her. Miss Gray.”
“Yes,” Peter said, his voice and whole manner stiff and disapproving. “I heard everything, Aunt Bertha. You came with this … gentleman, Miss Gray? Alone with a stranger?”
“For three days,” Bertha Cavendish added.
Stephanie could feel the certainty growing in her. Horace was her grandmother’s nephew. Bertha Cavendish was probably his wife. Peter was their nephew—her intended bridegroom. Her spirits, already hovering on the lower end of cheerful, took a steep dive. It was unjust to judge on such brief acquaintance that it was almost no acquaintance at all, but in her estimation Mr. Peter Whoever was a man without even a glimmering of humor. He frowned now.
“I do not believe—” he began.
“Sir.” Mr. Munro cut into whatever it was Peter did not believe, his voice quite decisive enough to command everyone’s attention. And there was no doubt about it now—there was pure ice there. He had turned to Mr. Watkins. “Perhaps Mrs. Cavendish would be good enough to present herself and these other two gentlemen to Miss Gray. And perhaps she would then escort Miss Gray to the drawing room or a salon for tea. Miss Gray has been traveling for many days. I have been her companion for three of those days. I believe it would be appropriate if I had a private word with you.”
Mr. Watkins bowed.
“Well—” Mrs. Cavendish began, her bosom swelling. But Mr. Munro wheeled on her and raised to his eye a quizzing glass that Stephanie had never noticed on his person until now. She remembered the early impression she had had of an arrogant and toplofty gentleman. It was all back, that impression, and clearly Mrs. Cavendish was cowed by it.
“Well,” she said with considerably more civility, “if you are satisfied, Mr. Watkins, I daresay we must be too. But how foolish of you, my dear Miss Gray, to leave your employer’s home without the proper escort. And how rash of you to accept a ride with a gentleman when you did not know him and had no maid with you.”
“It seemed preferable, ma’am,” Stephanie said, allowing herself to be led toward a magnificently curved staircase, “to dying of exposure and starvation.”
Mr. Munro had disappeared with Mr. Watkins. She had not had a chance to speak with him first and to invite him to come to the drawing room afterward or wherever it was that they were to take tea. She must have a chance to thank him properly before he left. And she must offer him dinner and lodging for the night. It would be quite proper to do so when there were obviously other gentlemen staying at the house in addition to Mrs. Cavendish.
It was all very bewildering. But she had arrived at last. The worst was over.
And it was hers. This was all hers—if she was married, within the next four months, of course. That might be tricky. She was not going to marry Peter Whoever-He-Was. She had made up her mind on that already. He had been about to say that he was not willing to take on a woman who had just spent three days in company with another man and had doubtless been behaving in quite unseemly fashion with that man.
How dare he.
The very idea!
She would rather go back to being a governess than marry such a man.
Though she hoped—oh, how she hoped—it would not come to that.
5
E WAS FEELING ALMOST AMUSED. HE REALIZED THAT it was a feeling that would not last—that it was only shock that enabled him to see the humor of a situation that was not in any way humorous for him. But feeling amus
ement was preferable to feeling stark horror, he supposed.
He followed Mr. Watkins, the solicitor, into a private room leading off the hall—it appeared to be a combination office and library—and waited for the man to close the door behind them.
He had rushed with wide open eyes into a trap of his own making. That had been obvious to him soon after he had helped her down from the carriage. At first he had felt blinding anger against Miss Stephanie Gray. If only she had thought of telling before now the story of the stolen bonnet and cloak and the one about the actors. It seemed to him that she had told him almost every detail of her life history except that one. And it was the one detail that made all the difference.
But perhaps not. Perhaps he would have taken it as one more brazen and clever invention. And he could hardly blame her for not telling him. She was not a prattler. She had talked to him, yes. She had done most of the talking during their days of travel. But everything she had told him had been spoken in answer to his questions. He had not thought to ask her what had happened during that one night she had spent out of doors.
He should have thought of asking. It did make all the difference. Without the cloak and bonnet, he realized now when it was too late, she looked to be exactly what she had said she was—a governess living on the edge of poverty. Why had he not set more store by her gloves, which actually had holes worn in them, and on her plain gray dress and shabby reticule?
He had built his whole fanciful image of her around such flimsy evidence as a fuchsia cloak and a pink bonnet with its multicolored plumes.
Oh, yes, he had set the trap for her with careful deliberation, and then he had proceeded to walk smiling into it himself. Yes, it really was funny. Hilarious.
Mr. Watkins cleared his throat. “Mr., er, Munro?” he said. “Are you not the head of that family, er, sir? I have seen you in town once or twice, I believe. Are you not the Duke of Bridgwater?”
“I am,” His Grace said, turning before the fireplace and setting his hands behind his back.
Mr. Watkins made him a hasty and rather ridiculous bow. “This is an honor, Your Grace,” he said. “And an honor for Miss Gray, too. I cannot imagine why—”
“I will, of course,” Bridgwater said, bringing one arm forward in order to toy with the handle of his quizzing glass, though he did not lift it to his eye, “be marrying the lady.”
He knew even as he spoke, even before he saw the surprise on the solicitor’s face, that it was a quite unnecessary gesture. His rank would have protected him. She would have suffered embarrassment and even a measure of disgrace, unless the four people who had greeted her all agreed to say nothing about her manner of arrival at Sindon Park. He would wager that the morally outraged Peter would agree to no such thing—unless he was bound and determined to marry her at all costs. But nobody would censure the Duke of Bridgwater for walking away from the woman. Nobody would expect him to do anything as drastic as offering for her.
But he had known as soon as the truth dawned on him that he had no choice. There was the annoying matter of his honor.
“You wish to marry Miss Gray?” Mr. Watkins said, his eyes starting from his head.
“But of course,” His Grace said haughtily, taking his glass more firmly in his hand and lifting it, though not all the way to his eye. “Do you believe I would so thoroughly have compromised her, sir, unless I intended to make her my wife?”
He was thinking about the law of averages. His best friend and those other two friends of his had all been forced into unwanted marriages—though that was not quite true of Carew, who had married for love only to discover that his bride had married for another reason altogether. All three of those marriages had turned out well. Indeed he might almost use that dreadful cliché of them and say that the three couples were in the process of living happily ever after. He knew—he had just spent a few weeks in their company. Three out of three success stories. Now there were going to be four such marriages. It was too much to hope that there would be four out of four successes. The law of averages was against him.
“I believe,” he said, “that according to her grandfather’s will Miss Gray must be married within the next four months if she is not to forfeit her inheritance?”
“That is correct, Your Grace,” the solicitor said. “But Sir Peter Griffin—”
His Grace set his glass to his eye, and Mr. Watkins fell silent.
“I think not,” the duke said quietly. “I feel a certain aversion to the idea of allowing another man to marry my chosen bride. Miss Gray is my chosen bride.”
Sir Peter Griffin could go hang, he thought. He was probably dangling after her fortune and this impressive property, but he would never let her forget the impropriety of her arrival at Sindon, dressed like a prize ladybird and with a male companion in tow. The man had looked severely displeased at his very first sight of her and had done nothing to hide his irritation.
Though why he should press his point when there was such an easy solution to his dilemma, the Duke of Bridgwater did not quite know. Miss Gray could marry the baronet, he could be on his way to town and his family and the Season, and they would all live happily ever after. No, she would not live happily. He could predict that with some certainty. And he would not have done the right thing.
He wished suddenly that he had not been brought up always to do the right thing, or that he had rebelled against his boyhood education as he had rebelled during his childhood. Good Lord, he had just spent six years being very careful indeed that nothing of the like would ever happen to him.
But he had walked into just such a situation like a lamb to the slaughter.
Mr. Watkins cleared his throat again, perhaps disconcerted by the silence that had stretched a little too long for comfort.
“We will discuss the marriage contract,” the duke said. “I wish it to stipulate quite clearly that Miss Gray retain ownership of this property and of whatever fortune she has been left besides. I gather, sir, that her choice of husband must be approved by you and by a relative. That would be Mr. Horace … Cavendish, I presume? He is the lady’s husband?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” the solicitor said.
“We will have him down here, then,” Bridgwater said briskly, “and have his approval. Then we will proceed to business. I am expected in London and have no wish to delay. I take it I have your approval, sir?” He raised his eyebrows and favored the poor solicitor with a look that had been part of his early education and had stayed with him ever since, a look that brooked no denial and no insubordination. He did not even use his quizzing glass.
“Oh, y-yes, i-indeed,” the solicitor said, visibly flustered. “It is a g-great honor, Y-your Grace. For Miss Gray, I mean. And indeed f-for—”
“Mr. Watkins,” His Grace said, “Mr. Cavendish?”
The solicitor scurried to the door in order to summon a servant.
Lord, the duke thought. Amusement was fading fast. Indeed, it had faded to nothing long ago, he realized. Lord, he was about to marry a governess. A governess-turned-heiress. A stranger. Someone for whom he felt nothing. Nothing at all except a certain lust. And that now seemed embarrassingly inappropriate. Good Lord, she was undoubtedly a virgin—a twenty-six-year-old virgin. A virtuous woman whom he had been planning to take back to London with him as his mistress.
Good Lord! He dropped the handle of his quizzing glass lest he inadvertently snap it in two.
HER CLOAK AND her bonnet had been whisked away—she fervently hoped that she need never see them again, though she felt woefully her lack of belongings. She had been taken by Mrs. Cavendish, who had requested rather stiffly that she be called Cousin Bertha, upstairs to her room. Actually, it was a whole suite of rooms, quite overwhelming to someone who had made her home in a small attic room for the past six years. She had been given time only to wash her hands and pat her hair into better shape after the removal of her bonnet. Then she had been taken down to the drawing room for tea.
Mrs. Cavendish, Cousin Bertha, pre
sented her properly to Mr. Cavendish, who explained that he was her grandmother’s nephew, son of Grandmama’s sister, and that she must call him Cousin Horace. And she was presented to Sir Peter Griffin, who bowed stiffly and frowned darkly and explained that he had the honor of being Cousin Bertha’s nephew and that he also had the honor of being at her service in the ticklish matter of her grandfather’s will.
It was, Stephanie supposed, his way of offering her marriage. She tried not to be awed by his title. He was the only titled gentleman she had ever met. But apart from the title itself, there was nothing impressive, nothing awe-inspiring about the man. She could overlook his lack of good looks. Though she would prefer a handsome husband if she had the choice, she had to admit, she had been taught from childhood on that a person must not be judged on looks alone. But she could not and would not overlook bad temper. And if Sir Peter Griffin was frowning at her the very first time they met, then one could hardly expect him to smile his way through the rest of the lifetime they might spend together.
Her experience of life might be limited, Stephanie thought, but even she knew that marriage was no easy business, that even the happiest of brides and grooms eventually had to work at achieving contentment and compatibility. Her parents had succeeded, though she could remember arguments and tight-lipped disagreements; Mr. and Mrs. Burnaby had not.
Her companions at tea were at least polite, she found. They appeared to have accepted her story and to have overcome their suspicions that she was an impostor. Cousin Horace was called away after a while, and she was left to converse with the other two. Cousin Bertha made an effort. Sir Peter concentrated on being silently morose. Perhaps he thought to impress her with a show of masculine power. She was not impressed.