by Mary Balogh
His eyes and his voice were quite devoid of emotion. Yet he was speaking of marriage—his own and hers. He could not have made it sound more impersonal if he had tried. But of course she was the one who had started it all. She had overheard what he said to his grandmother, and, remembering his words during the night that followed, she had seen the faint chance of improving her situation.
Improving?
I will not, however, give love or romance or even a feigned affection I do not feel.
What had happened to him? He had not been like this when he was a boy at school. Graham had always described him as a vibrant, charismatic figure, as a passionate leader everyone wanted to follow.
“Yes,” she said, matching the tone of her voice to his, “it is correct.”
“Then I offer you marriage,” he said.
Just like that. With a simple yes she could be a wife and mother. She could have a home of her own, the security and respectability of being a married lady. Never again, even if he predeceased her, would she feel essentially homeless and rootless and without identity. She would be Chloe Stockwood, Countess of Berwick. She would discover what it felt like to be with a man. For years she had wondered and ached with the secret and very unladylike longing to find out.
Then I offer you marriage.
She closed her eyes and wondered if being married under such bleak circumstances would actually be worse than remaining as she was. But how could it? Nothing could be worse . . .
I will allow you freedom within the bounds of respectability.
Did that mean what she thought it meant? And did it presuppose that he would take a similar freedom for himself? Would she be able to bear it?
She thought briefly of the dreams of romance and love and marriage with which she had embarked upon her come-out Season at the advanced age of twenty-one. And of the ghastly awakening that had killed those dreams. Reality was preferable. With this marriage she would at least know ahead of time just what to expect—and what not to expect. There would be no surprises and therefore no emotional ups and downs. There were always far more downs than ups when one allowed oneself to be caught up in emotion.
“A home?” she said, opening her eyes to look at him again. “In the country?”
“Elmwood Manor in Wiltshire is mine,” he said. “It is a sizable manor surrounded by a pleasingly landscaped park. I have not spent a great deal of time there since my boyhood, but I intend to change that—after my marriage.”
“You would live there in the spring?” she asked. “As well as in the summer and winter?”
“Neither London itself nor the spring Season holds any great appeal for me,” he told her. “I would be happy to avoid both. Once I am married I will be able to do just that. I wish for a wife for my home and a mother for my children, not for a hostess for my social life. I would never compel you to go where you had no wish to go.”
She almost asked him to promise. But a gentleman’s word was promise enough.
“Very well, then.” She gazed steadily at him while her fourth and little fingers crossed behind her back too. “I accept.”
He did not smile or toss his hat exuberantly skyward. Indeed, he looked almost menacing, with his hat’s brim shading his eyes and the scar slashing diagonally across his face. And he looked very large, perhaps because he was standing slightly higher on the slope of the lawn than she. Had she really just agreed to marry this morose stranger?
“I have brought a special license with me,” he said.
If he had closed one hand into a fist and driven it into her stomach she could not have felt more robbed of breath. She could not possibly be ready . . .
But what was there to wait or prepare for?
“My father?” she said. “Your mother?”
Oh, and a million other persons and considerations. A wedding outfit. Bride clothes. A church and invitations. A wedding breakfast. Betrothal notices. Time to think. None of which was essential. This was to be a marriage of necessity for him, a marriage of great convenience to her. It was not a match to be celebrated with family and friends and feasting and dancing. It was not an occasion a bride might be expected to look back upon for the next half century as the happiest day of her life. Their nuptials would be a mere formality, the sealing of a business arrangement to which they had mutually agreed.
“You are of age,” he said. “I assume you do not need your father’s consent. My mother may learn of our marriage after it has been solemnized. She would want a hand in the proceedings if she knew in advance. I would prefer to marry you without fuss or further ado.”
“Before you can change your mind?” she asked.
“I will not change my mind,” he assured her. “Why should I? If it is not you, Miss Muirhead, it will have to be someone else. At least I can be sure of not hurting you.”
Yes. He could be sure of that. Illogically, she felt hurt.
His eyes were very steady on hers and saw perhaps deeper than she had intended.
“I will not hurt you, Miss Muirhead,” he said. “It is a promise. After we are married, I will treat you with all the deference and respect due my wife and my countess. I have already drawn up a written agreement, which I will present to your father for discussion after our nuptials. It will give you all the future security you could possibly ask for, even in the perfectly likely event that I should predecease you. You suggested our bargain to me and I have accepted it on your own terms since they so nearly match my own. You are certain this is what you want?”
She uncrossed her fingers and moved her hands to the front in order to smooth out the skirt of her dress. For the first time she realized she was without either bonnet or gloves—just as she had been a few mornings ago.
She would have a husband, a quiet, secluded home in the country, children, security. Whatever else could she possibly ask for, when just a few days ago, even an hour ago, she had been looking forward to a bleak life of dreary dependence? And it had indeed been she who had suggested their very bloodless bargain.
“I am quite certain,” she said, looking up into his eyes.
“Good.” He nodded briskly. “Now we have only the hurdle of informing my grandparents to clear before I go to make arrangements with the vicar. For . . . tomorrow, I hope.”
Tomorrow?
She felt that somersaulting in her stomach again.
“They will not like it,” she said. “They will hate it. And they will despise me and see me as nothing but a fortune hunter. Perhaps they will even be right.”
His riding crop had been tapping against his boot again until it stopped abruptly and he looked around.
“Walk with me, Miss Muirhead,” he said, and he turned to stride across the grass in the direction of the falls and the steep stepping-stones beside them that she had descended earlier. He did not look back to see if she was following him, and that inherent arrogance, that assumption that he would lead and others follow, was more as she had expected him to be when she first met him.
She went after him and fell into step beside him. He made no attempt to offer his arm or engage her in any sort of conversation.
Climbing the steep path was very much more strenuous than going down. She had never done it in this direction before. She ignored the hand the Earl of Berwick offered to help her up the steeper, more perilous parts, pretending not to notice it. He did not press the point but went on ahead of her until they were up the steepest part and had only the rapids to pass before coming to level land. He had stopped walking to look back down, and Chloe stood beside him, the sound of rushing water half deafening her again.
“This was my favorite spot in the park when I was a boy,” he said, his voice raised. “I was strictly forbidden to come here alone, so of course I came all the time.”
She almost laughed. “It is dangerous for a child,” she said.
“Of course,” he ag
reed. “And for adults too. But children are far more surefooted than adults give them credit for, and the world was made for them to explore and challenge.”
“And for them to harm themselves in? Perhaps kill themselves in?” she said.
“Accidents happen.” He shrugged.
She looked at him. His eyes were squinting as he looked at something out in the fast-flowing river. His good profile was to her, and it struck her how very handsome he was. And it was not just his face and his dark hair. He had the perfect physique for his height and wore his riding clothes with casual elegance despite the dust that dulled the sheen of his boots. He looked restless, she thought, as though there were some power, some energy within just awaiting the opportunity to break free. It struck her that she scarcely knew him. And even that was an overstatement. She did not know him at all. Yet this time tomorrow it was altogether possible she would be married to him.
He turned abruptly toward her and held out his riding crop.
“Take this,” he said imperiously. And when she took it, looking at him in some surprise, he pulled off his riding gloves and thrust them at her too. “Take these.”
And he stepped out into the river, his right foot on a submerged stone while his left foot reached ahead to another.
The riverbed was sloping here. The water was flowing fast over a rocky bed. The falls began only a few yards away. If he missed his footing . . .
Chloe bit her lower lip and refrained from calling out a warning to him to be careful. Or from demanding to know what on earth he thought he was doing.
He stopped halfway across and bent over a group of stones that poked above the surface of the river. She could not see what he was doing, though his hand went once to the pocket of his coat. After that he turned and picked his way back toward the bank.
“Whatever were you thinking?” she cried when he was safe beside her again. She had no choice but to speak loudly in order to be heard over the din of the falls. “You could have killed yourself.”
He looked at her with blank eyes, though she had the disturbing sensation that there was something hovering in their depths, something almost . . . mischievous? He took his crop and gloves back with one hand and reached into his pocket with the other. He came out with a single stone—a flat, thin, smooth, almost round pebble.
“Perhaps,” he said, holding it out to her, “the next time you are at the lake you can make this one bounce six times.”
She took the perfect stone and stared at him.
“You risked your life,” she asked him, “for a stone I may well pitch into the water without achieving even a single bounce?”
“Or,” he said, “for a stone that may bounce seven times.”
What . . . ? She closed her fingers about the pebble and knew in a flash that she would never throw it anywhere, certainly not into the depths of any lake. She knew she would keep it. One day perhaps she would show her grandchildren what their grandfather had given her on the day he asked her to marry him. Not diamonds or gold, but . . . a stone. And she would tell them that he had risked his life quite, quite idiotically in order to obtain it.
Her own little touch of romance lay safely clasped in her hand.
“If we ever bring children to Manville,” she said, “I shall tie one end of a ribbon about their wrists and the other about my own whenever they step outdoors and not let them out of my sight for a single moment.”
His expression was totally blank.
“A simple thank-you would have sufficed, Miss Muirhead,” he said, and with a certain sense of shock she realized that he was actually enjoying himself.
And that perhaps she was too.
He turned abruptly and resumed the climb toward level ground. The sound of rushing water receded behind them, and Chloe could hear her labored breathing as the water became calm and dark green again. Through the treetops she could see blue sky and sunshine. They would be back at the bridge soon and turning in the direction of the house.
She stopped walking.
“What are you going to say?” she asked. “Both the duke and the duchess must surely know by now that you have come back but are nowhere in the house.”
“I shall say that I have been walking in the park with you,” he said, turning toward her, “and that I have been proposing marriage to you. I shall tell them you have accepted. I have always found that the truth is the wisest thing to speak when there is no reason on earth not to tell it.”
She drew a slow, ragged breath.
“I have agreed, Miss Muirhead,” he explained to her, “that it is my duty to marry. I have allowed my grandparents, or at least my grandmother, to urge matrimony upon me because it is no less than I must urge upon myself. I will not, however, allow anyone else except the lady to whom I have proposed marriage to influence my choice of bride. I have chosen you for the reasons of which you are aware. If the members of my family do not like that choice, that is their concern, not mine.”
“Her Grace has been kind to me,” she said.
“You will not persuade me to change my mind, Miss Muirhead,” he told her. “Have you changed yours? Because you do not have the courage to marry me, perhaps?”
He was not even trying to press reassurances upon her. She rather liked that. Did she have the courage to marry him? More to the point, perhaps, did she have the courage not to? She would never have a chance like this again. Or any chance, in all likelihood. She rubbed her fingers over the stone she clutched in one palm.
“I have not changed my mind,” she told him.
She would have liked nothing better as they approached the house than to go up to her room while he broke the news to his grandparents. But then the moment would come when she would have to come back down and face them. Better to do it now before she lost her nerve entirely.
Things did not proceed according to plan, however. They discovered the butler in the hall, looking unusually distracted, while a footman was shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other as though awaiting instructions before dashing off somewhere. The door to the duke’s book room was wide open and the mingled voices of the duke, the duchess, and His Grace’s valet came from within.
Her Grace appeared in the doorway, still dressed in the carriage clothes she had worn to visit Mrs. Booth, and addressed herself to the butler.
“He will not have the physician, Weller,” she said. “He says he will not see him even if he comes. You might as well forget about sending for him.”
“I don’t need any damned quack,” the duke’s voice rumbled from within. “Can a man not sleep and snore in his own private room in his own private house without everyone assuming he has one foot through death’s door? Bentley, you villain, stop hovering or I shall send you packing without notice or a character.”
The duchess had seen the earl, who was striding across the hallway toward her.
“Ah, Ralph,” she said, without commenting on his sudden and unexpected appearance, “just the man I need. Come and talk some sense into your grandfather. He was moaning and clutching his chest and fighting to breathe when I peeped in on him a short while ago after returning from Mrs. Booth’s. Yet now he declares himself to be in the best of good health. He will drive me into the grave before I am one hour older.”
The Earl of Berwick had been transformed before Chloe’s eyes. He had changed into a commanding presence, and it was very easy to see him as the military officer he had been. He was striding toward the study even before his grandmother started speaking, his boot heels ringing on the marble floor. He squeezed her shoulder in passing and disappeared inside the room.
“Berwick,” the duke said. “The world has gone mad.”
“How are you, sir?” The earl’s voice was crisp. “You look hale and hearty, I must say. But Grandmama has been upset and needs to have her mind put at rest. Allow me, for her sake, to summon Dr. Gregg, and after he has found
nothing whatsoever wrong with you, you will have all the satisfaction of saying I told you so.”
“Damned quack,” the duke grumbled again, but Chloe could tell he was about to give in.
“Bentley,” the earl said, “kindly have Weller send someone to fetch the doctor. And when you have done that, bring a glass of brandy. You may be feeling perfectly healthy, sir, but why waste the excuse to enjoy some hard liquor during the daytime?”
The duke’s valet was already brushing past Chloe in the doorway. He was on an unnecessary errand, however. The butler had signaled to the footman, who was already darting out through the front doors to fetch the doctor.
“He is so stubborn,” Her Grace complained to Chloe. “He always was. I do not know how I have put up with him all these years.”
“It was on account of my handsome face,” the duke said, coughing and covering his heart with one hand.
“Ha!” And then the duchess looked at her grandson and frowned. “Ralph? Whatever are you doing here? Never tell me you have good news already? Or, rather, do tell me you have. Have you?”
He was standing before the duke’s chair, frowning down at him. But he turned at her words and looked first at her and then at Chloe.
“I do,” he said, “if by good news you mean the announcement of my engagement, Grandmama. I am betrothed, very newly betrothed. Miss Muirhead has just done me the honor of accepting my hand in marriage.”
Chloe clasped her hands tightly in front of her.
“I trust you will wish us happy,” he added.
* * *
Ralph had told Miss Muirhead that his choice of bride was his alone, that what his relatives thought of that choice would be their concern, not his. Even so, he had felt some anxiety over how his grandparents would react when the moment came. For though Her Grace had taken in the granddaughter of the dearest friend of her youth out of the kindness of her heart, she could not necessarily be expected to look favorably upon a marriage between that lady and her only grandson. Indeed, it had seemed very probable that she would be as horrified as Miss Muirhead had predicted she would be. He was not going to regret his choice even if that proved to be the case. But he would regret disappointing his grandparents.