He seized her hand. At last, she’d given him the opening he needed to explain what he’d been planning. ‘Georgie, you cannot imagine I came up to your room with any other motive except to propose?’
‘What? But—’
‘Your stepmother did not coerce me into making a proposal. I simply decided—’ He drew in a short, sharp breath. She’d just made it clear, yet again, what she wanted from marriage. He couldn’t scare her by telling her that her vision of marriage sounded to him like a form of torture. That he didn’t want to be just her friend, he wanted to be her lover.
‘I decided I had to make amends,’ he temporised. ‘For the way I let you down, when you needed me to get you out of having to endure a Season at all. It didn’t take me long to see that your suitors were all making you wretched. That you would be even more miserable if you had to marry any one of them. And I couldn’t bear watching you suffer a moment longer.’
‘So, you decided to...mount a rescue?’
‘Exactly so.’ She still looked confused, so he hastened to explain, ‘I had meant to tell you, at some stage, that should you not find a suitable husband by the end of the Season, that I would agree to enter into the kind of marriage you proposed to me. That day. Your stepmother’s intervention has just brought that, um, event forward.’ He patted her hand.
‘But—’
‘I promised I would always be your friend. And what sort of a friend would I be if I were to stand back and watch you embark on a life of misery?’
‘I...I d-don’t know,’ she said, looking stunned.
‘By then, as well, I had pretty much worked out what happened when I was sent away to St Mary’s. I could see that you were still the same person, basically, as you had always been. Loyal and loving. You could not have broken your word to a lonely boy, sent so far away from home.’
‘No. I didn’t,’ she said indignantly. ‘And I don’t think Stepmama realised just how dreadful it must have been for you. She explained it to me, the other night. The Countess stressed, you see, that she had to turn me into a proper lady. And gave her a whole list of errors into which I’d fallen. She dropped the fact that I should learn that it wasn’t appropriate for a girl to write secretly to a gentleman into the list.’
‘But...my tutor...’
‘Oh, I’m sure he prevented our letters reaching each other at first. Stepmama was a second line of defence. If you had ever managed to smuggle a letter past your guard dog, then she would have intercepted it at the other end.’
‘She is nothing if not efficient.’
‘Which brings me to something I really wanted to ask you about.’
‘What is it?’
‘Your mother’s reaction to the discovery that she has not been able to keep us apart, after all. She must be furious to learn that all her plans came to nothing in the end. Is she? Very angry?’ Georgie shook her head, making the feathers on her bonnet bob wildly. ‘Of course she’s angry. She must be livid.’
‘Not as angry as you might suppose. At least, not by the time I finished with her.’
‘Oh, Edmund,’ she said, her face lighting up. ‘What did you do? What did you say?’
It did something to soothe his wounded sensitivity that she looked up at him with complete trust that he had, in fact, done something.
‘I simply pointed out to her that I was finally doing what she had been urging me to do ever since I came down from Oxford. She has not ceased to remind me of my duty to ensure the continuance of the line. She wastes no opportunity to thrust some eligible female or other under my nose.’
‘Yes, I can understand that she wishes you to marry somebody. But not me. I mean, else why would she go to all that trouble to separate us?’
‘Ah,’ he said, removing his spectacles and reaching for a handkerchief as he considered how best to word the next part of his confession. ‘It turns out,’ he said, polishing his lenses with painstaking care, ‘that her worries on that score were more in the nature of us creating a scandal due to our, or at least your, extreme youth. She did not, in short, want the family name tarnished by an illegitimate child, conceived when you would have been far too young for anyone to credit you knew what you were doing.’
‘What? She really thought that you could...’
He could see her waving her arms about. Fortunately, without his spectacles, he was unable to see the look of disgust on her face. For disgust she must surely feel, at discovering that people had suspected his feelings for her, back then, had been far from pure.
He cleared his throat. ‘I have convinced her that you will make me a suitable wife. She has agreed to vacate the London house, and Fontenay Court, and base herself in the dower house.’
‘Oh, but I couldn’t turn her out of her own home. She will hate me!’
‘Georgie, it is well past time my mother stepped down from the role she has played virtually all my life. This is the perfect opportunity for me to take the reins from her grasping fingers, without her losing face. An opportunity I have sought for some time. I need you to stand with me in this. Staunchly.’
‘Well, if you say so, Edmund, then of course I will do so, only...’
He replaced his spectacles to see her chewing on her lower lip. ‘Out with it. What is troubling you?’
‘Well, only that I haven’t been brought up to run a household, the way she has done. Stepmama has taught me how to behave like a lady, as far as she is able, but she isn’t a...a lady of Quality, is she?’ Her cheeks flushed prettily. ‘And obviously, she has no experience herself of the way things are done in grand houses, so—’
‘To quote you a little earlier, all you have to be is yourself. Although—’ his mind worked swiftly ‘—I believe it may help my mother to accept her diminished role if you were to ask her advice, from time to time.’
‘Would she give it? I mean, I’ve always thought she hated me.’
‘She may have, possibly, hated your being the catalyst that forced her to send me away,’ he conceded. ‘But...’ he cleared his throat, which suddenly felt very tight as he launched an oblique approach to the most awkward issue that lay between them ‘...she is now of the opinion that, actually, you are a practical choice for me, in at least one respect. You are so full of energy, as a rule, that she is convinced your health will go a long way to counteracting the lack of vigour she claims has dogged the last two generations of earls. She foresees you presenting her with half-a-dozen healthy grandsons.’
‘How silly of her.’
He flinched. ‘Yes, but—’ He was about to explain that he had been trying to spare Georgiana any unpleasantness by not telling his mother that their marriage was to be in name only. In that way, when no children appeared, she would blame him for being unable to father them. His shoulders were broad enough to take the blame.
But while he was collating the appropriate words to explain this, Georgiana had half-turned to him, her eyes sparkling with indignation.
‘No, Edmund. It simply isn’t true, is it? I mean, when you were a boy, you never had any ailments that every other child in the village didn’t have, did you? And...you were never as ill as the rumours would have it, either. When I got in to see you, I was always surprised that you weren’t at death’s door, after what I’d heard. I never saw you delirious with fever, or gasping for breath, or anything like that.’
He blinked. For some reason she now saw him as being full of health and vigour, of being capable of siring half a dozen sons, did she? When she wasn’t prepared to give him the opportunity to do so? When, to begin with, she’d practically accused him of not being a Real Man at all.
‘Which is why I put it the way I did.’
‘Put what how?’
‘When I mentioned the lack of vigour she claims has dogged the last two generations of earls.’
‘Well, your father c
ertainly wasn’t lacking in vigour, either, was he?’
Either? So it was true. She did see him differently, now.
Was that a good thing, or another obstacle he’d have to overcome?
‘My father,’ he said drily, since he couldn’t very well speak about the questions she was raising in his mind, ‘as you seem to be aware, simply preferred being vigorous in any woman’s bed but my mother’s. Which contributed to her almost obsessive devotion to my health.’
‘A case of having all her eggs in one basket?’
‘Very perceptively put.’ But then Georgie always was quick on the uptake. ‘I also discovered, recently, that my father had been urging her to send me to school. I always assumed he took no interest in my welfare, but now I wonder if the reason he made no objection to my eventual removal from Fontenay Court was that he saw my exile to a more moderate climate as a chance for me to escape her...smothering, and experience something more regular, for a youth of my age.’
‘But...surely, as your father, it was his right to decide whether you should go to school, or not?’
‘Ah.’ He wished he hadn’t already polished his spectacles now. He had nothing to do with his hands. ‘As I said, I always assumed he took no interest in my welfare. However, it turns out that my parents struck a sort of bargain. Which was, in short, that so long as I lived, he would leave her alone. She in turn would make no attempt to interfere with his hedonistic lifestyle.’
‘Golly,’ she said, her hold on her parasol slackening to the extent that it almost went overboard. She rescued it just before it struck a horseman heading in the opposite direction. Turned in her seat to make her apologies as the gentleman in question brought his startled mount back under control.
‘It cost her dearly, to send me away,’ he said, once Georgie was paying attention again. ‘For all her faults, I truly believe she was attempting to do her best. For my health. And for your reputation. She was so afraid I was going to turn out like my father. I look so very like him, you see...’
‘Oh, Edmund, no! You are nothing like that.’ She reached out and took his hand. If only they hadn’t been in an open carriage, bowling along in a public park, he’d have seized it and carried it to his lips.
‘The point is,’ he forced himself to say instead, ‘you need have no fear of her reception. When next you meet, she will greet you with open arms. So to speak. The only thing is...’
‘Yes? What?’ She clutched his hand a little tighter.
‘She may well speak to you in terms of...bringing new blood to the line. She is still more than a little obsessed with the lineage. Which is why I thought it only fair to warn you. Because I do not want you to think that I regard you in the light of a—’
‘A brood mare?’
‘Exactly. I mean, nothing of the kind! Georgie, I am not going to demand my conjugal rights immediately, you need have no fear of that.’
She removed her hand from his and placed it, curled up, in her lap. ‘No,’ she said in a small, defeated voice. ‘I don’t fear that.’
Though, for once, he wasn’t at all convinced she was telling the truth.
Chapter Nineteen
Georgie’s spirits, which had just started to revive, took a steep dive. Poor Edmund. In spite of all the things he’d just said, he couldn’t really want to marry her, or he wouldn’t have said that about not demanding his conjugal rights, when she knew how much he wanted children.
He was just being kind. Trying to make her feel better about a situation they couldn’t escape. He’d even had what sounded like an excruciatingly difficult conversation with his mother, in order to clear the air and make things easier for her.
She sighed. She wished she could be as stoical as him, that she could just accept that there was no getting out of the marriage, not now Edmund had put that notice in the paper. Though if only she’d been able to see him before he’d done that, she might have...
Actually, no, to be honest, there had never been any stopping it. Not once Stepmama had discovered him in her bedroom.
Oh, but he was being so noble about it. Even going so far as to declaring that it was what he wanted.
When she knew full well it wasn’t.
He cleared his throat.
‘Is something troubling you?’
Oh, so many things. But she couldn’t burden him with any of them, not when he was trying so hard to make the best of things. So she shook her head.
‘Then I shall take you home,’ he said and gave the order to his driver.
‘Actually,’ she said, as the carriage rolled inexorably closer to the exit at Cumberland Gate, ‘there is just one thing I wanted to say. Something I should have said at once, only I was too...’ She waved her free hand in a vague manner to indicate the complexity of what she’d been feeling the day he’d invaded her room.
‘What is it?’
She took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to thank you for giving me back Papa. Oh, that didn’t sound right. I wish I was more eloquent. But, to be honest, that is what it has felt like.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, when he married again and handed me over to Stepmama so entirely, it felt as if he’d washed his hands of me. I thought I must have displeased him in some way for him to want me to change so much. Or that he loved his new wife more than he loved me. It was...awful. Just awful.’
Edmund’s hand found hers and gripped it, though he never took his eyes from her face.
‘But now, now that you’ve dug into all that happened, I know that it wasn’t like that at all. He only married Stepmama because he thought it was best for me. He did it because he thought he’d failed me, not the other way round. Knowing that he never stopped loving me, the way he had when I was little is...’
Once again words failed her.
‘I am glad that I have been able to undo some of the damage done to us back then,’ he said gruffly, then studied their hands, linked in her lap. ‘That time of our lives has blighted everything that has happened since. For me, at least. It has been as though how I was made to feel, then, kept on seething through my whole being, no matter how hard I tried to prevent it. It was as pointless as attempting to prevent mist rising from the river, first thing in the morning. Sometimes, when the sun is hot, it obscures everything else from view. That mist is all you can see. You feel totally alone in it. Even when it isn’t there, you know the slightest little thing will set tendrils unfurling and wreathing themselves round the landscape.’
‘Oh, Edmund, that is so beautifully put. And so exactly right, too.’
He nodded curtly and said no more. Not that it was possible, once the carriage got out into the bustling streets. Not that she could very well have put what she was feeling into words. She ought to be feeling far happier that Edmund was content to offer her exactly the kind of marriage she’d asked of him in the first place. But her first reaction had not been joy. It had been...dismay. Because ever since he’d taken her to Bullock’s Museum and he’d given her that talk about caterpillars growing into butterflies, she’d wanted him to kiss her. She wanted to have his children, too, even if it meant doing what Liza and Wilkins had been doing to each other in the stables.
Each other? Oh. Yes, now that she came to think of it, Liza had been running her hands up and down the groom’s back, and even, briefly, squeezing that revoltingly hairy bottom. As though she was urging him on.
Why had she never recalled that aspect of it before?
Because she’d been remembering it through the eyes of a child, that was why. All tinged with her memories of betrayal, and her body maturing, and Liza’s tears, and the groom’s indifference, and the unfairness of it all.
She shut her eyes and tried to recall the event without prejudice. Without recalling the subsequent events which had made the whole scene so very sordid and unsettling. Without
the...the mist that Edmund had spoken of obscuring everything.
But for some reason, instead of seeing Liza flat on her back in the straw, with her legs spread, she pictured herself in that position. With Edmund on top of her. With no breeches on. Her eyes flew open in shock at the funny illicit sort of thrill that speared through her.
And then they were home and she was inviting him to come in and take tea. Which he declined to do. And she was trying not to reveal her disappointment. After all, he’d already given a huge portion of his day over to soothing her fears and attempting to make her believe he was perfectly happy to marry her, when he must have a hundred more important things to do.
She sighed as she tugged off her gloves and began to trudge upstairs. Poor Edmund. Marrying her because he felt as though he had to make amends...what rot! Edmund had nothing to make amends for. Though if he felt he did, that would explain why he’d been so good to her, well, to them all, actually, ever since he’d run across them in London.
She sighed again as she dragged off her bonnet, letting it dangle haphazardly from her fingers. How could their marriage be a happy one when it was all obligation on one side and a thwarted, stunted sort of love on the other?
‘What is the matter?’ Sukey was in their dressing room, where Georgiana had gone to put her bonnet and pelisse away. ‘Didn’t you enjoy your outing?’ Sukey pulled a face. ‘Silly thing to say. How could you? Lord Ashenden must have bored you silly.’
‘Indeed he did not,’ replied Georgiana indignantly.
Sukey shrugged. ‘If you say so.’
‘I do,’ said Georgie, taking down the hatbox in which her bonnet was to reside.
‘Well then, why do you look so glum?’
Georgiana sighed again. One of the plumes on her bonnet was looking distinctly bedraggled. She’d have to pull it out and replace it before she could wear this hat again. Why was it always her clothes that fell apart like that when Sukey’s never needed anything more than laundering?
‘It’s just that...well, you know, the way this betrothal came about.’ She shoved the hat in its box. Perhaps she need not confess that, yet again, one of her outfits was in need of repair. With any luck Stepmama would be too busy buying new bridal clothes to bother very much about her old ones.
The Debutante's Daring Proposal Page 21
