Slightly Married (5 page)

But there was
nothing
.

Her decision to wait for John had been a selfish one, she thought suddenly, as well as a foolish one.
He was not coming back.
He had not written even once either during the year he had expected to be away or during the months since he had expected to be back. She had been naive to trust his protestations of undying love. But her sudden loss of faith in him frightened her. She had clung to it for so long. And she loved him. With all her heart she loved him.

Was she the world's most gullible fool? If she had accepted one of her other suitors during the past year, she and all her friends and dependents would not be in this predicament now.

But how could she possibly have married a man who was not John?

A tap on the nursery door interrupted Eve's scattered thoughts. She looked up from the book as the door opened to reveal Agnes Fuller, looking even more sour than usual.

“It's that military gent,” she said.

Eve merely stared.

“The one with the nose and the scowl and the long handle of a name,” Agnes explained. “He has come calling. At
this
time of night.”

“Tell him I have gone out. Tell him I have retired for the night,” Eve said indignantly. How dared he! Colonel Lord Aidan Bedwyn was the last man she wanted to see—ever. His insensitivity to her and his words to Cecil on the terrace this afternoon had wiped out any sense of gratitude she had felt toward him.

“He said he wasn't going to believe no excuses,” Agnes informed her. “He also wouldn't wait in the hall when I told him to. He went striding off into the parlor without a by-your-leave. I'll try chucking him out if you want, my lamb. I probably won't be able to budge him even though I can square up to most men, but I wouldn't mind a good scrap with him anyway for being so high-handed. There was no need to be, was there? I hadn't even
given
him any excuses yet.”

“Well!” Eve got to her feet and handed the book to Thelma. Muffin scrambled to his feet with a woof. “We will see about
that
. But if anyone is to enjoy the pleasure of a good scrap with him, Agnes, it is going to be me. He had the
nerve
this afternoon to tell my cousin Cecil that all his ridiculous plans for improving Ringwood will make him a better-respected gentleman. He completely ignored me.”

“Oh, how incredibly ill-mannered!” Thelma exclaimed.

“Right!” Agnes turned away, all belligerent ardor. “I'll give him what for, I will, that chest and them shoulders notwithstanding. I'll put another bend in that nose, I will.”

“No, you will not.” Eve sighed when her housekeeper stopped and looked back at her, a mulish expression on her face. “Finish reading to the children, will you, Thelma? I will see him, Agnes. Perhaps he wishes to go down on his knees and beg my pardon.” She bent to kiss the children and bid them a good night. She instructed Muffin to stay, and he sat again, regarding her mournfully from his one eye.

“Shall I come right in there with you?” Agnes asked as they descended the stairs together. “Or would you rather I fetch Mrs. Pritchard?” Aunt Mari usually spent a quiet hour or two in her room after dinner before joining Eve for a cup of tea before bed.

“Neither. I'll see Colonel Bedwyn alone,” Eve said. “But you may stay in the hall if you wish. I'll call if I need help.”

She drew a deep breath as she opened the door to the visitors' parlor.

C
HAPTER V

H
E WAS STANDING IN FRONT OF THE FIREPLACE,
as he had been the first time she saw him, but he was not in uniform this time. He still looked almost as large and menacing, though. He had taken the liberty of lighting the candles in the branch on the mantel, it being almost dark outside.

“Colonel Bedwyn,” Eve said briskly, closing the door behind her. She made no attempt to smile or be gracious. “What may I do for you?”

“You withheld the truth from me,” he said, “in effect if not in strict fact. Your father
did
leave Ringwood to you, but only under conditions with which you have not complied. You are about to lose everything. In four days' time in fact.”

For a moment she was so furious that all she could do was curl her hands into fists at her sides. Was this what aristocratic privilege did to a man? It made him believe it gave him the right to come where he had not been invited, to pry into her private business, to speak thus boldly and abruptly to her?

“
This
is what you have come for?” she asked. “To accuse me of lying? You are impertinent, Colonel Bedwyn. You may leave my house immediately. Good night.” Her heart thumped uncomfortably as she stood away from the door. She was not one to lose her temper easily. She rarely spoke in anger.

“You might as well enjoy issuing such an order now,” he said, not moving. “It will not be in your power to do so for much longer, will it?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “when you come visiting next year or the year after to admire the
marble portico
and the
paved, treeless driveway,
you will say something equally impertinent to Cecil and
he
will have the satisfaction of ordering you off the property instead of me. But tonight I am still mistress here. Get out!” She felt rather like a mouse trying to impose her will on an elephant.

“He
is
a prize ass, is he not?” he said.

She was not quite certain she had heard him correctly. She looked into his dark eyes, but they had not changed expression.

“How else but by allowing him to fawn over me was I to learn the truth about you?” he asked.

She frowned. “The
truth
about me is none of your business,” she said.

“I beg to disagree with you, ma'am,” he told her. “Your safety and security and happiness were your brother's business. He passed that responsibility on to me at his death. That is what he meant, quite clearly, when he had me promise to protect you. He knew what his death would mean to you. By keeping the truth from me you refused him the peace he sought when he solicited my promise.”

She had not considered his offers of help in that light before. She did not want to think of them that way now. He was a
stranger
. In addition to that he was a man from a different world, so far above her on the social scale that it was impossible to converse with him or deal with him as she would with any of her neighbors and friends. He was
Lord
Aidan Bedwyn, son of a duke. She approached the nearest chair and sat on it.

“You owe me nothing, Colonel,” she said. “You do not even know me.”

“I know,” he said, “that I am responsible for you. I gave my word of honor. I have never broken my word once it has been given, and I will not start with you.”

“I absolve you,” she said.

“You do not have that power,” he told her. “What do you intend to do? What are your plans?”

When she drew breath to speak, she found that she could not draw in enough air. She felt as if she had been running hard. She shrugged.

“I will think of something,” she said lamely.

“Do you have anyone to go to?” he asked.

She still resented the abrupt, probing questions into her private life. But she understood now that he must not be enjoying this any more than she was. How he must be wishing that he had not come upon Percy before he died. How he must be regretting the fact that his batman had caught a cold before he could leave as planned yesterday. She shook her head.

“Not really.” She could not, of course, take up residence with James and Serena, even temporarily. Her only relatives were Cecil and Aunt Jemima, Aunt Mari, and her cousin Joshua, whom she would once have wed if her father had not forbidden the connection on the grounds that Joshua, though a wealthy shopkeeper, was neither a gentleman nor a landowner. He was now married to someone else and had three young children.

“You plan to take employment, then?”

“I suppose so.” She smoothed her skirt over her knees. She had not changed since this afternoon, and she was feeling rumpled. “I am not without skills and I am not afraid of hard work. But it seems rather cruel and cowardly simply to go away and concern myself with my own survival. I have a few days, though, in which to try and arrange something. I should have thought ahead and planned for just this eventuality, should I not? Percy was always in danger of dying.”

“Why
did
you not?” he asked her. “You knew the terms of your father's will. You knew, as you have just pointed out, that your brother lived in constant danger of dying.”

“I suppose I did not like to admit that possibility,” she said. “I suppose I chose to deny reality. He was my only brother. He was all I had left. As for marrying, it seemed calculating and distasteful to me to wed only in order to secure my inheritance. I always imagined that I would marry for love.”

She did not mention John. Would she have married someone else this year if there had not been John? She was not at all sure of the answer.

“Percy told me he did not want the estate or the fortune and was determined to sign it all over to me as soon as it became his,” she added. “Marrying someone this past year never seemed urgent to me. I would not have minded dreadfully even if he had changed his mind. He was as fond of me as I was of him. It was foolish of me to put all my trust in his surviving, was it not?”

He did not answer her but stared at her for a long, silent moment, his eyes hard, his features immobile.

“Why cruel?” he asked. “Why cowardly?”

“What?” She looked up at him blankly.

“To whom would your taking employment be cruel?” he asked. “It is the word you used a short while ago. To the pupils in the village school? To the mothers who need the services of your midwife?”

His eyes were looking very intently into her own, holding her gaze so that she found it impossible to look away. His was altogether an overpowering presence. She wished he would simply go away. But he was not going to release her until she had bared her soul to him.

“To them. To everyone,” she said with a sigh. “Everyone at Ringwood Manor—I believe without exception—will be forced to leave here when Cecil moves in. It is not just me.”

“Your aunt has no private means?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

She shook her head. “Neither does Thelma, an unmarried gentlewoman who was turned out of her employment because she was bearing her married employer a bastard child after he had forced his attentions on her. Nor does her child. Or the other two children living here, orphans I have taken into my own personal care. Or Agnes Fuller, my housekeeper, an ex-convict. Or Charlie Handrich, who does odd jobs around here with great eagerness but whom no one else wants because they consider him a half-wit. Or Edith, my maid, or Nanny Johnson. None of them has independent means. And none of them has any great hope of finding employment elsewhere.” She heard, appalled, the bitterness in her voice as she poured out the details, which were none of his business. “No hope at all, in fact.”

“You have a bleeding heart,” he said after a few moments of silence. She was not sure if it was an accusation or a simple statement of fact. “You have filled your home and neighborhood with lame ducks and now feel responsible for them.”

“They are not lame ducks.” She frowned up at him, her anger returning. “They are people to whom life has been cruel. They are precious persons of no less value in the sacred scheme of things than you or I. And there is Muffin too, my dog, who was brutally abused by his former owner. Lives of infinite value, all of them. What am I supposed to do when I see suffering and have it in my power to alleviate it? Turn my back?”

He stared expressionlessly at her. “A rhetorical question, no doubt,” he murmured.

“But now,” she said, “it is no longer in my power to help them. Now that I have given them a home and hope and dignity and a life to be lived, they are to be turned out again. No one will give any of the children a home. They will end up in an orphanage—if they are so fortunate. And no one will employ any of the adults, not even my neighbors, though I will go to each of them in turn tomorrow and beg them to do just that. These precious friends of mine will become vagrants and beggars and perhaps worse, and society will declare that it expected that all along. It will pat itself on the back for being so much more perceptive than I.”

He stared at her, still without expression. He was as granite-hearted as he looked, she suspected. Both his social rank and his military experience would have contributed to that. But what did it matter? He owed her nothing, not even sympathy, despite what he believed he owed Percy.

“I do beg your pardon,” she said. “This is all sentimental drivel to you, no doubt. You will tell me, as others have before you, that I am
not
my brother's keeper—or my sister's either. Even
they
say it themselves. But I am, you see. My father was one of the poor until marrying my mother made him into a fabulously wealthy man. He was a coal miner and married the owner's daughter. Did you know that, Colonel? I am not even close to being a lady by birth, you see, though I have been raised and educated as one. How can I not give back some of what I have done nothing to earn or deserve?”

“A thoroughly bourgeois attitude,” he said, “though perhaps I do the bourgeoisie an injustice. Most of them spend their lives dissociating themselves from their past and cleaving to those higher on the social scale.”

Which was exactly what Papa had done. Eve stared stonily at the colonel, and he stared back at her for so long that she grew uncomfortable.

“Go home to your family, Colonel,” she said. “It is beyond your power to protect
me,
far less all those for whom I feel responsible. I will manage. I will survive. We all will.”

He turned at last to stare into the unlit coals in the fireplace. He spoke brusquely. “There is a way of saving everything you hold dear,” he said.

“No.” She stared, frowning, at his back. “If there were, I would have thought of it, Colonel. I have considered
everything,
believe me.”

“You have missed one possibility,” he said, his voice cold and harsh.

“What?”

But he did not immediately proceed to tell her what it was. His clasped hands, she noticed, were tapping rhythmically against his back.

“You are going to have to marry me,” he said.

“What?”

“If you are married before the anniversary of your father's death,” he said, “you will be able to keep your home and your fortune and the lame ducks too.”

“Married?”
She stared incredulously at his rigidly straight back. “Even if it were not the most preposterous idea I have ever heard, there are only four days left. Before the vicar had even finished calling the banns, Cecil would have his portico half built.”

“There will be just time if we marry by special license,” he said. “We will leave early tomorrow morning for London, marry the next day, and return the day after. You will be back here in time to thumb your nose at your cousin when he arrives to take possession.
That
at least will afford me some satisfaction.”

He was serious, she realized.
He was serious.
And he spoke with all the confident assurance of a superior officer giving orders to his subordinates or his men. He was not asking her, he was
telling
her.

“But I have no wish to follow the drum,” she said.

He looked at her over his shoulder, his expression grim. “I am thankful to hear it,” he said. “You will not, of course, be doing so.”

“You can have no wish to live
here
.” The very idea was ludicrous.

“None whatsoever,” he agreed curtly, turning to face her fully. “You are being obtuse, Miss Morris. It will be entirely a marriage of convenience. It would seem that you have no wish to marry. You are no young girl, and you must have had numerous chances to attach the affections of a man of your own choosing if you had so desired. Obviously you have not done so. Neither do I wish to marry. I have a long-term career in the cavalry. It is a life hardly conducive to marriage and family. Neither of us will be greatly inconvenienced, then, by a marriage to each other. I will return to my regiment after spending the rest of my leave at Lindsey Hall. You will remain at Ringwood. We need never see each other again after I have escorted you home from London in three days' time.”

“You are the son of a
duke,
” she said.

“And you are a coal miner's daughter.” He looked haughtily at her. “I do not believe the difference in our stations precludes our marrying, ma'am.”