Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“You are going to fall over,” she teased.
“I am not. I have been through worse than that.”
“You are. You have ridden twenty-six miles, and you have not eaten, and you are the most obstinate man I have ever known.”
“Anne.”
“Yes.”
“Sit with me. Please. Only sit with me. I wish to say one more thing, properly, and I do not wish to say it while standing.”
“Very well.”
She sat beside him on the settee, quite close, her hand clasped in both of his. She kept her other hand on his lapels, as though she did not quite trust him to remain where she had put him.
He looked at her hand in his. In his head, he gathered the words he had been arranging for twenty-six miles, and he found that most of them had fallen out of their order in the last half-hour, and that he was going to have to say this as it came to him.
“I have to tell you one thing. You will not like it. I do not like it myself. But I shall say it, because it is the truth, and we have spent enough days this week not saying the truth to one another.”
“Very well.”
“That afternoon in the schoolroom, when you said that you did not wish for a child—”
“William, we have been over this.”
“I know. I know now. Let me say this, Anne. Please.”
She closed her mouth and nodded.
“I heard you in that moment,” he said. “Correctly. I understood that you were frightened. I understood that you were speaking out of fear. But… I took the words as proof of something I had believed before you, for a great many years. That I was not a man any woman would wish to bear a child. That whatever you had given me—your kindness, your warmth, your bed—was a thing you had given me out of pity, or duty. And that the moment any real consequence was asked of you, the truth would come out, and the truth was that you were ashamed of me.”
“That could not be further from the truth. I adore your face.”
“Do you know how I got this scar?”
“No, I believe I don’t.”
“It was a boar attack. I threw myself in front of my father.”
“That is why it runs up your arms as well?”
“Yes. Luckily, my father was able to shoot the bastard, but I have always had these scars.”
“Always?”
“Yes, I was nine.”
“Oh, darling.”
“Please, do not feel bad for me. This is not about me, I want you to understand. When you said you were afraid… You had been frightened… Well, I took your fright and turned it into a story about myself in my head. I assumed it was a reflection of your feelings for me, and I turned away from you. I punished you for the story. And I am—” His voice broke on the last word.
He had not expected it to. He had to stop a moment, looking down at her hand in his.
“—I am more sorry for it than I know how to tell you.”
Anne had gone very still beside him. For a moment, she did not speak.
Anne will be kind. She will not be angry. She will find a gentle way to set this down. She is always kind.
“William Redmond, Duke of Dawnhurst.” Her voice had gone very low and very fierce, to his shock. “You listen to me. You listen to me now.”
He looked up. Her eyes had turned a very dark green, indicating anger. A color he had seen once or twice.
“I have never,” she said, “in my life, looked at you and been ashamed. Not once. Not for one instant. Not in the smallest corner of me. Do you understand?”
“I did not mean to—”
“Do you understand?”
“I… Of course, yes. Yes.”
“No, William. You do not. You have just told me that you do not. So, I am going to tell it to you one last time.”
“Yes, we have an understanding. The floor is yours, barrister.”
“Good.” She drew a deep breath. “I chose you. Do you hear me? I chose you. I did not drift into this. I did not settle for it. I ran away from a house in the middle of the night with a ten-year-old child, with nothing arranged for me in the world except the little possibility of an aunt in Scotland. I had no reason on earth to trust a man ever again for the rest of my life. I had been bartered once, and I had a sister to protect, and I had learned very thoroughly what the men of my acquaintance considered themselves entitled to. I did not come into your house looking for a husband, William. I did not come looking for anything of the kind. I came looking for a roof, and I found…”
“What did you find?”
“My happily ever after.”
“Beauty and the beast, although beauty is far too tame a word for what you are.”
“I am not done.”
“No. Forgive me,” he said, smiling at her tenacity.
“I chose you,” she said again. “I chose you because when you walked into a room, the air in it became different.
I chose you because I watched you, for an entire summer, not knowing how to speak to your own daughter and trying anyway, every day, badly and earnestly and always.
I chose you because one evening before the fire, you told me about your first marriage without making yourself the hero of it, which I have never heard any man in my life do before.
“I chose you because when Celia asked you the name of every object in an exhibit, you answered her, William—every single one. You were not condescending, you did not give her a short answer, and you did not tell her to go and ask her sister. You answered her. That is who I chose.”
She took a shuddering breath, tears pricking her eyes again. “And you have sat in your study for three days, telling yourself a story about why I said what I said, and the story was about your face. Do you know what I think of your face?”
“Anne…”
“It is the face of the man I admire, William. That is what I think of it. I think it is the face I should like, if God is kind, to look at across a breakfast table every morning for the next forty years. Every morning, William. All of it. The scar and the beard and a considerable amount of grey that has turned up at your temples this summer, which I have been meaning to remark upon, and the—”
“It’s distinguished—”
“—way your mouth does that thing it does when you are trying not to smile at something Celia has said. All of it. I chose all of it. I did not compromise on any part of it.” She gave a small, wet, almost incredulous laugh.
“I have loved you for rather longer than is respectable, actually. And I cannot bear that you have sat in a study for three days with a splinter in your heart because I did not know how to tell you that I was frightened!”
He could not speak at once. He brought her hand to his mouth and held it there. He did not trust himself to do anything else at that moment.
“I love you,” he said finally, his voice quite hoarse.
“Oh.”
“I do not know that I have ever said that to anyone. I am not certain my mother ever said it to me. I am out of practice with the word. I shall get better at it, Anne. I give you notice. I shall get better at it.”
“William…”
“Listen. One more thing. I do not need an heir. I do not need a larger table. I do not need one more thing in this world beyond what is within these walls at this present moment. That is not gallantry. That is the thing I rode home to tell you. If we have a child, we have one in our own time, when you are ready, if you are ever ready, and not before, and we shall be glad of it. If we do not, we do not, and I will not spend one hour of the rest of my life counting the lack of it. Do you hear me, Anne? Not one hour.”
“William, I hear you.”
“Good.”
“And I…”
“Yes?”
“I love you. I love you, William. I ought to have said that first, and I did not, and I am saying it now. I love you. And I…”
She paused for a moment, seemingly choosing the next words with some care.
“And I think that when we are both ready—that is, when you and I are ready—I should like to try. Not yet. I am not quite there, William. But I should like to try one day. For a child. Yours and mine. I should like that, William. I should like that very much.”
“I do not deserve you.”
“When we are ready. Both of us. Together.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Until then, we could practice. How does that sound?”
He set her hand against his cheek and closed his eyes as if in a prayer. Then he opened them, looked at her, and leaned in.
He kissed her with everything he was. It was not a kiss of argument, of reconciliation, or of any negotiation at all. It was the kiss of a man who had at last arrived home. A man who had no further business in any other place, and who was exactly where he wished to remain.
Somewhere in the house, two floors below, a small triumphant voice cried, “Felicity! They have gone quiet!”