Chapter 32
Leonard didn’t speak to Prudence for the rest of the evening. He couldn’t bear to do it. He knew that she understood something was wrong and that she was worried about it, but even the thought of taking her aside to explain it to her was too much for him to face.
How could she have done that? She knew perfectly well that all I wanted was to protect Peter’s reputation and to keep the scandal of our wedding day a secret. She knew that, and she still chose to do what she did.
“You can’t avoid me forever,” Prudence said to him on the ride home. Her voice trembled. He had upset her, but he couldn’t bring himself to express regret or even to ask her about how she was feeling. He didn’t want to hear it from her. She had known what she was doing. She must have.
When they arrived at home, he started to make for the solitude of his study, but she reached out and stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Don’t do this,” she said quietly. “Don’t you run off and leave me on my own yet again.
How many times do we have to go through this with one another, Leonard?
How many times before we’re able to admit to one another that we are on the same side? ”
It was too much to bear. “You aren’t on my side,” he told her. “You’ve never been on my side.”
“I don’t know how you can say that.” She drew back, tears in her eyes.
“And I don’t know how you can suggest otherwise,” he fired back.
“What’s the one thing I’ve told you again and again is more important than anything to me?
I know you’ve heard me say it because you’ve mocked me for it.
You act like it doesn’t matter what people think of us, and to you, it doesn’t.
But you know that it does to me, so how can you set my priorities aside with such reckless abandon? ”
She shook her head. “I never meant to do any such thing,” she said softly.
“But you did! I told you how important it was that no one ever find out what happened the day of our wedding. I told you how ruinous it might be to my brother’s reputation.
The tears seemed to evaporate from her eyes very suddenly, and she drew herself up to her full height. “That’s really all you care about, isn’t it?” she demanded. “Peter’s reputation. That’s the only thing that matters to you.”
“It’s a very important thing to me, and I’ve never made any secret of that fact. He is my brother, Prudence! It’s my responsibility to take care of him.”
“And what of your duty to me? To us? To yourself?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“You heard the way those ladies were speaking about you! How disrespectful they were,” she said.
“Did you really expect me to just stand there and listen to them say those things and not intervene? To say nothing at all while they disparaged you and told me what a rake you were, when you and I both know it isn’t the truth?
As someone who claims to care so very much for his reputation, how can that be what you want?
How can you be content to let other people slander you right to your face? ”
“They were poking fun at me, that’s all,” Leonard said though he felt a bit uneasy. There was some truth in what Prudence was saying—a little too much truth.
“And that’s all right with you, is it?” Prudence asked. “I don’t see any fun in it. How can it be fun to allow people to impugn your character?”
“You know as well as I that being a part of society comes with a bit of this sort of nonsense and teasing,” Leonard said. “I can’t afford to get angry every time someone calls me a rake.”
“All right, maybe you can’t. What if they had been talking about me?” she asked him.
Leonard frowned. “I don’t believe I know what you’re referring to.”
“Use your imagination. What if those ladies had decided to focus on the scandalous things they’ve heard about me instead of the rumors about you?
Would you have allowed that to happen, simply because they were teasing and we can’t afford to get upset about it?
Would you have stood by and let them say negative things about your wife? ”
“Of course, I wouldn’t.” How could she ask him that? The very idea of it was offensive.
“Well, if you wouldn’t allow that to happen, how can you expect me to do the same thing?
” she demanded. “How can you expect that I would sit back and allow cruel words to be spoken about you when I have the power to correct them? When I have the ability to tell people that you did not try to shirk the responsibility of marrying me but immediately and reliably stood up to it? There was never a less rakish man, and I won’t have people saying such dreadful thing about you when they simply aren’t true. ”
“But don’t you see that in defending me, you gave away what Peter did?
You told them that he abandoned you at the altar,” Leonard pointed out.
“No one will be able to respect him now. No one will see him as anything other than a man who neglected the lady he was meant to marry. It will be all but impossible to find him someone to marry now.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that’s my fault,” Prudence said firmly.
“Oh, you don’t?” Leonard raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you the one who revealed what happened tonight when I thought we were agreed on the need to keep it a secret?”
“Yes, but I’m not the one who came up with the idea that it had to be a secret in the first place,” she told him.
“And why should it be? Why did we have to make such a show out of everything when we could have simply walked out of that church and said that we’d decided you and I were the better match?
We could have acted as if this marriage was something we wanted right from the start instead of making out as though anyone was forced into anything.
We could have simply told people that we had decided to leave Peter out of it.
You were always so much more concerned with what was best for him.
You were willing to overlook entirely what was best for us. ”
“You’re being unfair,” Leonard told her.
“No. I don’t think I am,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been unfair about any of this.
You always tried to control things, and it was always a bad idea, wasn’t it?
I told you I didn’t want to marry Peter, Leonard, and he told you that he didn’t want to marry me.
But you did all you could to force us together anyway in spite of what either one of us wanted.
You were so determined to control the situation that you didn’t bother to consider what would actually make anyone happy. ”
“You sound as if you’re taking Peter’s side here,” he objected, hardly able to believe it.
But she squared her shoulders. “Maybe I am,” she said. “Maybe I think the way he acted made sense given the circumstances.”
“Oh really? You think his choice to leave you at the altar was justifiable, Prudence? He abandoned you. How can you be all right with that?”
“He didn’t abandon me!” she burst out. “I told him not to come for heaven’s sake!”
Leonard froze.
He must have heard her wrong. That couldn’t have been right. There was something he was failing to understand, something about what she had said that was missing because it was impossible that her words were true at face value.
“You didn’t tell him anything,” he said slowly. “The two of you never spent any time together out of my company.”
“We did,” she explained. “I saw him once without you there.”
“When?” His voice was hoarse. This didn’t make sense. And if he could prevent it from making sense, he could prevent it from being true.
It couldn’t be true.
“I went to see him,” she said.
“You went to see him where?”
“At the pub. I went the night before the wedding. I… I wore my peasant clothes.”
He closed his eyes. “Now that you say it, I don’t know why I’m even surprised,” he said. “Of course, you did that. And I suppose you just assumed that you would find him at the pub?”
“I had seen him there many times before,” she replied. “It was a fair assumption to make, especially since I turned out to be right about it.”
“And what did you say to him?” Leonard asked.
“I told him that I didn’t want to marry him and that I knew he didn’t want to marry me either,” Prudence said, lifting her chin.
“I told him that the best way out for both of us was for him to simply not come to the wedding. He knew you would be angry, but he assured me he could manage your anger—that it was something he was used to dealing with.”
“That makes it sound as if I’m unreasonably angry with him all the time.”
“I don’t pretend to know what things are like between the two of you,” she said.
“What I do know is this—I never intended this to be a way of forcing you to marry me. I never imagined things going that way, nor was it what I wanted. You were there. You saw how I tried to resist. I wasn’t trying to…
to entrap you or anything of that nature. ”
“No,” he murmured. “No, that’s not what I thought.”
“I hope that means you can forgive me for this,” she said. “I hope you can understand why I had to do it and that I never meant you to come to harm.”
“But that doesn’t matter,” Leonard said. “You took matters into your own hands without even pausing to consider what I might think about it.”
“And how is that different from what you did when you insisted that Peter marry me in the first place?” she demanded.
“It sounds to me, Leonard, as though you’re fine with the idea of people making decisions that influence each other’s lives—it’s just that you don’t want anyone to do that to you. You were fine with doing it to me.”
He couldn’t even think through what she was saying. It was all too much. “I’m going to my study,” he said. “I’m going to take the rest of the night too myself.”
“Leonard, if only you could step back and look at this clearly, you would see that I haven’t done anything that should distress you,” she protested.
“Peter hasn’t been seen in weeks anyway.
It’s not as if he’s even taking part in this season.
By the time he returns—if he even does—any gossip about this will have died down.
And in the meantime, you and I will be able to live the lives we deserve. ”
“This is exactly what I was worried about, you know,” Leonard said. “I was worried that our feelings for each other would lead us to set aside the priorities we ought to have—and that’s exactly what’s happened. You’ve proven me right.”
“Oh, no, I haven’t,” she countered. “The only thing I’ve proven, Leonard, is that I have never had the priorities you wanted me to have. Not from the very start.”
She said nothing more, and neither did he. He waited a moment to see whether she would, but it appeared she had spoken her piece, so at length, he turned and went up to his study, wondering how he would ever bring himself to face her again.