Chapter 14
W
“Sometimes, when everyone else around me thinks the world is being silent, I can hear her singing.”
I awoke with bleary eyes and a headache to the sound of banging on the cottage door. There was only the slightest bit of light coming through the window, so dawn must have arrived only a few minutes ago.
The banging sounded again. It was too early for Mary to have stoked the fires or helped us prepare for the day, so whoever was outside would have to be either ignored or greeted by Mama or me.
I threw on a wrap and crossed the small corridor to Mama’s room. I opened her door without knocking and found her sitting in bed with eyes at least as bleary as mine.
“Who is at the door?” she asked with an edge of irritation.
“I don’t know. But it seems urgent.”
Mama nodded. I grabbed her wrap from her wardrobe and handed it to her. Then we darted down the stairs, Mama mumbling about what she was going to say to whomever was behind the door.
But when Mama pulled it open, David stood there, his fist raised to knock again.
He looked worse than either of us did. His coat was half opened to the bitter wind, and he seemed to be wearing the same clothes he’d worn the day before. The stubble that had adorned his cheeks when he’d returned from Lincolnshire was back again.
He dropped his hand and glanced between us.
“Dav—” I began, but his eyes, fierce and icy, stopped me.
He held out a piece of paper in his left hand. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said with such force that he might have been declaring war on a sovereign nation. “Anna, I’ve changed my mind. I do want to marry you. If you are willing.”
Words caught in my throat. I’d cried more than I cared to admit while falling asleep, and now he was here telling me he’d changed his mind? He’d been so cruelly certain. What could have possibly happened to change his mind in such a short amount of time?
Mama didn’t have the same problem talking that I did. “You told her yesterday you didn’t want to marry her.”
“That is not what I said.”
“You definitely didn’t agree to marry her.”
David nodded. “And as I said when you first opened the door, I’ve changed my mind.”
Mama put a hand on her forehead and ran it down her face.
Then she backed away from the door, leaving it open, which David took as an invitation to come in.
He handed Mama a sheet of paper. She took it absentmindedly, glanced at it, then froze, and glanced at it again.
She looked up at David. “This is signed by the archbishop.”
David nodded. “He was a friend of my grandfather’s.”
Mama blinked. “The archbishop of Canterbury?”
David nodded again, his disheveled appearance becoming clear. If he was here, and this wasn’t a strange, vivid dream my poor addled brain had concocted, David would have been on trains and horses for most of the night to get that signature.
Mama blinked. “But why a special license?”
“I don’t want the banns read, nor do I want to make a spectacle of the event. I’d like us to marry quietly. Today, if possible.”
Today?
He’d left me to cry myself to sleep, made me doubt my worth in some of the most excruciating ways possible, and now was here, with a special marriage license, telling me he’d simply changed his mind?
Was he mad?
“David, you can’t be serious,” I said.
“I’m deadly serious.”
Mama stumbled toward the drawing room and opened the door. I followed, my own feet unsteady and unbelieving. Mama took a seat near the window, catching the earliest morning rays to read the writing on the special license over again.
A soft touch on my elbow made me turn to face David.
He held my arm carefully, as if he were afraid I would run away.
Or perhaps to keep himself from running—I wasn’t certain.
It wasn’t long ago when he’d refused me quite decisively.
He lowered his head. “May I speak to you alone about this? Please?”
“I . . .” I was going to let him speak to me.
I couldn’t spend an evening crying over his loss without trying to understand what had changed over the course of one night.
But my mind was struggling to come to grips with what was happening.
I rubbed my eyes again, not entirely certain my brain wasn’t addled.
“Of course . . . It is just . . .” The cottage had the drawing room and the kitchen on the ground floor, and it was much too cold to follow him outside with only my wrap.
“Mama?” Her head jerked up. “Could David and I speak privately?”
Mama jumped up from the chair and nodded. “Of course, of course. I’ll return to my room. But please”—her eyes caught mine— “come and explain everything to me as soon as you’re finished.”
Mama climbed the stairs with the special license held so tightly in her grip a hurricane wouldn’t have been able to loosen it. That paper held the solution to all our problems. Mr. Green, where to live, our finances . . . everything. Perhaps even the broken heart I’d nursed all night.
But I didn’t know what had changed his mind.
The moment we heard Mama’s bedroom door shut, David started pacing.
I motioned to our all-purpose table. “Would you like to sit?”
He shook his head and ran a hand through his already mussed hair. “No. I don’t think I could.”
I eyed his attire and his general state of nervous energy. He’d seemed more of a sound mind the night before when he’d rejected me than he did now.
“Have you slept?” I asked.
He shook his head again. “No, I couldn’t.” He finally stopped his maddening pacing and took a step toward me. “You asked for a favor yesterday, and I refused you.”
That was what this was about? His unfounded gratitude toward me? “You had every right to refuse me. It wasn’t as though I’d asked to borrow a spare chicken.”
His expressive eyebrows furrowed much like the night before, and for the first time since he’d walked in the door, the near crazed look in his eyes dissipated, instead replaced by mild confusion. “No. It wasn’t like that at all.”
I raised my chin and continued on my wild tangent.
As much as I needed him to explain what was happening, I also needed him to look at me with some sense of normalcy.
I wouldn’t agree to marry him if our marriage made him this agitated.
“I’m certain you would have been able to sleep quite soundly if you’d refused a simpler request.”
He had turned to resume his pacing, but at my words, he stopped and spun back to me expelling a lungful of air. “I would have given you a chicken, Anna.”
“It would have been easy to give me a chicken and easier to refuse. My point is that was not what I asked for.”
He strode toward me, his eyes imploring. When he stopped, he was close enough for me to reach out and touch him. Suddenly, the drawing room seemed excessively small. “Can we please stop speaking of chickens?”
I was instantly mollified. “Yes, David.”
“I want to give you anything you ask for. No. More than want, I think I need to give you anything you ask for.”
A nervous laugh escaped my throat. “Because I was nice to you when you were a child?”
“No.” He reached a hand toward my face but then pulled it back. “Not because of that.”
I swallowed. My heart was suddenly pounding. “Why, then?”
His chest rose and fell, and he looked at me as if I were a small bird perched and ready to fly off if he were to move too quickly.
I felt like a bird ready to fly to him. “Because, my dear Anna, you are the single most important person in my life, save my brother and sister. In truth, it feels as though you are the only person in my life, save my siblings. I don’t want to lose you.
I don’t want you to leave, to find a position as a governess or live off the kindness of others.
And I definitely don’t want you to marry some eager inferior lout because financially you must. I would do anything to help you, Anna. Anything.”
“Even marry me when you would rather not?” I asked, my voice cracking.
He sighed heavily, his eyes searching mine for something I didn’t know if I had. “As it turns out, because of all the reasons I just listed, especially that.”
“Oh.” My heartbeat, which had somehow managed to increase its pace with each of his words, seemed to stop. He’d just admitted he didn’t want to marry me. That hadn’t changed. “I can’t rob you of a future with someone you want to marry, no matter how dire my circumstances.”
He shook his head, and a deep sadness filled his eyes.
“You won’t be robbing me of anything. I decided years ago I would never marry.
You are the only woman who could make me change my mind.
But, Anna—” He swallowed and put his hand on the back of his neck.
“There will come a time when you will need to leave, and we have to make certain you can. If we marry, it will be so you can pay off Mr. Green and have enough of your inheritance to live off of.”
He wanted me to leave? Even after marrying him? “I can’t simply marry you, take my money, and leave. The courts would know.”
“No, and I selfishly don’t want you to. I want you to be my wife and live with you as long as I possibly can. You have to leave the cottage today, and I want you to move into my home not as my fiancée, as we’d originally planned, but as my wife. Today.”
There it was again. Today. We’d barely had any time together. What was the rush? Mama and I had to leave the cottage, but David had already initiated a plan for that.
“Why such urgency? And if I marry you, I will not leave you. Why should I? I want to be your wife, David. I thought I made that clear enough last night.”