Chapter Eight Mary Beth’s Choice
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mary Beth’s Choice
For the next day, Mary Beth did exactly what Ambrose had asked of her.
She thought about tomorrow and found the exercise inconvenient almost immediately.
Tomorrow intruded while she reviewed accounts, while she approved the hiring of two additional quarry carts, while she stood at the north windows and watched the western cut carry cleanly through the slope.
It followed her into luncheon. It sat beside her in the carriage on Thursday evening as Blackthorn’s lamps disappeared behind the rain-streaked glass.
By the time Benedict’s house came into view, Mary Beth had begun to suspect that tomorrow was simply another name for consequence.
The Sablehurst carriage had arrived at seven precisely, polished black lacquer gleaming beneath the lamps. Benedict had sent it with a footman and a rug warmed before the fire. The gesture was considerate, expensive, and visible to everyone in Blackthorn’s front hall.
Mary Beth had almost laughed, because of course the gesture was visible. That was the point.
She wore deep green silk with very little ornament, no widow’s black, and no attempt at penitence. Her maid had arranged her hair more formally than Mary Beth usually tolerated and had wisely made no comment when Mary Beth rejected the pearl cross that had been laid beside her gloves.
At Sablehurst, the doors opened before the carriage stopped moving.
Inside, respectability waited for her with candles lit.
Benedict’s mother received Mary Beth as though the county had never spent an afternoon discussing where Mary Beth Blackthorn’s gamekeeper had entered the house.
She kissed the air beside Mary Beth’s cheek, admired the green silk, and drew her into a room containing twenty people who became, with remarkable speed, fascinated by the weather.
Mary Beth knew nearly all of them.
More importantly, they all knew her.
A woman who had failed to acknowledge Mary Beth at church three months earlier now asked whether Blackthorn’s roses had survived the wet spring.
A magistrate’s wife who once moved her daughter to another side of a shop greeted Mary Beth with such warmth that Mary Beth wondered whether the woman had suffered a recent blow to the head.
Nothing had changed about Mary Beth.
Benedict had merely placed his approval beside her name.
That was apparently sufficient.
He came to her after the first quarter hour, immaculate in evening clothes, his expression carrying just enough satisfaction to annoy her.
“You see?” he murmured.
Mary Beth accepted a glass of wine from a passing tray. “I see people who have discovered remarkably flexible memories.”
“People prefer permission to forgiveness.”
“An unattractive distinction.”
“A useful one.”
His hand rested lightly at the back of her arm as he guided her toward an older couple near the fireplace. He never gripped. Benedict did not need to. He possessed the kind of confidence that assumed doors would open before he reached them.
For the next two hours, Mary Beth watched him open them for her.
She was seated at his mother’s right hand at dinner.
The magistrate asked Mary Beth’s opinion about a proposed road improvement.
Two women invited her to an autumn charity subscription.
Someone mentioned a musicale in York and included Mary Beth in the sentence as naturally as if four years of whispers had never occurred.
The food was excellent. The conversation was civil. No one insulted her.
Mary Beth had not expected any of that to feel so unpleasant.
She had spent years telling herself she did not care whether these people approved of her.
Mostly, that was true. Yet approval possessed practical value even when affection did not.
Invitations became introductions. Introductions became credit, influence, easier dealings with merchants, kinder treatment of tenants who carried the Blackthorn name into nearby villages.
Respectability was not only a drawing-room decoration; it had practical uses, and Benedict understood every one of them.
After dinner, when the ladies moved into the long drawing room and the gentlemen had not yet joined them, Lady Sablehurst sat beside Mary Beth and spoke quietly about a committee concerned with cottages on two estates farther north.
She did not once refer to scandal. She spoke to Mary Beth as another landowner.
It was precisely the sort of conversation Mary Beth had missed more than she wished to admit.
The realization annoyed her because it complicated the story she preferred to tell about herself.
She could dismiss cruelty. She could mock gossip.
What she could not honestly claim was that exclusion had cost nothing.
There had been committee rooms where Blackthorn’s interests might have been heard more easily, merchants who became cautious after hearing her name, wives who treated a widow’s independence as contagious.
Benedict had not invented those consequences.
He had merely demonstrated how efficiently his approval could soften them.
Mary Beth resented him a little for being right about that, and resented herself more for understanding the temptation.
A life with Benedict would not be a prison built entirely of unpleasant things.
There would be comfort, influence, excellent dinners, familiar rules, and a hundred small courtesies that made power seem like kindness.
That was what made the offer dangerous before it had even been spoken aloud.
When Benedict finally entered, his eyes found her immediately.
Later, near eleven, he walked her to the waiting carriage himself.
“Was it unbearable?” he asked beneath the portico.
“Almost civilized.”
“High praise from you.”
“Do not become greedy.”
His smile deepened. “You were welcomed.”
“I noticed.”
“It need not be temporary.”
The implication had finally stepped into the open.
It was not yet a proposal; Benedict was too careful for that tonight. But the shape of one stood behind the words.
Mary Beth gathered her skirts before stepping into the carriage. “You make society sound like a club whose membership you control.”
“No one controls it. That is why sensible people learn how to move within it.”
“And you believe you could teach me?”
“I believe you already know how. You simply decided for several years not to care about the cost of refusing.”
The words were not cruel. That made them harder to dismiss.
Mary Beth studied him in the lamplight. Benedict was handsome, composed, wealthy, connected, and entirely at ease with the world she had been born into.
He would never arrive at Blackthorn with mud to his knees.
He would never mistake her knowledge of a drain for an inconvenience to his assumptions because he would never expect her to inspect one in the first place.
“Good night, Benedict.”
He took her gloved hand and bowed over it. “Good night, Mary Beth.”
The carriage door closed.
On the road home, she thought about what he had offered without offering it.
Then she thought about Ambrose standing in the blue room the night before, refusing the body she had freely offered because he wanted an answer she had never required from another man.
Benedict could give her a place in the world she already understood.
Ambrose had asked whether she wanted a world with him in it after the wanting was finished.
By the time Blackthorn’s lamps appeared beyond the trees, Mary Beth knew which question frightened her more.
She did not go to Ambrose that night.
She wanted the decision to remain hers, untouched by the aftertaste of Benedict’s table or the satisfaction of defying him.
She almost smiled at the thought and corrected herself before it could become one of those neat little conclusions life rarely deserved.
Instead, she went to bed alone because she refused to let Benedict’s dinner become the reason she crossed another locked door.
In the morning, she chose Ambrose in daylight.
He was in the old carriage room at half past ten, sleeves rolled, waistcoat unbuttoned, three revised drawings spread across the plans table. The room smelled of damp wool, pencil shavings, and the strong tea someone had left near his elbow.
Mary Beth entered carrying his cost sheet.
He glanced up. “You are back.”
“Astonishingly.”
“Was Sablehurst society survivable?”
“Barely. I endured soup, fish, two kinds of wine, and a woman who once pretended not to see me in a milliner’s shop.”
His mouth moved. “Heroic.”
“I thought so.”
Mary Beth laid the cost sheet on the table. “Your quarry estimate is wrong.”
Ambrose’s attention shifted immediately to the paper. “Where?”
“Nowhere.”
He stared at her.
Mary Beth rested the cost sheet against her hip. “I required a pretext.”
“You own the room.”
“That has never prevented people from expecting an explanation when I enter it.”
Ambrose’s pencil went still; he laid it beside the drawing.
The humor left his face, not from alarm but recognition. He understood why she had come.
“Did you think about tomorrow?” he asked.
“Constantly. It was exhausting.”
He waited.
Mary Beth had prepared several elegant versions of what she intended to say. Every one of them vanished beneath that patience.
“I do not know whether I want marriage,” she said.
“I do not know whether I want children. I do not know what the county will do when it understands that you are not merely repairing my wall. I do not know what you will want in six months, or whether we will discover some unbearable habit in one another before then.”
“Promising beginning.”
“You asked for honesty.”
“I did.”
She came closer to the table. “What I know is that I do not want this arranged to end before it begins. I do not want you leaving Blackthorn when the wall is finished simply because that was the convenient boundary. I want to find out what happens after.”
Ambrose did not move.
Mary Beth’s pulse began to irritate her.
“You might say something.”