Chapter 17
“Ihave done something monumentally stupid.”
Penelope barely had time to set down her teacup before Hyacinth swept through the drawing room doors in a flurry of travelling cloak and windswept curls, her bonnet dangling from one hand as though she’d forgotten it existed.
She looked nothing like the composed, calculating young woman who had departed the estate a fortnight ago with Sir Edmund’s name still firmly at the top of her matrimonial ledger.
She looked, Penelope thought with a jolt of recognition, like a woman coming undone.
“Good morning to you as well,” Penelope managed. “I wasn’t expecting—”
“I wrote to you. Three letters. Did you not receive them?” Hyacinth collapsed into the nearest chair without waiting for invitation, dropping her bonnet onto the floor with a carelessness that would have horrified her mother.
“The third one was rather desperate. I believe I underlined several words.”
“I received two.” Penelope retrieved the bonnet from the carpet and set it on the side table. “Both of which mentioned Sir Edmund’s courtship in considerable detail. You seemed quite pleased.”
“Yes, well.” Hyacinth’s fingers twisted together in her lap. “The third letter was... rather different.”
Penelope studied her friend’s face—the high colour in her cheeks, the way her gaze kept darting toward the window as though she expected pursuit.
Penelope shifted, unable to keep the worry from pressing on her chest. She had seen Hyacinth excited, indignant, triumphant, and theatrically despairing. She had never seen her frightened.
“Tell me.”
Hyacinth opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. The uncharacteristic silence was more alarming than any confession could have been.
“I’ve been meeting Mr. Crawford,” she said at last. The words tumbled out in a rush, as though holding them back a moment longer might have killed her.
“Secretly. Without a chaperone. Three times now, in the village, when I told Mother I was visiting the milliner.” She pressed her hands flat against her knees, her knuckles bloodless.
“I told you it was monumentally stupid.”
The drawing room clock ticked. Somewhere down the corridor, Rose let out a small cry that was quickly soothed by Lottie’s murmur. Penelope lowered herself into the opposite chair, her mind racing.
“How?” was all she could manage.
“He wrote to me.” Hyacinth’s voice dropped, as though the walls themselves might carry tales back to London.
“After my visit here. A perfectly proper letter, mind you—he thanked me for the conversation and recommended a book on agricultural philosophy, of all things, because I’d mentioned finding the estate interesting.
And I should have ignored it. Should have burned it and forgotten the entire acquaintance. ”
“But you didn’t.”
“I wrote back.” Hyacinth’s laugh held no amusement whatsoever.
“I told myself it was merely politeness. That there was nothing improper in corresponding with an acquaintance. Then he wrote again, and I wrote again, and somewhere between his thoughts on crop rotation and a rather lovely passage about the way morning light falls across the Kentish hills, I realised I was running to the post tray every morning like a child expecting sweets.” She shook her head.
“His handwriting is terrible, you know. He writes as though the pen has personally offended him. And yet I have read every letter so many times the paper is wearing thin at the folds.”
Penelope’s throat tightened. She knew that feeling—the breathless anticipation of something you hadn’t asked for and couldn’t afford.
The way a person could rearrange your entire day without knowing it, simply by existing.
She thought of Alastair’s footsteps in the corridor, how she’d learned to distinguish them from every servant’s tread without meaning to.
She pushed the thought aside. This was about Hyacinth, not about the man down the corridor whose voice she listened for in every quiet room.
“And the meetings?”
“The first was an accident. Truly.” Hyacinth pulled at a loose thread on her glove.
“I was in the village with Mother, and he happened to be there on estate business. We spoke for perhaps five minutes whilst Mother examined ribbons. Nothing improper. Nothing remarkable.” Her fingers stilled.
“Except that I could not stop thinking about it afterwards. About the way he looked at me as though what I said actually mattered. Not my connections or my dowry or my prospects—just... what I thought. What I felt.”
The thread snapped. Hyacinth stared at the ruined glove as though it had betrayed her.
“Sir Edmund never asks what I think,” she said quietly.
“He tells me what he thinks, and then waits for me to agree. Which I always do, because that is what suitable young ladies do when suitable young gentlemen court them. Last Tuesday he spent forty-five minutes describing the improvements he plans for his Gloucestershire estate. He did not once ask whether I had any opinions on the matter. He did not ask what I would want in a home.” She swallowed.
“He doesn’t actually see me, Penelope. He sees a pleasant face and a respectable name and a woman who will agree with him about wallpaper. ”
Penelope said nothing. She was thinking of Alastair crouching on the nursery floor, asking her about her wish for a quiet life—and actually listening to the answer. Of the way he’d leaned forward, elbows on his knees, as though her words were the most important thing in the room.
“The second meeting I arranged myself,” Hyacinth continued, her voice growing smaller.
“I told Mother I needed new gloves. He met me at the lending library. We talked for an hour about nothing and everything—books, music, the ridiculousness of society’s rules.
He made me laugh so hard I nearly knocked over a display of sermons.
” She bit her lip. “And the third time...”
“Hyacinth.”
“He told me I was the most interesting woman he’d ever met.
” The words came out fractured, barely held together.
“And I wanted to tell him he was being foolish, that I was nothing special, that any number of women would find him perfectly—” She stopped herself.
Drew a breath that shuddered on the way in.
“But I couldn’t. Because no one has ever said that to me and meant it the way he did.
Not as flattery. Not as strategy. Just.. . as truth.”
The room had gone very still. Outside, a breeze stirred the garden, carrying the scent of roses through the open window.
“He has no fortune,” Hyacinth whispered.
“No title. No connections worth mentioning. He is an estate steward, Penelope. My mother would sooner see me enter a convent than marry a man who works for his living. And Sir Edmund is right there—wealthy, titled, everything I said I wanted since I was sixteen years old—and I cannot make myself want him. I have tried. I have listed his qualities on paper. I have reminded myself of his three thousand acres and his excellent teeth and his impeccable reputation, and none of it—” Her voice cracked.
“None of it makes me feel the way I feel when James Crawford talks to me about drainage.”
Penelope reached across the space between them and took her friend’s hand.
The fingers that gripped hers were ice-cold and trembling.
She thought of her own hands, white-knuckled against the edge of Rose’s cradle two nights ago, holding herself in place when every part of her had wanted to step forward instead of back.
“You think I’m being foolish,” Hyacinth said.
“I think you’re being brave.”
Hyacinth’s head snapped up, surprise breaking through the misery on her face. “Brave? I’m sneaking around behind my mother’s back to meet a man with no prospects. That isn’t bravery. That’s madness.”
“Perhaps.” Penelope squeezed her hand. “Or perhaps it’s the first honest thing you’ve done since you decided to approach marriage like a military campaign.”
Hyacinth flinched, but she didn’t pull away. “That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” Penelope’s voice was gentler than her words. “You made a list, Hyacinth. You ranked men by acreage and annual income. You selected Sir Edmund the way one selects a horse at Tattersalls—sound investment, good breeding, likely to hold value.”
“Because that is what sensible women do.” But the conviction had drained from her voice, leaving only the raw question beneath.
“What else is there? Marry for feeling and risk everything? End up penniless and disgraced because you chose a man who made you laugh over a man who could keep you comfortable?”
The question hung between them, and Penelope felt it in her own body with the weight she’d been avoiding for weeks.
What else is there? She thought of rules and boundaries and a marriage of convenience that was beginning to feel like anything but.
Of a man who hid his tenderness with wit, who held a sleeping baby as though she were made of blown glass, who had nearly kissed her in a darkened nursery and then walked away because she’d asked him to.
Who had walked away because she’d asked him to.
“I don’t know,” Penelope admitted, ignoring the way the honesty cut through her defenses. “I don’t know what the answer is. But I know that wanting something real isn’t foolish, Hyacinth. Even when it’s terrifying. Even when it doesn’t fit the plan.”
Hyacinth stared at her. Then, slowly, her composure fractured—not into tears, but into a laugh that was half-sob, raw and startled and real.
“When did you become wise?” she demanded, wiping her eyes with the back of her ruined glove. “You were supposed to be the naive one. The one who believed in love and kept bees and left the practical matters to me.”
“Perhaps I’ve been learning.”
“From whom? Your rake of a husband?” Hyacinth’s gaze sharpened even through her distress, that merciless instinct for observation reasserting itself. “Penelope Hartwell. You’re blushing.”
“I’m not.”
“You absolutely are. Your neck has gone the precise shade of pink it always goes when—” Hyacinth sat forward, her own crisis momentarily abandoned in favour of a far more interesting one. “Oh, good Lord. You have feelings for him. For the Duke.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You do. I can see it all over your face.” Hyacinth’s mouth fell open. “The woman who wanted nothing but a quiet life and a garden full of bees has fallen for London’s most notorious—”
“Hyacinth.” Penelope’s voice came out sharper than she intended. “We are discussing your situation. Not mine.”
Her friend held her gaze for a long, knowing moment. Then she leaned back in her chair, a ghost of her old smile playing at her lips.
“Very well. My situation.” She picked up the ruined glove and examined it as though it contained the answer to everything. “What do I do?”
Penelope opened her mouth to answer—and found she had nothing to offer that wouldn’t condemn her own heart in the process.
Every argument for following feeling over security, every word about choosing what was real over what was safe, would land squarely at her own feet.
She could hear her own voice telling Hyacinth to be brave, and beneath it, the quieter question she refused to ask herself: Then why won’t you?
She was spared by a knock at the door. Lottie appeared, Rose balanced on one hip.
“Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but the little one won’t settle. She’s asking for you.”
Penelope rose, grateful for the interruption—then stopped when she noticed where Hyacinth’s gaze had drifted. Through the drawing room window, crossing the gravel drive with a ledger tucked beneath his arm, walked Mr. James Crawford.
Hyacinth’s face went white, then scarlet.
“He works here,” Penelope said softly. “You knew that.”
“I know.” Hyacinth’s voice was barely audible. “That’s rather the problem.”