Chapter Five
Dawn rose grey over the square. Nathaniel stood at the breakfast-room window in the coat he had worn the previous evening and watched a lamplighter pass along the railings, his ladder balanced upon one shoulder as he extinguished the lamps one by one.
Nathaniel had not slept. His coat proclaimed the fact, and he had made no effort to conceal it.
At eight, he sent a servant to ask Miss Gray to join him before breakfast.
She entered several minutes later with a book beneath her arm. Her gaze passed from his unchanged clothes to the untouched coffee upon the table.
“You sent for me, Your Grace.”
“I did.”
She placed the book upon the sideboard. “And unless this is your usual appearance before breakfast, you have spent the night arriving at whatever you intend to say. Is aught the matter?”
He had arranged the argument several times during the hours before dawn. Looking at her now, he found that an argument was precisely the wrong thing to offer.
“I wish you to consider marrying me.”
Then, into the silence that followed, “That was not how I meant to begin.”
Selina became perfectly still.
When she answered, her voice was composed. “That is an unexpectedly rapid promotion.”
“It is not a promotion.”
“From scandal to duchess? It has many of the usual features.”
“If scandal were the only reason, I would not ask it.” Nathaniel drew one hand across the back of a chair but did not sit. “The events at Mrs Ottley’s forced me to examine a question I have avoided for several years. They did not supply the whole answer.”
“And what question is that?”
“I am four-and-thirty. I require a wife and, eventually, an heir. I have postponed both because I dislike the usual methods of acquiring them and have met no woman with whom I wished to attempt the arrangement.”
Her eyes remained upon him. “You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“You first met me four days ago.”
“Four days have been sufficient to teach me certain things about you.”
“That I am unemployable and attract scandal with unusual efficiency?”
“That you are a gentlewoman. That you are intelligent, honest when dishonesty would serve you better, and courageous to a degree I find deeply inconvenient. My sister trusts you. You understand this household more clearly after four days than most people have managed in four years.” He paused. “And I am not indifferent to you.”
Something shifted in her expression, but it vanished before he could identify it.
“You have also been denied the protection ordinarily afforded to a woman of your birth,” he continued.
“My name could restore some part of it. You would have a secure home, an independent position within it and no employer empowered to send you away upon a rumour. I would have a duchess whom I respect, a wife whose judgement I trust and, if the marriage proved acceptable to us both, the possibility of an heir.”
“You make it sound remarkably orderly.”
“I have had all night to put it in order.”
She considered this for only a moment. “And the scandal? What effect might an association between my family and yours have upon Georgiana’s prospects?”
“There will be talk. I shall not pretend otherwise. But Rowland has already placed your family name beside mine. Dismissing you would not sever the connection; it would merely suggest that I was ashamed of it. Marriage would make that connection deliberate and place it beneath the protection of my title.” He paused.
“Georgiana would remain a duke’s sister, with her name, fortune and my support behind her.
Any gentleman deterred by the history of her sister-in-law would not have suited her in the first place. ”
“Then you propose to spend your name to bury one evening’s gossip. That is a very large coffin, Your Grace, for a very small corpse.”
“I propose to use my name where it may do some good. And the matter is not small. It concerns my sister.” His gaze held hers. “And you.”
Selina crossed to the window and stood a little apart from him. It was easier to address the glass than his face.
“I will not bind the Duke of Wexford to the daughter of a hanged man merely to repair a difficulty my presence has caused. You received me into your house out of decency, and this is the price that decency has exacted. Dismiss me instead. Give me a character and allow the story to die for want of anyone in this house upon whom it may fasten.”
“You did not cause this.”
“I entered that house.”
“You entered it in pursuit of my sister, whom I had failed to keep at home, because no one else knew where she had gone.” His words came more quickly now that they were no longer rehearsed.
“You did not entrap me. Whatever account you have constructed in which you are the author of my ruin, abandon it. I am offering marriage, not merely shelter. My title may protect you, but it is my home, my family and my future that I am asking you to share.”
She turned from the window and regarded him in silence. Nathaniel allowed her to do so, having reached the end of what he had prepared and found nothing waiting beyond it.
“You have considered my objections,” she said at last.
“Since the carriage.” He drew out a chair. “Sit. If you do not intend to refuse me outright, then do what you do best and make me agree to terms. Now, at dawn, while neither of us has the strength to pretend.”
“You are remarkably certain that I shall not refuse.”
“I am certain of nothing where you are concerned. It is a novel condition, and I dislike it.”
She remained standing for a while. Then she sat, and he took the chair opposite, and they began to construct a marriage as other people might draw up a lease, though neither proved particularly skilled at it.
“Separate rooms,” Selina said. “I understand that an heir forms part of what you are asking, and I am not refusing that part of the marriage. But I will not enter your bed at once, nor be summoned to it as though the ceremony had purchased me. When I am ready, we shall decide together how our marriage is to proceed. If you require more certainty than that, say so now, and I shall take the character instead.”
Nathaniel was silent for a moment. “I will not pretend that an heir is unimportant to me.”
“I have not asked you to.”
“Then separate rooms, for as long as you require them. I shall neither press you nor claim a husband’s privilege before you freely offer it. When you are ready to reconsider the arrangement, we shall reconsider it together.”
“Agreed.”
“I will not be asked for affection I do not feel, nor reproached for its absence. If affection comes, it comes. If it does not, you will not have been cheated, because I promise none.”
“Agreed. You are not to be reproached for what you do not feel, and I am not to expect that, in time, you should…”
He stopped, his jaw tightening.
“That was wrongly expressed. I made it sound as though I were entitled to your affection and magnanimously consenting to do without it.” He looked down at the table. “I am entitled to nothing of the kind. State the term again, and I shall answer it properly.”
“I will not be asked for affection I do not feel.”
“Then you will not be asked.”
The door opened and the tea arrived upon a heavy tray, carried by a footman who had plainly been awake nearly as long as his master. Neither of them spoke as he arranged the cups, the pot and the little jug. He adjusted the fruit knife by half an inch to align it with the cloth, then withdrew.
The door closed. The clock upon the mantel had a loose tick which Selina had not noticed before.
“Georgiana is to remain your sister, not become solely my responsibility. I will guide her where I can, but you must make a greater effort to speak with her rather than merely manage the dangers around her. She appears to have begun mistaking your vigilance for impatience with her, and I suspect that made Rowland’s attention seem more valuable than it was. ”
His mouth moved, and he made no attempt to conceal it. “Agreed.” He turned his cup a quarter turn upon its saucer. “I ought to have understood that without your assistance.”
“You did not.”
“No.”
“And there will be no lies between us. Neither the polite sort nor those intended as kindness. You will not conceal matters from me because I am a woman, and I shall not spare you the truth because you are proud. That is my final term. It is the one about which I care most.”
“No lies between us,” he repeated, as a man might repeat a figure to ensure that he had heard it correctly.
After a moment, and with greater difficulty, he continued.
“There will be a settlement. My solicitor, Petherick, will draw it up. You are to have money of your own, secured to your separate use and entirely at your disposal. You will account to me for none of it; not a farthing, not for any purpose.”
“Yes. Agreed.”
The answer escaped before he had completed the sentence. Selina sat back as though the movement might conceal its haste.
She had answered too quickly. She heard the small, hungry eagerness of it in a room where every other word had been carefully weighed. She reached for the milk jug, though she did not want it, merely to give her hands an occupation.
Nathaniel looked at her for a moment longer than was necessary.
He asked nothing.
“Now hear my term,” he said instead. He leant forward, his forearms resting upon his “Now hear my term,” he said.
“You will not leave this house in order to protect my name without first speaking to me. You have already offered to disappear as though your absence were the simplest answer to every difficulty.”
“You are asking me not to run.”
“I am asking you not to sacrifice yourself for my family and call it practicality. Once we are married, you will not decide alone that we are better served without you.”
Selina set down the unused milk jug. “No lies and no noble disappearances.”
“Precisely.”
The loose tick of the clock continued between them. At last, Selina poured tea, drank a little and replaced the cup upon its saucer. She allowed the clock to complete two slow rounds before she spoke.