Chapter Fourteen #2
“You may still refuse me,” he said. “You may refuse, and I will still defend you. If you wish to leave Wrenfield, I will make it possible without making you appear dismissed. If you wish to stay only until another respectable position can be found, I will use every proper means to secure it. Marriage is not the price of my protection.”
Something in her expression changed.
“That is an important thing to say.”
“It is also the easier part.” He looked towards the garden sketch because her face made courage less reliable. “The harder part is that I cannot pretend this is only duty.”
The room quieted around the words.
“I am not the gentleman you deserve,” he said. “I am ill-tempered, marked by old grief, and too practised at making my solitude look like principle. None of that recommends me.”
Petalia’s hands tightened, but she did not interrupt.
“I have made mistakes with my children. I have made mistakes in this house. And I have made mistakes where you are concerned.” He looked briefly away. “I thought consideration could remain invisible if I gave it another name. It appears I was wrong.”
The room was quiet.
“You have a dreadful habit of using silence where words would do.”
A corner of his mouth moved.
“Yes.”
“And you do darken rooms.”
“That too.”
For a moment, she studied him.
“But I have never doubted your care for the children,” she said. “Nor your care for this house, however oddly you express it.”
“Oddly?”
“You attempted to apologise with a stale muffin.”
“I had already committed to the muffin.”
“An error in judgment.”
“One of many.”
The faintest trace of amusement passed between them and settled.
Then it faded.
Petalia folded her hands more tightly.
“Lady Maria spoke of marriage.”
“She did.”
“And you did not dismiss it.”
“No.”
The answer settled between them.
“At first,” he said carefully, “I told myself it would be a remedy. An answer to gossip. A way to place my name between you and the county’s appetite.”
“And now?”
“Now I know that would not be enough.” He drew a breath. “If I ask, it must be because I am willing to live inside the answer, not merely use it to silence a question.”
Her gaze did not leave his.
“And are you willing?”
He looked towards Eleanor’s writing table, then back to her.
“I am afraid,” he said. “Of failing you. Of failing the children. Of making grief into a third person at the table and expecting you to dine with it politely.”
“That would be uncomfortable,” she said softly.
“It would be unforgivable.”
She absorbed that.
“I cannot promise grief will never enter the room,” he said. “But I can promise I will not make you apologise for being alive in a house where she died.”
Her face changed.
“That,” she said, “is an important beginning.”
He stood.
Petalia began to rise as well, but he lifted one hand.
“No. You are hurt. Stay seated.”
“If you are about to propose from that height, Your Grace, I shall have to develop a very stiff neck before becoming a duchess.”
He looked at her, then at the chair, and then, with a grimness that made Lady Maria’s mending tremble in the corridor, lowered himself onto one knee.
Petalia’s eyes widened. “I did not mean—”
“No,” he said. “But you were right. A proposal should not be delivered like a command from a fortress.”
His knee ached. He ignored it. Everything about the posture felt theatrical and sincere at once, which irritated him and moved him in equal measure.
“Petalia Winthrop,” he said, and her name in his mouth no longer felt stolen but entrusted.
“Will you marry me, knowing the danger, the haste, the scandal, the children, the grief, and the man who has made a poor business of all of them? Will you enter this with your eyes open, and with my promise that I will not mistake your courage for something I have the right to spend carelessly?”
She looked at him for a long moment.
When she answered, her voice was steady, though not untouched.
“Yes. I will marry you. Not because I am unafraid, and not because the title dazzles me, and not because scandal has left me no other thought. I will marry you because the danger is real, because leaving would not make me safer, and because you have offered protection without making it the price of my obedience.”
Her voice grew quieter, but surer.
“I will marry you because the children matter to me, because you have not asked me to pretend this is simple, and because you have promised I shall not be hurried or spent carelessly. That may not be romance as novels understand it, but it is a beginning I can trust.”
For one moment, he could not speak.
Lady Maria rose in the corridor and then, with heroic restraint, sat down again.
Edmund bowed his head over Petalia’s hand. He did not kiss it. Not yet. The restraint cost him more than the gesture would have. He released her fingers before any witness could make meaning of touch.
Then he stood and held out a key.
“This is for the west morning room,” he said.
“Not because I ask you to become what Eleanor was. You could not, and I would not ask it. But the room should not remain a shrine to my refusal to live. Use it if you wish. Leave it closed if you prefer. Change nothing until you decide. Change anything that must be changed.”
Petalia raised her hand. Their fingers brushed as the metal passed between them, brief enough to satisfy propriety and charged enough to unsettle the ground beneath it.
She looked down at the key in her palm. “I will be careful with it.”
“No,” he said, surprising himself. “Be honest with it. Careful has kept the room dead for six years.”
Her eyes lifted to his.
Whatever passed between them was not yet love, not safely, not fully. It was recognition. It was trust setting down one cautious foot in a room grief had guarded too long.
Lady Maria entered at last, dabbing one eye with a handkerchief she pretended had been used for dust.
“Good,” she said briskly. “Very good. Now that you have both survived honesty, we may proceed to the practical matters.”
“Aunt,” Edmund said.
“Do not object before I have begun. It is inefficient.”
Petalia laughed softly, and this time the pain seemed only faint.
“The children?” she asked.
“Will be told after luncheon,” Lady Maria said. “Gently, honestly, and without making them feel that the schoolroom has been taken from them by treaty. They will be given facts, cake, and time.”
Petalia looked at Edmund. “Together?”
He understood the question beneath the word. They would tell the children together. Face the household together. Enter the next room together.
“Together,” he said.
Lady Maria clapped her hands once. “Excellent. The licence must be arranged, the clergyman warned, Mrs Holroyd must see about a gown that does not torment Miss Winthrop’s burn, Pritchard must prepare the household, and Edmund…”
Edmund turned slowly. “What of me?”
“You,” Lady Maria said, looking him over, “must be made presentable.”
Petalia looked down, but he saw the smile.
For the first time in years, the future did not feel like an insult to the dead.
It felt terrifyingly like a responsibility to the living.