Chapter Ten
Avid horsewoman.
Prefers the countryside to the city.
Enjoys reading.
Loves children and dogs.
Kate supposed they weren’t the most ridiculous of requirements, nor even the shallowest. Elliot could have listed any number of things, from the superficial to the profound, and yet this short list was far less offensive than it might have been.
Still, there was some part of her that wanted to take offense anyway.
Was this what wife-hunting boiled down to in the end?
Four small requirements, which might apply to any number of women?
It was better, she supposed, than choosing a woman only for the fairness of her face or the shapeliness of her figure, but only fractionally.
But was it better that those four small requirements might apply to any number of women?
If Rebecca’s dinner party had been anything to judge by, there would be a great many women lining up for the mere possibility of becoming the future Lady Elliot Holbrook.
Just the thought of it was unsettling. Every unmarried woman present had been vying for even a sliver of his attention, and she—
For a moment there, as she had found herself relegated to the fringes of the group that had coalesced around him, she had felt rather…lonely. In such a crowded room, she had felt lonely. Bereft. Like she’d somehow lost something terribly important and precious in only the space of a few seconds.
Kate shook her head to clear it of the strange notion and rolled her shoulders to relieve the knot that had woven itself between them as she and Elliot had conversed only moments ago.
Then, from her perch beside Mama in the curricle she’d climbed into as Elliot had gone to retrieve the horses, she pressed the ruined tip of the pencil to the page of the notebook opened upon her lap and wrote in a thick, black scrawl: Kind.
There. Her own requirement, because his wife would have to be a kind woman.
Elliot deserved that in his marriage. A wife not given to rages or sulks; one who would be gentle with him, because he was a more sensitive and tender-hearted soul than most men she had known.
He needed the sort of wife that would celebrate that rare quality, and never try to crush it out of him.
And patient. Kate’s pencil flew across the page as she added the word to the list. Any woman who married him would need to be possessed of a great quantity of patience, for he was ever the joker, ever the comedian.
Which was…quite a lovely quality, most of the time.
It made him an amusing companion, clever and quick-witted as he was.
Even on those occasions where Kate had most wanted to throttle him, it had almost always been with a helpless laugh caught somewhere in her throat.
One couldn’t help but to be amused by him—or at least, his wife ought to be.
A keen sense of humor, she scribbled in.
That was critical, really. For both Elliot’s happiness, and his future wife’s sanity.
What else? Kate tapped the tip of her pencil to the page, her brow furrowing in thought.
Loyal, she decided. Of course anyone would wish one’s spouse to be loyal, but Elliot particularly, she thought.
Despite the frustration he often evinced toward his brothers, and his tendency to purposefully irk both of them, he had a great deal of love and respect for them.
And he was close with his mother. Though the dowager duchess had spent much of the last several years traveling, Kate knew that she and Elliot exchanged frequent letters.
Elliot would want his wife to have strong ties to her own family—and no doubt to develop a fondness for his.
A woman he can love. The thought traipsed through her mind, but the pencil remained stationary upon the page as if it had been glued there.
She didn’t want to write it down, didn’t want to make herself responsible for it.
Her fingers froze, cramping up and aching.
She let the pencil drop to flex her fingers free of the painful sensation, and it rolled to the center of the notebook, nestling between its spread pages.
A lacy white handkerchief dangled before her eyes. “Here you are, dear.”
Kate gave a muted shriek of surprise, her heart pounding in her throat.
In these last few moments as she’d been furiously thinking and scratching out requirements, she had forgotten entirely that she was sitting in a curricle in the midst of a public park, with Mama at her side.
“Thank you, Mama,” she said as she accepted the handkerchief. “What is it for?”
“You’ve become terribly flushed,” Mama confided softly. “You’re sweating just a bit, darling. Is it too hot? Shall I ask Lord Elliot to return us home?”
Sweating? Surreptitiously, Kate patted her forehead, feeling the cloth whisk away the mist of sweat that had gathered there.
Where had it come from? The day was warm, but not so warm that she had felt overheated.
The breeze that wafted by ought to have precluded such a thing, anyway.
“Thank you,” she murmured again, as she patted her cheeks just to be safe. “I’m fine, Mama, truly.”
Mama’s lips pursed, and behind the lenses of her spectacles, her eyes studied Kate’s face as though searching for hints of deception.
“You’re certain? You don’t look it.” Mama’s gaze dropped to the book resting upon Kate’s lap.
“What have you got there that has put that particular expression upon your face?”
What expression was that, exactly? Kate’s hands folded over the notebook, feeling somehow embarrassed. “Elliot bought a notebook for me,” she said as she worried her lower lip between her teeth.
“He did? Whatever for?”
“To take notes,” Kate said dryly. And then, as Mama slanted her a look of purely motherly annoyance, Kate admitted, “On the qualities that he desires in his future wife. I can only surmise that I am meant to create a page for each lady under consideration to assess them for their potential—er, wifely aptitude.” Per his requirements…
with the addition of a few of her own, as he had insisted her opinions were of such importance to him.
“My goodness.” Mama blinked, entirely bewildered. “And you agreed to this?”
Kate grimaced and ducked her head. “He is my dearest friend, and he has asked for my help,” she said.
But the prospect was not particularly appealing, for some odd, unknowable reason.
Perhaps several of them, all tangled up in a ball in her mind like a mess made of fine yarn.
Detangling those separate skeins would require time, effort, and attention, and she had the sinking suspicion that there would soon be little enough of all three to put toward it.
“He doesn’t want to marry a woman he hardly knows, or someone who might turn out not to suit. ”
“I cannot fault him there. Marriage is the most important undertaking of one’s life. All of one’s future depends upon choosing the right spouse.”
Kate threw up her hands. “He wants me to pick his wife!”
“Remarkably prudent of him,” Mama observed mildly, folding her hands in her lap, the hint of a smile tugging at the right-hand corner of her lips.
“Mama!” Kate chided.
“All I meant to imply, dear, is that you have always been sensible. Thoughtful, practical, and discerning—and Lord Elliot has known you long enough to be entirely aware of these qualities of yours. Probably he had deduced that he could hardly hope to do better on his own than you might.”
Kate rolled her shoulders again, striving to ease that wretched knot of tension that lingered still between her shoulder blades.
Her hands drifted down from their agitated lift, settling back over the notebook.
“I don’t know, Mama,” she said, grimacing as she looked down at the notebook sheltered beneath the cage of her fingers.
“I thought I was meant to—to advise him, or something of that nature.” Like any friend would do, to offer an opinion when it was solicited of her.
“But to choose the woman myself…I just don’t know. What if I choose wrong?”
“Darling,” Mama laughed, patting Kate’s hand with her own. “That will not happen. Besides, Lord Elliot is unlikely to marry a woman for whom he has no liking, regardless of your opinion of the woman.”
Mama was right, of course. It wasn’t as if Elliot had to marry a woman of Kate’s choosing. If he did, it would be only his own choice, because he had developed a fondness for her. Perhaps even because he had found a kindred spirit in her.
A woman he could love.
Perversely, the thought—which by all accounts ought to have been reassuring—only served to twist that knot in her back even tighter. As she strove to find a more comfortable position, her gaze lifted from the notebook, searching for Elliot amongst the throngs of people milling about the park.
She found him some distance away. He had been easy to spot, with his mop of unfashionably-long gold hair fairly glowing beneath the sunshine as the breeze ruffled the once-tidy strands. He and the footman were managing the horses, leading them back toward Kate and Mama.
Two women—a mother and a daughter, Kate thought—walked beside him, matching his sedate, leisurely pace. There was a proper distance set between them, but it was obvious they had been conversing.
Elliot was smiling. That dimple which often appeared in his cheek when he was amused was visible even at this distance. Kate’s hands flexed above the surface of the notebook on her lap, her nails finding those same impressions they had left only minutes ago and sinking into them once more.
Oh, Lord. This was it, then. The strange and unusual courtship of Lord Elliot Holbrook had begun in earnest.
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