Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
“Yes.”
It was out of Tamsin before she placed her hand in his. Before she had finished hearing the question, nearly. She heard herself say it and felt a brief, dizzying surprise at her own certainty. She had settled the matter the moment he asked.
Lord Hartwell stared at her, his eyes wide and his body momentarily stiff.
Perhaps he had not expected such an instant answer, arriving without adornment or even a hint of demurring on her part.
Perhaps she ought to have thought on it rather than speaking with such impulsivity.
Yet as she stared back at him, quite surprised with herself, she found she had no wish to take her acceptance back.
“You have not heard my reasons.” The surprise in his tone was endearing.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Tamsin had spoken on instinct, and she might as well continue to do so.
“I do not require your reasons to know my own mind.” She had not said yes blindly, either, and the practical part of her was already catching up to what she had done.
“Though I do have questions. Concerns, perhaps would be the better word.”
Something in his shoulders eased, as if this—the questions, the concerns—was ground he anticipated and could stand on again.
“Ask them,” he said calmly. “I have given the matter of our union considerable thought.”
“My family.” Tamsin kept her gaze on him.
“If I leave Sycamore Lodge, who manages the younger children? Anne does her best, but she has never been the one to oversee their lessons or their days, she busies herself with social calls and guiding the three girls of an age to marry. Looking after the children has fallen to me for some years now. I cannot simply—” She heard the anxiety in her tone, steadied her voice.
“I will not abandon them to chaos for my own advancement. They are my brothers and sisters, and I love them.”
They had started back toward the gig, his arm offered and her hand resting on it out of habit. Walking made it easier to speak plainly.
Easier than standing still and watching his face for every reaction, anyway.
“The children’s lessons,” Tamsin continued.
“Edward is away at school, but I keep up with his letters from the family. Daisy and George need their mathematics drilled daily or they forget them entirely. Henry barely has legible handwriting.” She heard herself listing each item as she might list household accounts and could not seem to stop.
“Someone must see to it, or they will not be ready when it is time to go away to school. I do not know who that would be, if not me.”
“A governess,” Lord Hartwell said, without hesitation or seemingly any concern.
“A proper one, qualified, paid a fair wage. I have already made inquiries. There is a woman known to my mother—she is well regarded, presently between positions. I can have her installed at Sycamore Lodge within the fortnight, should your father agree to it.”
“You have…already made inquiries?”
Lord Hartwell’s expression remained neutral, yet there was the barest twitch to his lips. “I told you I had given the matter considerable thought.”
Tamsin let that sit a moment, unsettled by how thoroughly he had considered her family before she had agreed to join his. It ought to have felt presumptuous of him…yet it felt instead like relief.
“The household,” she said aloud, before she could examine that feeling too closely.
“My stepmother manages the accounts and the menus, but it is I who—” She paused, searching for the right way to say it.
“It is I who keep the peace, generally. Between the servants. Between Mother and the cook, when there is a disagreement about the management of the table and kitchen. Between the older girls, when Seraphina and Pearl quarrel over nothing at all, which is often. I calm the younger children when they are quarrelsome or distressed. The neighbors, too, I keep in good humor when something unfortunate happens, such as Henry feeding their geese.”
Tamsin halted by the gig and realized he had not yet offered his hand. Indeed, Lord Hartwell was quiet long enough that she glanced up at him.
He was not looking at her. He was looking at nothing, staring downward, his brows drawn together. It was a surprising change to his otherwise always stoic demeanor.
“I had not considered that,” he admitted finally.
“The governess, the finances—those I could plan for. All this is not something I took into account, because such a thing should not, I think, fall to the daughter of a household. Especially where there is a more mature woman in residence. Your father’s wife.
I cannot think this is an issue for you to worry over.
Family management, household management, it belongs to the heads of the house. ”
Tamsin’s stomach twisted. It might be true, but that did not make hearing it from someone outside the family any easier. “Someone must do it.”
“Yes. But it ought not to have had to be you. Not at nineteen, not at five and twenty, not now.” Lord Hartwell paused.
“Perhaps, without you there, your stepmother will find she must take it up herself. It may not happen gracefully, there will be fractures. But I do not think it is yours to carry any longer, not once you are my wife.”
Once you are my wife. She did not examine that phrase too closely either.
“And the finances you mentioned,” she said, because it was the last of it and the hardest, and though it had been said briefly the topic must be examined.
She would rather have it said and done with than carried back to the gig unspoken.
“You must know already that I have little to bring to this arrangement. I have no significant dowry—indeed, until I see the accounts I am unsure if my dowry has been spent. Daphne is to be launched at the Christmas assembly ball, and that alone will strain what funds remain. I would not have you mistake this for—” She twisted her fingers before her even as her lungs tightened.
“I would not have you think I came to this arrangement unaware of what I lack.”
“Miss Mayweather.” Lord Hartwell raised both hands and caught hers, carefully disentangling them to hold one in each of his own. His gaze held her steady. “I am a baron with considerable income and no need of your dowry. I have asked for your hand, not your father’s accounts.”
“That is generous of you to say.” Though hardly practical.
“It is not generosity. It is simply true.” Something flickered across his face—not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. “Though I confess I had not expected to spend my proposal defending the fact that I wish to marry you, and not your family’s money.”
It startled a short laugh out of Tamsin, unexpected and entirely genuine, and for a moment the gravity of everything they had just agreed to lifted enough that she could breathe. “What of our consequence? We have little enough of it.”
That had him keeping hold of one of her hands, guiding her up into the gig. “Your family is generally known and respected in York Society. Your father is a gentleman. Your mother was, and your stepmother is, a lady. I cannot think of any reason to have doubts on that matter.”
Her family’s lack of consequence was, it seemed, of no consequence to him.
Puzzled, Tamsin settled in her seat. He gathered the ribbons and climbed in beside her as though the matter was settled, but it was not. And she had to speak.
“Lord Hartwell.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked up at him, studying his expression.
His fine features. The expensive suit of clothes.
“If my family’s fortunes are of no interest to you, and indeed you intend instead to spend money on them by hiring a governess, then why would you ask me to wed you?
Surely there are other candidates. You cannot pretend, I think, to have fallen deeply in love with me after only two encounters. ”
“Three,” the gentleman corrected. “The first near the walls, with Henry.” His eyebrows gave the slightest tilt upward, and she caught it then—a sense of humor.
Whether it was with himself or the situation, she could not guess.
“And no. I will not claim myself moved by an unlikely, hasty passion. The reason is to my liking, even if no one else understands it.”
“And what is it? Your reason?” She needed to know, to be certain she was not agreeing to a match offered for something she did not have or could not grant. Though there weren’t any great misunderstandings of her family’s situation on his part.
Lord Hartwell took both reins in one hand and laid the other atop hers where they rested in her lap, the touch strangely intimate, yet she did not recoil from it.
“Miss Mayweather, I asked you to be my wife because I have seen and heard evidence to assure me you would be exactly the partner I need going forward. You are thoughtful, practical, and kind. You are respectful of others and resourceful. I am a busy man, tending to the needs of the city, county, and the realm. I have estates and households to manage. Political meetings and responsibilities. A mother in need of a companion.” He gave a gentle squeeze to her hand as his head tilted toward her.
He lowered his voice as he said, “It is past time for me to have a baroness by my side through it all. Past time for me to have a family of my own, including a wife and children. I think you are an excellent choice, from all I know of you.”
The answers were quite practical. And, somehow, that disappointed her. “Oh. I see.”
“But there is one thing more.” He watched her carefully, his gaze shaded by the brim of his hat. “I find that I am curious about you.”
Now that startled her. “Curious?”