Chapter 22
“We’re going to attend the Staffordshire ball in a few weeks,” Leonard announced over breakfast a few days later.
Prudence looked up from her toast. “When you say we, do you mean you and me?”
“Who else would I mean?” He raised an eyebrow. “Do you think this is my way of telling you I plan to take Mrs. Mills to Staffordshire?”
“Well, no, of course not,” she said. “But I’m rather surprised to hear that you intend to take me as well. We hadn’t discussed attending any of the season’s events together. What changed?”
“Now that I won’t be moving to the country, we have to think about our image,” he told her.
“The honeymoon period is over, and people will expect to see the two of us emerge into the public eye. Staffordshire will be our first opportunity to do so, and we need to have a conversation about what that’s going to look like. ”
“What it’s going to look like?” Prudence repeated, setting her toast down slowly. “I’m not sure I know what you mean. Did you have something in mind that you wanted me to wear?”
“Well, now that you mention it, we should have a conversation about your wardrobe,” he agreed.
“I’d like you to appear in the latest fashion.
It’s a good way to make the sort of impression we want on society.
But that will be easy enough to arrange.
I’ll send someone out to pick something up for you.
What I really need to discuss with you is the way we need to present ourselves at the ball. The way we want to be perceived.”
“How do we want to be perceived?” she asked slowly, her eyes narrowing as if in suspicion that he was going to say something she wouldn’t like.
Maybe he was. He had no idea how this conversation might go over. “We need to make sure that everyone thinks we’re a very happily married couple,” he explained.
“We aren’t unhappy,” she said.
He wasn’t prepared for the way that simple sentiment would affect him, sending a shiver through his nerves.
“We’re not,” he agreed. “But I want them to think we’re in love and desperately so.
I want people to believe we’ve spent the honeymoon holed up together, unable to let one another go.
I want them to look at us and have no doubts about how in love we are. ”
“Why is this so important?” Prudence asked. “I doubt very much whether anyone will be thinking about the two of us this much anyway?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Or, I don’t know, perhaps you wouldn’t.
You ought to know as well as anybody how nosy the ton can be, and how excited by gossip.
If they can find something to criticize us for, they will.
And we can never allow ourselves to forget the fact that we are keeping a secret from everyone. ”
He saw confusion cloud her eyes; she had forgotten.
Or, if not forgotten, she had at least allowed other things to become so important to her that she hadn’t kept it at the forefront of her mind.
“The circumstances of our marriage,” he reminded her.
“The fact that you were originally intended to marry my brother, and then that changed.”
“When he left me at the altar, you mean.”
Was she being deliberately pointed with him? “Yes, that’s what I mean,” he agreed. “The point is that we don’t want to allow anyone else to find out about that. We would both be disgraced, and so would Peter.”
“I never knew you were this worried about the idea of Peter being disgraced,” she said.
“I mean, it’s come up several times since we married, but before that day, I would never have guessed it could be so important to you.
Surely a grown man can manage his own affairs without his brother tending to everything?
Why does he need you to worry about this on his behalf? ”
“I would have thought you would understand,” Leonard observed. “This is how it is in your family. Am I correct? Your sisters are always looking out for one another?”
“Yes, but that’s different,” Prudence argued.
“I don’t quite see how.”
“Because my sisters and I… forgive me, but we like one another a great deal,” she said. “I would do anything for them, and they for me. They don’t just care for me because they’re worried about damage to my reputation—but that seems to be the way you feel about Peter. Am I wrong?”
“My relationship with my brother is a complicated one,” Leonard objected. He wasn’t in the mood to try to explain things to her. “The point is that we don’t want people to realize that the original arrangement was between you and him. That wouldn’t make you look very good either, you know.”
“I’m not worried about how I look.”
“Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear. In any case, will it hurt you so very much to try to go along with what I’m asking of you here? You can manage it, surely?”
“I’m happy to try to cooperate,” she agreed. “Tell me what you want.”
“It’s fairly straightforward. We’ll attend this ball and act like a couple in love,” he explained. “That means that we’ll keep close to one another all evening. We’ll dance together, look into one another’s eyes, and in general put on a display of being deeply infatuated with each other.”
“It doesn’t bother you that such a display would be dishonest?” she asked him.
He laughed lightly. “No one is more dishonest in all the world than the people who attend these functions,” he said. “I have no compunctions about lying to them, especially when it comes to my personal life.
What he didn’t say, though he couldn’t help thinking it, was that it wouldn’t be such a lie as it might have been.
He was very fond of Prudence, even though he found her deeply maddening.
Pretending to be in love with her might not be entirely truthful, but it wouldn’t be as if he was pretending to be in love with someone he despised either.
He liked her. That would be easy enough to show to people.
“All right,” she said. “If it’s that important to you, we can put on this act.”
“It is important,” he said. “And if we play our parts well, we’ll have them convinced that this is the reason we married. Not out of any desire to control a scandal but simply because we loved one another so much that a marriage was the only solution we could come up with.”
“Solution,” she laughed. “As though love was a problem that needed to be solved.”
“Maybe it is,” he said quietly, immediately hoping she hadn’t heard.
If she did, she said nothing about it and simply picked up her tea and sipped it slowly. When she put it down, she had a thoughtful expression on her face.
“Simply attending one ball isn’t going to do, is it?” she asked. “One ball isn’t going to make this point sufficiently.”
“No, it won’t,” Leonard agreed. “There will have to be many balls. We’ll have to see out the whole season and let everyone know just how strongly we feel for one another.”
“It’s a good thing you’re not going to the country, then,” she said mildly. “Tell me, what was the plan when you thought you would be going? How did you intend to show people that our marriage was real and born of love back when you thought you would be gone for the season?”
It was only a matter of time, he supposed, before this question came up.
“I would have hoped that people would come to a different conclusion if I was forced to go,” he said.
“I’d have hoped they would assume I had left for work, rather than out of any dissatisfaction with our marriage.
That would have been the official story, of course, and there would have been some truth to it.
I was never unhappy with you or leaving to get away from you in any way.
I simply thought we might both appreciate our freedom…
you know, before I realized that I didn’t trust you. ”
“You’ll never stop bringing that up, will you?”
“It’s only been a few days,” he protested. “Am I expected to have forgotten it already?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I do know that, whether it’s days or years, you will continue to bring it up forever. You will always have something to say about me and about how scandalous I am, and that’s the reason you had to stay here.”
“Well, perhaps you’re right,” he murmured. “And you’re certainly right that one ball isn’t going to be enough to prove to anyone that we have the kind of marriage I want them to believe we have. So, yes, we’ll be attending many events this season.”
“In which case I will ask for a new wardrobe,” she told him.
“I’d very much like something in lavender.
And instead of sending someone to do the shopping, I would like to do it myself.
Perhaps I could go into town with my sisters?
We would have a very good time together.
I think that would encourage me to be prepared for the kind of season you’re hoping to see me have.
I’d be more than ready to convince anyone who was paying attention that I’m madly in love with my dear husband. ”
She gave him a witchy smile, and he couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing. “You know how to play your cards.”
“That’s an important thing for a young lady to know,” she agreed. “What do you say? May I do my own shopping?”
“As long as you’re escorted. If I let you go to town on your own, you’re liable to open up a pub or something.”
Now she was laughing. “I wouldn’t open up a pub!”
“Yes, I’d like to think you wouldn’t, and yet at every turn, you seem to surprise me by doing something I would never expect you to do,” he said.
“The lesson I have learned is that if I want any hope of keeping you under control, I must do it myself. So, you may go into town as long as you have one or both of your sisters with you. Do you accept the terms?”
“Yes, yes, I accept them,” she agreed with a smile. “I wasn’t going to do anything untoward anyway. I really do just want to buy gowns, and that will be made enjoyable by my sisters’ presence. I’ll be happy to go with them.”
“Good, then,” Leonard said. “I’ll see to it that you have the money you need.
You make arrangements with your sisters for a date and time—sometime soon so you’ll have something new to wear to Staffordshire—and then you’ll be taken care of.
If we continue to take these matters seriously, there’s no reason we can’t have a very effective season that meets our goal of showing everyone in London that we have a good and valuable marriage and that there is nothing here to look twice at. ”
“That’s very businesslike of you,” Prudence observed.
If she meant that as an insult, he wasn’t going to receive it as one. “I try to be efficient and practical in everything I do,” he told her. “This is no different.”
“All right,” she agreed. “Is that all?”
“Are you done eating?”
“I’d like to go and see what trouble I can get into today.”
She winked at him mischievously, and he was almost certain that she had been joking. Surely, she had to be joking. She wouldn’t try something foolhardy again so soon after the last time.
Either way, she was gone before he could try to stop her.