Chapter 23 #2
“Aye, likely I am. We savages do.” Magnus did not move.
“She deserves to choose her own husband. That’s all.
Every soul on that lawn gets to choose, the dullest of them, the cruelest, and ye’d deny it to her because it’s convenient to ye.
A man who’d do that to the women in his own house isnae a protector. He’s a jailer with a good tailor.”
Samuel laughed. It was not a pleasant sound.
“How very stirring. Do they teach speeches like that at whatever kirk you attend?” He turned away from Magnus as though the matter were closed, and his hand shot out and closed around Rosaline’s wrist hard.
“Come, Rosaline. We are finished here, and so is His Grace.”
He pulled, and Rosaline stumbled a step.
Magnus stepped between them and the gap in the yews, blocking their path. “Let go of her wrist.”
“I beg your—”
“Ye’re leavin’ marks, Darton.” His voice had dropped to something very quiet. “Let go.”
Samuel did not let go. But he did not pull again either.
In that suspended moment, Magnus looked at Rosaline for the first time since he had come through the yews. Really looked at her, at her burning eyes and her pale face and her brother’s fist around her wrist, and she watched him arrive at a decision she could not read.
“Marry me,” he said.
The garden went silent. Even Samuel had nothing to say for a second.
“Marry me, Rosaline.” Magnus said it again, steadier, as though the second time had cost him less than the first and he had found he meant it more. “Nae a husband found for ye. Nae a wretch at whatever price. Me. Now. Of yer own choosin’.”
“You cannot be serious.” Samuel found his tongue at last, and it dripped with venom. “You? She would sooner marry a footman. My sister is the daughter of an English earl. She will not shackle herself to some savage dragged out of a Highland bog with a borrowed English title. The very notion is—”
“Rosaline.” Magnus did not so much as glance at him. His eyes stayed on hers, steady, certain, and gentle in a way that had no business surviving in that hard face. “Ye have a choice here. Whatever he tells ye, whatever he’s always told ye, right now ye have a choice. And ye can choose me.”
And there it was, the thing Samuel had spent her whole life making certain she never had—a choice. Held out to her across three feet of trampled grass by the Scot her brother had just called a savage, in a garden corner, in the worst and least romantic circumstance she could ever have imagined.
It was still, God help her, the first choice anyone had offered her in as long as she could remember.
Something that had been banked within her for twenty-one years began to burn.
“She will do no such thing.” Samuel was still talking, she realized dimly, still pulling at her wrist, still pouring out his certainties into the air as though they were law. “I will not allow it. I absolutely forbid it. Do you imagine I would ever consent to see my sister thrown away on—”
Rosaline drew in a breath from the very bottom of her lungs and tugged her wrist free of her brother’s hand. It was such a small motion, yet it was the biggest thing she had ever done.
“No,” she said.
Samuel stopped. She had never once told him no, and the word sat in the air between them like something she had thrown.
“You will not answer for me. Not this time.” She turned away from her brother entirely, and looked at Magnus, and found her voice had steadied on the way. “Yes. I choose you, Your Grace. I will marry you.”
Samuel’s composure cracked at last, the color rising ugly in his face. “You ungrateful little fool. You will regret this. I will never permit such a marriage, never, do you understand me? I will see you in a convent before I see you married to that man—”
“Then I’ll make it simple for ye.” Magnus’s voice cut clean across him, and now there was something cold and sharp beneath the quiet.
“Ye consent, gladly and publicly, to yer sister’s betrothal to the Duke of Greythorne.
Or I leave this garden and go to every press in London, and tell them that I ruined her.
That she came to my house alone after midnight.
That it is my doing and she is compromised past saving.
” He tilted his head. “Choose which story London will hear, Darton. A grand match, or ruin. Ye’ve always cared a great deal which story London hears. ”
Samuel went white, then red. “You would never. You would drag your own name through the filth along with hers. No man would—”
“I’m a savage duke, Darton.” Magnus almost smiled. “Ye’ve said so yerself twice this afternoon. I’ve precious little name to protect and a great deal less to lose than ye do. Aye, I’d do it, before the week’s out. Try me and see.”
It hung there between them.
Rosaline watched her brother measure it, watched him look into that calm, hard face for the bluff and fail to find one. She watched him process the possibilities and turn them over in his mind.
He had come up, at last, against an opponent who genuinely did not care what it cost him.
His shoulders dropped a fraction, and when he spoke, his voice had gone flat and venomous.
“Take her, then,” he scoffed, as though she were a chair being sold. “God knows she is the most useless of the three. Let her be your problem, and your embarrassment, and see how you enjoy her ‘horses are very large’ across a dinner table for the rest of your—”
Magnus took one step forward, only one, and the words died in Samuel’s throat.
“Ye’ll want to think very carefully before ye ever speak of her that way again,” Magnus said softly. “Within me hearin’ or out of it. Are we clear, Darton?”
Samuel’s face pinched. The pallor had gone all the way to his lips.
For one vindicated instant, Rosaline watched her brother, who had frightened her for three years, be afraid. And it was Magnus who had done it, without lifting a hand, in the space of a single step.
“You presume a great deal,” Samuel managed, and it came out thin. He drew himself up and reached for the last rags of his dignity. “This is absurd, absolutely absurd, and I will not stand in a garden to be threatened.”
“Then daenae.” Magnus stepped back, easy again, as though nothing had happened.
“I’ll obtain a special license. We’ll have it done quietly, and all London will hear is that the Duke of Greythorne has made a love match with the Earl of Darton’s eldest sister, and ye’ll smile through every word of it.
” He inclined his head, precise, mocking, perfect.
“Congratulations on the connection, Me Lord. It’s a very grand one. Ye must be delighted.”
Then he crossed the little space of trampled grass and stopped in front of her, and for a moment the garden might have been empty of everyone else in it.
“Rosaline.” Only her name, low, pitched for no one but her. “Ye chose. Whatever he says to ye between here and the church, ye keep hold of that. Ye chose.”
“I did.” It came out barely above a breath. “Magnus—”
“Tomorrow.” He said it like a promise being set down where she could reach it. “I’ll call tomorrow, in the front door, in the daylight, and he’ll receive me. Ye’ll nae have to do a single thing alone before then.”
And Samuel, because there was nothing else left for him to do, took Rosaline by the arm once more, gently this time for the crowd’s sake, and drew her back out through the gap in the yews and into the bright indifferent noise of the party, betrothed, both of them smiling, neither of them meaning it.
Rosaline let herself be led. Her wrist still ached where Samuel had gripped it. Her mother’s name still hung in the air behind her like smoke. And somewhere at her back, watching her go, was the man she had just agreed to marry, with four words and a promise of tomorrow.
She had wanted to have a choice her whole life, and she had finally made one, in a garden, out of fury and desperation, with a threat for a wedding ring.
She did not yet know what she had chosen. She only knew, as Samuel’s voice took up its pleasant murmur beside her, that for the first time in a fortnight, she was not afraid of him.
And that nothing after today would ever go back to the shape it had been.