Читать книгу Historical Romance June 2017 Books 1 - 4 - Энни Берроуз, Annie Burrows - Страница 28

Chapter Eighteen

Edmund waited until the notice of his forthcoming marriage to Miss Georgiana Wickford appeared in print before calling upon her again. He wasn’t going to give her any opportunity to wriggle free now he’d got her hooked.

Besides which, it turned out that arranging a wedding at short notice required a great many hours of work.

However, he did want to speak to Georgie before the ceremony. He didn’t want her walking up the aisle fearing he had the slightest reluctance to marry her. She had such an expressive face that every member of the congregation would wonder what was amiss. And would start inventing stories that bore no relation to the truth, but would be accepted as gospel simply because the inventor had attended the wedding.

It was a great pity, he mused as he mounted the front steps of her house, three days after he’d invaded her bedroom, that eloping was regarded as being scandalous behaviour. He’d much rather whisk Georgie away and marry her in private.

But on that point both his mother and her stepmother were in accord. Nothing would do for either of them but the biggest, most extravagant wedding that could be arranged in the short time he’d agreed to wait to make Georgie his wife.

‘Good morning, my lord,’ said Wiggins with an avuncular smile as he opened the door. ‘The ladies are all in the drawing room this morning,’ he continued, taking Edmund’s coat, hat, and gloves. ‘I take it you do not require my escort upstairs?’ And then, to his astonishment, the fellow winked.

‘No,’ he said tersely. ‘There is no need.’ He might have imagined it, but he could have sworn the fellow was chuckling as he sauntered off with Edmund’s things.

He mounted the stairs, cursing over-familiar servants under his breath. And was still frowning when he entered the drawing room.

Georgie’s stepmother and stepsister both leaped to their feet and greeted him effusively. Predictably, Georgie sent him a troubled, guilty look before lowering her gaze to a tangle of needlework that lay in her lap.

‘I was hoping,’ he said, once the initial hubbub occasioned by his arrival had died down, ‘that Miss Wickford would be well enough to take the air with me today. I have—’

‘Of course she is!’ Mrs Wickford cut him short. ‘Run along and put on your coat and bonnet, dear,’ she said to Georgie, who rose to her feet with reluctance.

‘I do hope you will not mind, my lord,’ Mrs Wickford added, archly, as Georgie trailed to the door, ‘but Sukey and I will not be coming with you. We are expecting visitors we do not wish to offend by putting off.’

Georgie’s face flushed.

‘I am sure,’ said her stepmother, when it looked as though Georgie meant to voice some sort of objection, ‘that there can be no impropriety in you driving in the park with your betrothed. You will have a groom and footman with you and will be in public view at all times.’

Mrs Wickford must have been looking out of the window and seen the carriage in which he’d driven up to be able to say that. Though she was correct. He’d borrowed his mother’s barouche, again.

‘No impropriety at all,’ he said. Was impropriety even possible, in a barouche? ‘I am glad you understand the necessity for us to appear in public as a betrothed couple, Mrs Wickford, now that the announcement has been made. We do not wish anyone to suspect there is anything irregular about our forthcoming union, do we?’

Georgie shot him an anguished look before, shoulders slumped in defeat, she went off to get ready for their outing.

He sank on to a sofa to wait for her, the inane chatter of her female relatives washing over him as he struggled to maintain an appearance of calm. Though his heart had plunged somewhere below the region of his boots at her hangdog expression. Or even lower perhaps. Downstairs somewhere. Possibly even in the servants’ hall, if it was in that little area whose windows he’d spied when mounting the front steps. Anyway, wherever it had gone, the fact that his heart had done so was extremely annoying.

But then this was the way he’d been ever since managing to clinch the deal with Georgie’s stepmother. Fluctuating wildly from one extreme to the other. One minute he’d be elated at the ease with which he’d managed to snatch her out from under the noses of all her other suitors. The next he’d be ashamed for resorting to such ruthless methods that had left her no choice. But then he’d remind himself that he’d saved her from a fate she’d been dreading. And now nobody would have the right to ‘paw at her’.

Except him.

At which point he’d have a vision of a future in which they slept in separate beds. Or at least she would sleep. He would lie there thinking about her, down the corridor. In her nightgown. With her hair streaming across the pillows...

In fact, over the last few days he’d come to understand why some men drank so much they rendered themselves insensible. It was going to be unbearable having her yoked to him, passively, when he yearned for so much more.

And then the door opened once more and there she was, looking utterly captivating in the carriage dress she’d worn when he’d taken her to Bullock’s Museum, the pink one with all the white fluffy trimming down the front and round the edges of the loose sleeves.

He rose to his feet automatically. Which was just as well. His brain seemed to be taking a holiday.

‘You do have your parasol with you, Georgie, don’t you?’

Mrs Wickford was fussing round Georgie, who was staring back at him across the room as though she, too, was in a daze.

‘You must take more care to protect your complexion, what with the wedding taking place so soon and the sun deciding to shine today. And you will be in an open carriage, don’t forget.’

Her lips compressed at the mention of the vehicle. And he suddenly wondered if he ought to have made time to go and buy himself a phaeton, so that he could have driven her himself.

His heart beat erratically as he led her downstairs and out on to the street as his mind frantically seized upon, and then rejected, excuse after excuse. But in the end, only honesty would suffice.

‘I know,’ he said, his cheeks heating as he handed her into the low-slung vehicle, ‘that we are not exactly going to cut a dash, driving about in this carriage, but you have to admit it does make it easy to sit and converse. Which was my intention.’

Georgie gave him a quick frown as she took her seat and arranged her skirts. ‘There is no need to apologise for being who you are. I know you have never wanted to cut a dash, as you put it. In fact, I would have thought you despised the kind of young men who thought of nothing else.’

His spirits sank. ‘In short, you find yourself about to be shackled to a very dull dog.’

Her eyes widened in surprise. ‘You are not dull. At least,’ she amended, ‘I have never found you so.’

‘Thank you,’ he said glumly, since he didn’t believe her. For, after all, wasn’t it his very dullness that had made her propose to him in the first place? If he only had ink running through his veins, rather than red-hot blood, then she didn’t need to fear he would ravish her, did she?

‘It has never bothered me before,’ he said as they set off, ‘what anyone thinks of me. But I do not want you to find me...lacking, in any way.’ A sweat broke out on his upper lip when he realised he’d almost admitted that he didn’t like the image she carried of him, or the hopes she cherished for a bloodless union, in which she probably saw him taking a kind of brotherly role. Fortunately, he’d stopped himself in the nick of time. He must absolutely not alarm her by telling her exactly how hot his blood ran, sometimes, when his thoughts turned in her direction. Or his eyes did.

‘Edmund?’ She looked at him with concern. ‘Surely you know that I would much rather you carry on being yourself than trying to ape the antics of any of those idiots who think they are dashing. Though, actually,’ she said with a curl of contempt to her lips that made them look even more kissable than usual, ‘dashing is a good word to describe them, for they do tend to go dashing about in their high-perch phaetons, don’t they, terrifying innocent pedestrians and drivers of market carts? Or racing down to Brighton, to win a stupid wager. Or prancing about in the park on a showy piece of rubbish Papa would never have permitted in his stables. Or dressing themselves up like peacocks and strutting round with smug looks on their faces, expecting every female in the vicinity to swoon in admiration.’ She was breathing rather fast by the time she’d finished unburdening herself of her view of the male of the species.

And he was feeling even more diminished than he had when he’d handed her into his mother’s barouche.

‘Yes,’ he said in a hollow voice. ‘I would regard acting in any such way as completely frivolous.’

‘Exactly,’ she said with an approving smile. ‘You don’t strew your conversation with fatuous, insincere compliments, either, about the lustrous sheen of my hair, or the sparkle in my eyes, without once taking your own gaze higher than my...’ She made a gesture to the front of her coat.

What had she made, then, of the compliments he had paid her? How had she felt when he’d told her she looked magnificent in that gown which had been practically falling off her shoulders?

And hadn’t he told her she had lovely hair and eyes himself? In Bullock’s Museum? ‘Would you prefer it if I didn’t pay you any more compliments, then? I would not wish to make you...uncomfortable.’

She gave him a strange look, then turned her head to regard the shop windows that edged the street through which they were driving.

After a short pause during which he held his breath, she turned back to him. ‘You would not make me uncomfortable, Edmund. Because I know you would never say anything you did not mean.’

‘Never,’ he vowed on a rush of exhaled breath.

She smiled at him. In a way that made his heart turn over, as well as making him long to crush her to his chest and kiss her in such a way that she would know exactly how dashing he could be.

‘Because,’ she continued, ‘we are...friends again, aren’t we?’

‘Friends,’ he echoed.

‘Yes. I...I missed that. This. Very much when we...weren’t. Having someone to talk to.’

‘Talk to.’ Well, that neatly summed up exactly what was wrong between them. While she was thinking of their marriage in terms of having a friend to talk to, he was longing to get his hands on her bare flesh. To sink into that bare flesh. Over and over and over.

‘Yes. The only times that I haven’t been utterly miserable, since I came to London, were the times I spent with you.’

‘But we hardly had a polite word to say to one another.’

‘I know.’ She grinned up at him. ‘You cannot imagine how wonderful it was to just...let go of all the etiquette and be myself.’

‘Hmmm.’ Well, that was something.

‘And you always manage to make me see the funny side of things.’

So now he not only had ink running through his veins, but he was also some sort of clown?

Georgie certainly knew how to cut a man down to size.

‘At least you appear to be reconciled to the notion of marrying me,’ he said.

‘Ye...es...’

‘What is it?’ He turned to study her pensive face, ignoring the lady who was hailing him from a landau bowling along in the opposite direction. Because if Georgie had any doubts, now was the time to quash them. ‘Come now, Georgie, this was the whole point of bringing you out for a drive. So that we could talk to each other. We never had time, did we, before your stepmother burst in upon us, to settle things.’

‘Well, no, and I’m sure you didn’t want to settle things that way, did you? I mean, you had to tell her you were in the process of proposing. It was the only thing to say, wasn’t it? But, um...’

He seized her hand. At last, she’d given him the opening he needed to explain what he’d been planning. ‘Georgie, you cannot imagine I came up to your room with any other motive except to propose?’

‘What? But—’

‘Your stepmother did not coerce me into making a proposal. I simply decided—’ He drew in a short, sharp breath. She’d just made it clear, yet again, what she wanted from marriage. He couldn’t scare her by telling her that her vision of marriage sounded to him like a form of torture. That he didn’t want to be just her friend, he wanted to be her lover.

‘I decided I had to make amends,’ he temporised. ‘For the way I let you down, when you needed me to get you out of having to endure a Season at all. It didn’t take me long to see that your suitors were all making you wretched. That you would be even more miserable if you had to marry any one of them. And I couldn’t bear watching you suffer a moment longer.’

‘So, you decided to...mount a rescue?’

‘Exactly so.’ She still looked confused, so he hastened to explain, ‘I had meant to tell you, at some stage, that should you not find a suitable husband by the end of the Season, that I would agree to enter into the kind of marriage you proposed to me. That day. Your stepmother’s intervention has just brought that, um, event forward.’ He patted her hand.

‘But—’

‘I promised I would always be your friend. And what sort of a friend would I be if I were to stand back and watch you embark on a life of misery?’

‘I...I d-don’t know,’ she said, looking stunned.

‘By then, as well, I had pretty much worked out what happened when I was sent away to St Mary’s. I could see that you were still the same person, basically, as you had always been. Loyal and loving. You could not have broken your word to a lonely boy, sent so far away from home.’

‘No. I didn’t,’ she said indignantly. ‘And I don’t think Stepmama realised just how dreadful it must have been for you. She explained it to me, the other night. The Countess stressed, you see, that she had to turn me into a proper lady. And gave her a whole list of errors into which I’d fallen. She dropped the fact that I should learn that it wasn’t appropriate for a girl to write secretly to a gentleman into the list.’

‘But...my tutor...’

‘Oh, I’m sure he prevented our letters reaching each other at first. Stepmama was a second line of defence. If you had ever managed to smuggle a letter past your guard dog, then she would have intercepted it at the other end.’

‘She is nothing if not efficient.’

‘Which brings me to something I really wanted to ask you about.’

‘What is it?’

‘Your mother’s reaction to the discovery that she has not been able to keep us apart, after all. She must be furious to learn that all her plans came to nothing in the end. Is she? Very angry?’ Georgie shook her head, making the feathers on her bonnet bob wildly. ‘Of course she’s angry. She must be livid.’

‘Not as angry as you might suppose. At least, not by the time I finished with her.’

‘Oh, Edmund,’ she said, her face lighting up. ‘What did you do? What did you say?’

It did something to soothe his wounded sensitivity that she looked up at him with complete trust that he had, in fact, done something.

‘I simply pointed out to her that I was finally doing what she had been urging me to do ever since I came down from Oxford. She has not ceased to remind me of my duty to ensure the continuance of the line. She wastes no opportunity to thrust some eligible female or other under my nose.’

‘Yes, I can understand that she wishes you to marry somebody. But not me. I mean, else why would she go to all that trouble to separate us?’

‘Ah,’ he said, removing his spectacles and reaching for a handkerchief as he considered how best to word the next part of his confession. ‘It turns out,’ he said, polishing his lenses with painstaking care, ‘that her worries on that score were more in the nature of us creating a scandal due to our, or at least your, extreme youth. She did not, in short, want the family name tarnished by an illegitimate child, conceived when you would have been far too young for anyone to credit you knew what you were doing.’

‘What? She really thought that you could...’

He could see her waving her arms about. Fortunately, without his spectacles, he was unable to see the look of disgust on her face. For disgust she must surely feel, at discovering that people had suspected his feelings for her, back then, had been far from pure.

He cleared his throat. ‘I have convinced her that you will make me a suitable wife. She has agreed to vacate the London house, and Fontenay Court, and base herself in the dower house.’

‘Oh, but I couldn’t turn her out of her own home. She will hate me!’

‘Georgie, it is well past time my mother stepped down from the role she has played virtually all my life. This is the perfect opportunity for me to take the reins from her grasping fingers, without her losing face. An opportunity I have sought for some time. I need you to stand with me in this. Staunchly.’

‘Well, if you say so, Edmund, then of course I will do so, only...’

He replaced his spectacles to see her chewing on her lower lip. ‘Out with it. What is troubling you?’

‘Well, only that I haven’t been brought up to run a household, the way she has done. Stepmama has taught me how to behave like a lady, as far as she is able, but she isn’t a...a lady of Quality, is she?’ Her cheeks flushed prettily. ‘And obviously, she has no experience herself of the way things are done in grand houses, so—’

‘To quote you a little earlier, all you have to be is yourself. Although—’ his mind worked swiftly ‘—I believe it may help my mother to accept her diminished role if you were to ask her advice, from time to time.’

‘Would she give it? I mean, I’ve always thought she hated me.’

‘She may have, possibly, hated your being the catalyst that forced her to send me away,’ he conceded. ‘But...’ he cleared his throat, which suddenly felt very tight as he launched an oblique approach to the most awkward issue that lay between them ‘...she is now of the opinion that, actually, you are a practical choice for me, in at least one respect. You are so full of energy, as a rule, that she is convinced your health will go a long way to counteracting the lack of vigour she claims has dogged the last two generations of earls. She foresees you presenting her with half-a-dozen healthy grandsons.’

‘How silly of her.’

He flinched. ‘Yes, but—’ He was about to explain that he had been trying to spare Georgiana any unpleasantness by not telling his mother that their marriage was to be in name only. In that way, when no children appeared, she would blame him for being unable to father them. His shoulders were broad enough to take the blame.

But while he was collating the appropriate words to explain this, Georgiana had half-turned to him, her eyes sparkling with indignation.

‘No, Edmund. It simply isn’t true, is it? I mean, when you were a boy, you never had any ailments that every other child in the village didn’t have, did you? And...you were never as ill as the rumours would have it, either. When I got in to see you, I was always surprised that you weren’t at death’s door, after what I’d heard. I never saw you delirious with fever, or gasping for breath, or anything like that.’

He blinked. For some reason she now saw him as being full of health and vigour, of being capable of siring half a dozen sons, did she? When she wasn’t prepared to give him the opportunity to do so? When, to begin with, she’d practically accused him of not being a Real Man at all.

‘Which is why I put it the way I did.’

‘Put what how?’

‘When I mentioned the lack of vigour she claims has dogged the last two generations of earls.’

‘Well, your father certainly wasn’t lacking in vigour, either, was he?’

Either? So it was true. She did see him differently, now.

Was that a good thing, or another obstacle he’d have to overcome?

‘My father,’ he said drily, since he couldn’t very well speak about the questions she was raising in his mind, ‘as you seem to be aware, simply preferred being vigorous in any woman’s bed but my mother’s. Which contributed to her almost obsessive devotion to my health.’

‘A case of having all her eggs in one basket?’

‘Very perceptively put.’ But then Georgie always was quick on the uptake. ‘I also discovered, recently, that my father had been urging her to send me to school. I always assumed he took no interest in my welfare, but now I wonder if the reason he made no objection to my eventual removal from Fontenay Court was that he saw my exile to a more moderate climate as a chance for me to escape her...smothering, and experience something more regular, for a youth of my age.’

‘But...surely, as your father, it was his right to decide whether you should go to school, or not?’

‘Ah.’ He wished he hadn’t already polished his spectacles now. He had nothing to do with his hands. ‘As I said, I always assumed he took no interest in my welfare. However, it turns out that my parents struck a sort of bargain. Which was, in short, that so long as I lived, he would leave her alone. She in turn would make no attempt to interfere with his hedonistic lifestyle.’

‘Golly,’ she said, her hold on her parasol slackening to the extent that it almost went overboard. She rescued it just before it struck a horseman heading in the opposite direction. Turned in her seat to make her apologies as the gentleman in question brought his startled mount back under control.

‘It cost her dearly, to send me away,’ he said, once Georgie was paying attention again. ‘For all her faults, I truly believe she was attempting to do her best. For my health. And for your reputation. She was so afraid I was going to turn out like my father. I look so very like him, you see...’

‘Oh, Edmund, no! You are nothing like that.’ She reached out and took his hand. If only they hadn’t been in an open carriage, bowling along in a public park, he’d have seized it and carried it to his lips.

‘The point is,’ he forced himself to say instead, ‘you need have no fear of her reception. When next you meet, she will greet you with open arms. So to speak. The only thing is...’

‘Yes? What?’ She clutched his hand a little tighter.

‘She may well speak to you in terms of...bringing new blood to the line. She is still more than a little obsessed with the lineage. Which is why I thought it only fair to warn you. Because I do not want you to think that I regard you in the light of a—’

‘A brood mare?’

‘Exactly. I mean, nothing of the kind! Georgie, I am not going to demand my conjugal rights immediately, you need have no fear of that.’

She removed her hand from his and placed it, curled up, in her lap. ‘No,’ she said in a small, defeated voice. ‘I don’t fear that.’

Though, for once, he wasn’t at all convinced she was telling the truth.