She rested her eyes thoughtfully upon him. “When I came here nine years ago from my father’s home in Lancashire,” she said, “I knew no one. Everything was strange and a little depressing—living in a cottage that seemed incredibly small compared to what I was accustomed to, being alone, working for my living. But the adjustment to a new life was made, and I have been happy here. Now I have freely agreed to another complete change. You have not coerced me in any way. I will make the necessary adjustments. If you are quite sure, that is, now that you have seen me and spoken to me again.”
He was still holding her hand, he realized. He squeezed it and raised it to his lips once more.
“I am,” he said. “Quite sure.”
He wondered what she would say or do if he dipped his head and kissed her lips. She could hardly object—she was now his affianced bride. The shock of that thought caused him to pause, and he wondered for a moment if he really was sure. It was suddenly difficult to picture himself kissing her, making love to her, becoming as familiar with her body as he was with his own. But he did know that he would have been horribly disappointed if she had said no. For it really was not just marriage itself that had come to his mind a few nights ago in London. It was Miss Dora Debbins and the strange, unexpected yearning to be married to her.
“When?” she asked him. “And where?” She bit her lower lip as though she feared she was displaying an inappropriate overeagerness.
He patted her hand and released it, and she sat down again. Rather than loom over her, he resumed his seat too. Idiot that he was, he had not thought much beyond the proposal itself. Or, at least, he had not thought of the actual process of wedding her. His mind had been focused more upon the imagined contentment of the years ahead. Yet he had just been caught up in all the frantic busyness of a wedding and knew it did not just happen without planning.
“Ought I to go to Lancashire,” he asked her, “to speak to your father?” It had not occurred to him until now that perhaps he ought.
“I am thirty-nine,” she reminded him. “My father lives his own life with the lady he married before I moved here. There is no estrangement between us, but he has little or nothing to do with my life and certainly no say in how I live it.”
George wondered about that family situation. He knew some of the facts but not the full reason why she had left home and moved so far away. It was an unusual thing for an unmarried lady to do when there were male relatives to support her.
“We have none but our own wishes to consult, then, it would seem,” he said. “Shall we dispense with a lengthy betrothal? Will you marry me soon?”
“Soon?” She looked across at him with raised eyebrows. And then she lifted both hands and pressed her palms to her cheeks. “Oh, dear, what will everyone think? Agnes? The viscount and viscountess? Your other friends? The people in the village here? I am a music teacher. I am almost forty. Will I appear very . . . presumptuous?”
“I believe,” he said, “indeed I know that my friends will be more than delighted to see me married. I am equally sure they will approve my choice and applaud your willingness to have me. Your sister will surely be happy for you. I am not a bad catch, after all, am I, even if I am nine years older than you? Julian and Philippa—my only nephew and his wife—will also be pleased. I am certain of it. Your father will surely be happy too, will he not? And I believe you have a brother?”
Her hands fell to her lap. “This is all so very sudden,” she said. “Yes, Oliver is a clergyman in Shropshire.” She worried her lower lip again. “We will marry soon, then?”
“In a month’s time if we wait for banns to be read,” he said, “or sooner if you would prefer to marry by special license. As to the where—the choices would seem to be here or in Lancashire or at Penderris or in London. Do you have a preference?”
Her sister and Flavian had married here at the village church last year by special license. The wedding breakfast had been held at Middlebury Park, and Sophia had insisted that the newly married couple spend their wedding night in the state apartments in the east wing there. It had all been lovely, perfect . . . but did she want to do exactly what her sister had done?
“London?” she said. “I have never been there. I was to go for a come-out Season when I was eighteen, but . . . Well, it never did happen.”
He thought he knew the reason. Scandal had almost erupted last year after her sister went to London with Flavian following their wedding. A former fiancée of Flavian’s, who had abandoned him when he was badly injured in order to marry his best friend, was now a widow and had hoped to marry Flavian after all. When she discovered that she had missed her chance, she had dug into Agnes’s past and found dirt there. Agnes’s mother—and Miss Debbins’s—was still living, but her father had divorced her years ago upon the grounds of adultery. It was a spectacular scandal at the time, and even last year it had threatened malicious gossip and social ostracism for Agnes, the divorced woman’s daughter. The ton would have eaten her alive if Flavian had not stepped in boldly and skillfully to handle the situation and avert disaster. That initial scandal would have been happening when Agnes was a child and Miss Debbins a young lady about to make her debut in society. It would have deprived her of all that excitement and, more important, of the respectable marriage she could have expected to result from a London Season, the annual grand marriage mart. She had stayed home instead to raise her sister.