“And it is out of the question to go to your half brother?”
“Yes,” she said.
John would perhaps not literally refuse her admission to the vicarage if she turned up on his doorstep, but he would certainly make it clear that she was unwelcome, that she could not stay there beyond a few nights at the longest.
“Forgive my impertinence,” Sir Benedict said, “but do you not have an independence? Can you not set up on your own somewhere?”
She stared blankly at him. Her father had left her a small legacy, which Matthew had appropriated. He had left her with a small income, enough for her personal needs since she had never been extravagant. But enough with which to set up her own establishment? She did not know and had never wondered. She had relied upon Matthew’s assumption that his father would be happy to leave her at Bramble Hall. Oh, how foolish of her. How foolish! She ought to have been making plans. But what plans?
“I could not stay anywhere close to here,” she said, “where at least I have some friendly acquaintances and some sense of belonging. Rudolph and Patience will be at Bramble Hall within a fortnight. They would make life very difficult for me if I remained here in defiance of my father-in-law’s express wishes. And I could not return to the village where I grew up. I had a few friends there, but on the whole I was not well accepted because my mother was not. As for anywhere else, well, I do not know anywhere.”
She swallowed awkwardly. She was suddenly very frightened. The world seemed a vast and hostile place. Whatever was she going to do?
“Starting a new life is never easy,” he said, “especially when there is no obvious base of operations. You have the rest of today and tomorrow, then, to think of an alternative to Leyland Abbey.”
“I cannot go there.” She set down her cup and saucer and gripped one arm of the sofa. “I will not. Though I may not have a choice if I am right about those servants the earl has sent. They are all large, severe-looking men. However it is, though, I have to leave Bramble Hall. I expected it to be my home for the rest of my life. It is what my husband expected.”
She dipped her head forward in an attempt to cling to consciousness. Tramp whined. She was going to be homeless. And friendless.
“I must count my blessings,” she said, smoothing a hand over the dog’s head as though to reassure herself by comforting him. “I am not penniless, after all. There are thousands upon thousands of people who at this very moment are both homeless and destitute. Oh, the despair of it. How do they go on, Sir Benedict? I must not despair. It would be wicked. I am not destitute. There must be somewhere I can live, some small country house I can afford.”
She frowned in thought for a moment but was distracted when she realized he had got to his feet and come to sit beside her after propping his canes against the far side of the sofa. He took her right hand in both of his while Tramp stretched out at their feet. His hands were blessedly warm.
“I know how it is to feel homeless, even if I do not know how it is actually to be homeless,” he said. “It is a wretchedly bleak and lonely feeling. But, as you say, you are not destitute.”
She turned her head and looked at his finely chiseled features and slightly hollowed cheekbones, a strangely appealing, not-quite-handsome face—though his eyes were very blue. He had kissed her almost a month ago and then withdrawn from her life, though she was convinced he had sent his sister to befriend her and involve her in neighborhood and church activities.
“Do you have any other relatives apart from your half brother?” he asked.
“A few aunts and uncles and cousins,” she said. “None to whom I have ever been close. They all shared my half brother’s outrage over my father’s marrying an actress of doubtful origin who was half his age.”
“And there is no one else?”
There was the illusion of comfort in his grasp.
“There were friends, other wives, during the first year of my marriage,” she said. “But I was not with them long enough to establish any lasting friendships before the regiment went to the Peninsula and I was sent to Leyland instead of going with them. No, there is no one.”
How abject it sounded. After twenty-four years of living, she had no one to whom she could turn for help.
He raised her hand, and she felt the warmth of his lips and his breath against the back of it for a few moments.
“But I have taken enough of your time, Sir Benedict,” she said. “You must be wishing me in Hades though you have been very kind. This is not your concern, and the longer I talk, the more pathetic I sound.”
She spoke briskly, and she tried at the same time to repossess her hand. He tightened his hold upon it, however.
“I think,” he said, “you had better marry me, Mrs. McKay.”
She jerked her hand free then and leapt to her feet. “Oh, no,” she cried in great dismay. “No, no, no. Oh, how very good of you. And how excruciatingly embarrassing. I was not in any way hinting at such a thing, you know.” She set her palms against her cheeks. As she had suspected, they were hot with shame.
“I am perfectly well aware of that,” he said. “But marriage to me would solve your problem, you know. And perhaps it would solve mine too.”
“You have a problem?” She frowned down at him.
“An inability to steel myself to rid my home of my younger brother and his family, who have usurped it,” he said, smiling a slightly crooked smile, “and an impossibility of living there with them. A restlessness and a depression of spirits at the realization that I will never again be the man of action I used to be. An inability to forge a meaningful new life for myself and settle to it. Beatrice says it is all explained by the fact that I have no woman in my life.”