“Yes,” she said, “I am.”
They stood and stared at each other.
“Are you related to Graham Muirhead?” he asked her abruptly.
“He is my brother,” she told him.
Ah. His eyes strayed to her hair and back to her green eyes. Graham was dark haired and dark eyed, but he was her brother. It was hardly a recommendation in her favor.
She must have read his thoughts.
“I am suggesting that you marry me, Lord Berwick,” she said, “not my brother.”
3
There was an uncomfortably long silence during which the Earl of Berwick stood where he was, his shoulder propped against the ancient oak, his arms folded over his chest, his booted feet crossed at the ankles. He looked rather menacingly large and . . . dark. He looked dark, of course, because he was in the shadow of the tree, but rather than muting the effect of the scar across his cheek, the dimness accentuated it—and it was the cheek turned more fully toward her.
There was not a glimmering of humor or any other emotion on his face or in his blank eyes.
Whatever had made her think she could marry him? Or that he would marry her? He was all brooding, dark emptiness. Even dangerous, though she had not thought that until this moment. For one did not know, would probably never know, what emotions were buried deep inside him, ready to erupt at any moment.
She wondered what she would do if the silence stretched much longer. Perhaps he had no intention of moving or saying anything. Should she turn and walk away, then? From her last chance? But chance for what? Perhaps marrying him would not after all be more desirable than living the rest of her life as she was, in dreary but independent spinsterhood.
He spoke at last.
“Tell me something, Miss Muirhead,” he said. “If marriage is of such importance to you, even the poor apology for a marriage into which you are proposing to enter with me, why are you still unwed at the age of twenty-seven?”
Ah.
Because no one has asked me? It was true. But the answer was not nearly as simple as that.
“I am ineligible,” she told him, lifting her chin. An understatement if ever she had spoken one.
“Yet you expect me to marry you?” His eyebrows soared again and he looked more the way she had expected him to look from the start—arrogant and supercilious. “In what way are you ineligible, pray? You have just told me your father is a baronet with a solid lineage and that your mother was the daughter of a viscount. Birth surely counts for something in the marriage mart. And you do not exactly look like a gargoyle.”
Was that a compliment?
She drew a slow breath.
“My sister ran off with a married man six years ago,” she told him. “He married her a year later, a scant three months after his wife died and one month before her confinement, but their marriage restored only a very limited degree of respectability to what had been a very public scandal. She will never be received by any of the highest sticklers in polite society, and we have not been entirely forgiven either, for my father refused to cast her off even when for a few months her seducer abandoned her to return to his dying wife.”
“We,” he said. “Why, pray, did the scandalous behavior of your sister and the socially unwise reaction of your father make you a pariah, Miss Muirhead?”
“Well.” She looked down at her fingers, which she had spread out before her as though she were examining her manicure. “The man was the darling of society at the time, wild and eccentric though he was, a playwright of flamboyant appearance and smoldering good looks to rival those of Lord Byron. And his wife was the daughter of a government minister. It could not have been worse. Lucy was seventeen. She had not even made her debut in society. She was in London only because I was making my come-out at the grand age of twenty-one and she had persuaded our mother that she would expire of boredom if she were forced to remain behind in the country with her governess. She met Mr. Nelson in Hyde Park when she dropped her reticule and its contents spilled at his feet while she was walking there one morning with Mama’s maid. His wife’s family made a dreadful fuss after he had run off with her. Her father had Papa expelled from one of his clubs. Her brother forced a quarrel upon my brother in a public place and challenged him to a duel. Graham refused to fight.”
The earl interrupted the ghastly narrative.
“Did he, by Jove?” he said. “But, yes, I suppose he would.”
“Oh, he kept the appointment,” she said, looking up at him with a frown, “but he would not take up one of the pistols. He walked off the paces at the signal and turned and stood, his arms at his sides. Apparently he did not even stand sideways to offer a narrower target. His adversary bent his arm at the elbow and shot into the air, and everyone jeered at Graham for his cowardice, though I still think it was the bravest thing I have ever heard of. My mother insisted that we try to weather the storm while Papa went in pursuit of the runaways and Graham tried in vain to apologize to Mrs. Nelson and her family. We attended those entertainments to which we had already been invited, but new invitations stopped coming. When Mama took me calling upon ladies who had always welcomed us, they were suddenly not at home even if other people’s carriages were drawn up outside their doors to give the lie to their words. When we arrived at Almack’s one evening for the weekly ball, it was to the discovery that our vouchers had been revoked.”
There was a brief silence. “Why were you twenty-one when you made your come-out?”
“My grandmother died when I was eighteen,” she explained, “and Mama insisted we go into strict mourning, though Papa said it surely was not necessary to ruin the plans that had been made for me. My mother was very ill for a couple of years after that. It was the illness that finally killed her, though she did rally to take me to London for my long-overdue debut into society.”