Yesterday morning.
Was she just a fortune hunter? A gold digger? A cold fish?
I am ineligible.
To be fair, perhaps, it had sounded as if none of the disasters that had befallen her was her fault. She was enjoying the pleasures of her first Season when her sister ran off with that stupid ass Freddie Nelson—at least, he assumed that was the playwright she had spoken of—who seemed to believe that a flamboyant lifestyle was a good substitute for brains and talent. She was not the one who had made a prize spectacle of herself during the resulting affair of honor. How exactly like Graham Muirhead, though, to turn up for a duel and then refuse to take up a pistol or make as small a target of himself as he could.
Nor was it her fault that the man who had made her the object of his gallantries—she had not named him beyond starting to call him Lord Somebody-or-other—had turned out to be a cad of the first order. And it was not her fault that her mother had once been shockingly indiscreet with a man with hair of a distinctive shade of red or that he had passed on that feature to the child she had borne less than nine months after her hasty marriage to Muirhead.
Ralph felt little doubt that the gossips—for once—had the right of it. Miss Muirhead probably felt little doubt either, though she denied it.
As much as none of these crimes was her fault, she was indeed ineligible. She must have been mad—or just desperate—to expect that he would marry her simply to save himself the bother of courting someone else. His grandmother had received her as a guest into her home, it was true, despite her notoriety, but she would surely have forty fits of the vapors if he should suddenly announce his intention of marrying the woman. And he could only imagine the reaction of his mother and sisters.
He shook off the thought of Miss Muirhead. He had other, more pressing and even more dreary things to consider.
He ought to have begun his campaign that evening. He had even found an invitation to a ball that would be attended by all the cream of the ton and its daughters. He went instead, after dining alone at home, to Stanbrook House on Grosvenor Square, to call upon George, Duke of Stanbrook, if by some chance he was at home.
George was both friend and father figure, having opened his home all those years ago to wounded soldiers and given them the time and space in which to heal. And healing, George had recognized, as so few people did, did not consist just in a mending of broken bones and a knitting together of cuts and gashes, but in a restoration of peace and sanity to troubled, shattered minds. True healing was a slow business, perhaps a lifelong one. George had always had the gift of making each of the six of them who had stayed the longest feel that he or she was special to him.
Ralph had often wondered if any of them had lavished nearly as much attention upon George, who had been as deeply wounded as any of them by war even though he had not been on any of the Napoleonic battlefields.
He was at home, and by some miracle had no plans to go out. Ralph found him sitting by the fire in his drawing room, a glass of port at his elbow, an open book in his hand. He closed the latter and set it aside with a welcoming smile, and for the first time it occurred to Ralph that perhaps it had been selfish of him to come thus, unannounced. Perhaps George had been looking forward to a quiet evening at home.
“Ralph.” He got to his feet and stretched out a hand. “Come and warm yourself by the fire while I pour you a drink.”
They talked about inconsequential matters for a few minutes, and Ralph felt himself begin to relax.
“I have just come up from Sussex,” he said at last. “I was summoned there by my grandmother. But I was not kept. I was sent scurrying back to choose a bride, soon if not sooner. And to get her with child on our wedding night unless I want to incur Her Grace’s undying wrath.”
George regarded him with quiet sympathy.
“Your grandfather is poorly?” he asked.
“He is well into his eighties,” Ralph said by way of explanation.
“You are not regretting,” George asked, “that you let Miss Courtney go?”
Ralph winced and looked down into the contents of his glass while he twirled it slowly. Miss Courtney was the younger sister of Max Courtney, one of his best friends—one of his dead best friends. Ralph had known her since he was a boy and she was just a child. He had used to tease her whenever he went to stay with Max during a school holiday and, when they were a bit older, flirt just a little with her. After his return to town from his three years in Cornwall, he had run into her more than once at a social entertainment, and she had glowed with happiness and explained that being with him brought her closer again to her beloved brother. She had started to write to him, indiscreet as it was for a single lady to communicate privately with a single gentleman. Ralph had feared that she was developing a tendre for him. He had avoided her whenever he could, and had ignored a few of her letters and written only brief, dispassionate replies to the others. While he was at Middlebury Park this spring, she had written to inform him that she was about to marry a clergyman from the north of England. He had felt guilty then about having offered her so little consolation after Max’s death, about ignoring the affection she had tried to give him. He had shared his feelings with his fellow Survivors.
“I had nothing to offer her, George,” he said. “I would have made her life a misery. I was too fond of her to encourage her to attach herself to me.”
George said nothing. He sipped from his glass and leaned back, crossing one leg over the other and draping his free arm along the arm of his chair. He was the picture of elegant relaxation. His eyes rested upon Ralph without in any way staring at him. It was his gift, that pose, that silence, that attention. Waiting. Inviting. Not in any way threatening or judging.