He looked at her with blank eyes, though she had the disturbing sensation that there was something hovering in their depths, something almost . . . mischievous? He took his crop and gloves back with one hand and reached into his pocket with the other. He came out with a single stone—a flat, thin, smooth, almost round pebble.
“Perhaps,” he said, holding it out to her, “the next time you are at the lake you can make this one bounce six times.”
She took the perfect stone and stared at him.
“You risked your life,” she asked him, “for a stone I may well pitch into the water without achieving even a single bounce?”
“Or,” he said, “for a stone that may bounce seven times.”
What . . . ? She closed her fingers about the pebble and knew in a flash that she would never throw it anywhere, certainly not into the depths of any lake. She knew she would keep it. One day perhaps she would show her grandchildren what their grandfather had given her on the day he asked her to marry him. Not diamonds or gold, but . . . a stone. And she would tell them that he had risked his life quite, quite idiotically in order to obtain it.
Her own little touch of romance lay safely clasped in her hand.
“If we ever bring children to Manville,” she said, “I shall tie one end of a ribbon about their wrists and the other about my own whenever they step outdoors and not let them out of my sight for a single moment.”
His expression was totally blank.
“A simple thank-you would have sufficed, Miss Muirhead,” he said, and with a certain sense of shock she realized that he was actually enjoying himself.
And that perhaps she was too.
He turned abruptly and resumed the climb toward level ground. The sound of rushing water receded behind them, and Chloe could hear her labored breathing as the water became calm and dark green again. Through the treetops she could see blue sky and sunshine. They would be back at the bridge soon and turning in the direction of the house.
She stopped walking.
“What are you going to say?” she asked. “Both the duke and the duchess must surely know by now that you have come back but are nowhere in the house.”
“I shall say that I have been walking in the park with you,” he said, turning toward her, “and that I have been proposing marriage to you. I shall tell them you have accepted. I have always found that the truth is the wisest thing to speak when there is no reason on earth not to tell it.”
She drew a slow, ragged breath.
“I have agreed, Miss Muirhead,” he explained to her, “that it is my duty to marry. I have allowed my grandparents, or at least my grandmother, to urge matrimony upon me because it is no less than I must urge upon myself. I will not, however, allow anyone else except the lady to whom I have proposed marriage to influence my choice of bride. I have chosen you for the reasons of which you are aware. If the members of my family do not like that choice, that is their concern, not mine.”
“Her Grace has been kind to me,” she said.
“You will not persuade me to change my mind, Miss Muirhead,” he told her. “Have you changed yours? Because you do not have the courage to marry me, perhaps?”
He was not even trying to press reassurances upon her. She rather liked that. Did she have the courage to marry him? More to the point, perhaps, did she have the courage not to? She would never have a chance like this again. Or any chance, in all likelihood. She rubbed her fingers over the stone she clutched in one palm.
“I have not changed my mind,” she told him.
She would have liked nothing better as they approached the house than to go up to her room while he broke the news to his grandparents. But then the moment would come when she would have to come back down and face them. Better to do it now before she lost her nerve entirely.
Things did not proceed according to plan, however. They discovered the butler in the hall, looking unusually distracted, while a footman was shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other as though awaiting instructions before dashing off somewhere. The door to the duke’s book room was wide open and the mingled voices of the duke, the duchess, and His Grace’s valet came from within.
Her Grace appeared in the doorway, still dressed in the carriage clothes she had worn to visit Mrs. Booth, and addressed herself to the butler.
“He will not have the physician, Weller,” she said. “He says he will not see him even if he comes. You might as well forget about sending for him.”
“I don’t need any damned quack,” the duke’s voice rumbled from within. “Can a man not sleep and snore in his own private room in his own private house without everyone assuming he has one foot through death’s door? Bentley, you villain, stop hovering or I shall send you packing without notice or a character.”
The duchess had seen the earl, who was striding across the hallway toward her.
“Ah, Ralph,” she said, without commenting on his sudden and unexpected appearance, “just the man I need. Come and talk some sense into your grandfather. He was moaning and clutching his chest and fighting to breathe when I peeped in on him a short while ago after returning from Mrs. Booth’s. Yet now he declares himself to be in the best of good health. He will drive me into the grave before I am one hour older.”
The Earl of Berwick had been transformed before Chloe’s eyes. He had changed into a commanding presence, and it was very easy to see him as the military officer he had been. He was striding toward the study even before his grandmother started speaking, his boot heels ringing on the marble floor. He squeezed her shoulder in passing and disappeared inside the room.