‘Good heavens,’ he said. ‘Miss Beaumont. I thought you were in Scotland. Or – have you come back?’ he added with a sudden hope. ‘Should I be offering my congratulations, Mrs Marston?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘I did not get married,’ she said, in a tight sort of voice. Her big grey eyes looked rather red. ‘Mr Marston chose – we had an argument—’
‘Oh.’ The Duke glanced around. ‘Where is he?’
‘I couldn’t say. I left him in Manchester.’
‘Oh.’ He wished he had something else to say to this litany of disaster. ‘Then who is your attendance?’
She shot him a vicious look. ‘I don’thaveany attendance. I ran away from my guardian to elope and now I haven’t even eloped and I’ve nowhere to go, so how I could haveattendance—’
‘You came down from Manchester alone?’ Dear God. But, regrettably, his duty was clear and the Duke always did his duty. ‘There is a bench over there. Would you like to sit down and talk about it?’
Miss Beaumont would. She poured out a tearful but reasonably coherent account of the journey from Stratford to Manchester, in which she freely admitted becoming exasperated by her intended. ‘He was soslow. He was so dreadfully bad at all of the deceiving people we had to do, and Mr Charnage said we should get to the coast and take a boat, but Tony, Mr Marston, wouldn’t because he gets seasick, of all the stupidnesses, and I dare say I was terribly impatient with him, butreally. He exasperated me dreadfully. And – and then by the time we got to Manchester and we’d argued for a day or so, he asked me, did I truly love him or did I merely want to marry him to escape Sir James? And I just couldn’t say it. I suppose that’s even wickeder than eloping, isn’t it? Eloping with someone I didn’t even love – only I did, I’m sure, when I was seventeen, but I’m twenty nowand we haven’t spent much time together in years and I’msurehe wasn’t so tiresome before – but he said I wasn’t even marrying him for his money, I was marrying him formymoney, which was worse, and he didn’t want to be a cipher in his own life, and I’d just used him as a means to my freedom. That was awfully unkind, you know, because it was true. I wished it wasn’t, but it was.’
‘Yes,’ the Duke said. ‘That does hurt.’
She sniffed. ‘He said if I didn’t care for him, he certainly didn’t want my money.’
‘That was good of him.’
‘I dare say it was very noble, but I was furious. We’d come all the way up to Manchester and gone through all this inconvenience so I could marry him and there he was refusing, which left me in the most dreadful scrape. And really, what was I todo? I suppose he wanted me to tell him I was sorry and he was wonderful, but honestly, I thought he was being a self-centred oaf. Iwasmarrying him to be free of Sir James, and if he wanted something more it was quite right he shouldn’t marry me, but for heaven’s sake, could he not have raised the subject beforeManchester? So I left.’
‘And he let you come back all this way on your own?’
‘He said, if I didn’t love him, then I should do as I pleased. I think he was expecting me to cajole him into a good humour.’
The Duke thought about that – a young lady, unchaperoned and miles from home, being told by the man with power over her future to prove her love – and took a breath. ‘I would like a word with Mr Marston.’
‘I did hurt his feelings awfully,’ Miss Beaumont said fairmindedly. ‘I know I shouldn’t have done it but I truly thought we’d rub along so much better than we did. Afterall, once we were married we’d have lots of money and that solves most problems, doesn’t it? And I didn’t lie to him. One might have thought he’d prefer an honest arrangement to a flattering deception. But then, if he’d truly thought I was heels over head for him in the first place, I can see why he was disappointed. I’ve made an awful mull of this.’
‘Something of one,’ the Duke was forced to admit. ‘And what now? Why are you here?’
‘I have to be somewhere,’ Miss Beaumont said bleakly. ‘I took the stage south, on my own, which has been really quite unpleasant. I bought a ring, on Mr Charnage’s advice – is he not here?’
‘No. No, we’re not travelling together any more.’
‘Oh,’ she said, with clear disappointment. ‘Well, the ring helped, but all the same— Anyway, I got to Birmingham and I realised I didn’t know what I was coming backfor. I’ve no family and my trustee has made it very clear he doesn’t want to be troubled and I cannot go back to Sir James.’
‘No, you can’t. Not after this escapade. If he finds out—’
‘But I don’t know what else to do.’ She sounded very young as she said that. ‘I’ve made such a dreadful, dreadful mistake. I should have lied, shouldn’t I? I should have told Tony he was wonderful and flattered him into a better mood—’
‘No, you should not,’ the Duke said. ‘What you should have done from the start is found a lawyer who would act on your behalf if your trustee won’t.’
She shot him a look. ‘I wrote to five lawyers. Only one of them wrote back, and he did so directly to Sir James, as my guardian. I am under age and a woman. They won’t listen to me.’
And the rush to a hasty marriage would not make herseem any more worth listening to. The Duke didn’t point that out. ‘Have you met anyone you know on your travels? Can anyone – except Mr Marston, I suppose – say for certain you eloped?’
‘Well, I did leave that note for Sir James, saying I was running away with Mr Charnage.’
‘But you can argue that was to throw him off the track. What we need is— Oh.’
She straightened at his tone. ‘Have you had an idea? What is it, Mr, uh—’
