“The devil!” he said. “Whatisit about you, Miss Westcott? We have already quite firmly agreed that Harry’s suggestion was outrageous. Shall we—” He was gesturing ahead along the terrace.
“To yourhome?” she said. “As yourwife?”
“At the risk of repeating myself rather too often,” he said, “I beg to apologize.”
“Didwe agree?” she asked. They probably had. She could not remember. “It was not anoutrageoussuggestion.”
“I am a guttersnipe,” he said, and he turned his head to look about them. “Oh, for God’s sake. We cannot stand here forever. Take a turn about the lawn with me.”
But they went only partly across it before Abigail stopped again. “I cannot keep up with your pace,” she said.
He stopped and took a step closer to her.
“Guttersnipeis merely a word,” she said. “An ugly one I suppose you have decided to attach to yourself so that no one can hurt you by insulting your origins. You already accept theworst anyone can say about you. But what does itmean? That you grew up very poor in a household with only your mother? That you were rejected by all her family members you never knew and despised by all the so-called respectable folk among whom you lived? You learned to read and write, thanks, I daresay, to your mother and a vicar who did not turn you away from his school. You enlisted with a recruiting sergeant and made your way up through the ranks to become a sergeant yourself. After your father purchased a commission for you and then a promotion, you rose through your own efforts to the rank of captain, then major, and eventually lieutenant colonel. You must have worked hard to speak and behave like a gentleman in a gentlemen’s army. You have a home that is larger than a cottage. You have money. Is it time, Lieutenant Colonel Bennington, to stop calling yourself a guttersnipe?”
“It is what I would be called—among other things—if I tried to marry a lady,” he said.
“Is that what happened when you married the general’s daughter?” she asked. “Was she of age? Why did he not stop you if he despised your origins so much?”
“She was increasing,” he said.
“Oh.” She could feel her cheeks grow hot.
“Forget I suggested you come with me when I leave here,” he said. “I rescind the offer.”
“Wasit an offer?” she asked him. “Or merely a suggestion?”
“Forget it,” he said, “whatever it was.”
And they walked on, though she noticed that he shortened his stride to accommodate hers. She did not know where they were going. They were headed toward the trees, but he turned before they were among them, to walk along the bottom of the lawn in the direction of the place where they had had a picnic the day her family left.
It seemed he had no more to say.
“Who is your father?” she asked him.
She did not expect him to answer. He did not for a long while.
“Viscount Dirkson,” he said curtly.
Aviscount.She had not expected that. She had thought perhaps some wealthy farmer or businessman. The name sounded vaguely familiar, though she was sure she did not know the man. How could she? She had never mingled with theton. He had been one of her father’s crowd, perhaps? That would not be a strong recommendation.
“I know nothing more about him than his name,” he said. “I did not know even that before he purchased my commission. My mother never spoke of him, even when I was at the stage of boyhood when I pestered her for information. I merely got cuffed about the ears for my pains. Later I did not want to know. And after Ididknow, I was neither interested in learning more nor desirous of taking advantage of his sudden wish to be my benefactor.”
It was understandable, she supposed. Even commendable.
“Have you decided,” he asked her as they turned just before reaching the drive to make their way up the lawn toward the house, “who you are?”
“Who...?” She looked at him blankly.
“You told me once that if you ever married,” he said, “it must be because of who you are rather than what. BywhatI took you to mean the illegitimate daughter of a former Earl of Riverdale. But when I asked what you meant bywho, you said something like that being the key question. You also said that if you ever wed, you wanted both to marry and to be married. Meaning, I believe, that you wanted it to be a mutual choice and decision of both partners. Youdid not want to be the passive recipient of a wooing and a marriage proposal.”
“Did I indeed say all that?” she asked him. “How embarrassing. It sounds as though I was barely coherent. At the picnic, was it, after everyone had left? But I believe you must have rightly interpreted what I was trying to say. I am not the illegitimate daughter of an earl. Or, rather, I am. But I am not defined by that identity. Or by the fact that I am a Westcott on my father’s side and a Kingsley on my mother’s. I am not defined by my education and upbringing. I would never be defined by the fact that I was someone’s wife or someone’s mother. Or by any other label.”
“Who, then, are you?” he asked.
“The bottom fell out of my world six years ago, Lieutenant Colonel Bennington,” she said. “That is a phrase often used carelessly to describe some minor upset. For me it felt frighteningly real. For a while I was careful to behave with quiet decorum as though by doing so I could hold my world together. In reality there was a yawning black hole inside me that stretched to infinity. I did not know who I was. I did not even know if I could lay claim to my last name—Westcott. My mother changed hers to Kingsley, but it had been her name before she married. It had never been my name. I survived by learning to embrace that black emptiness, and I discovered that actually it was an infinity of light and possibility. I learned that my real self is inner and infinite and indestructible and quite independent of circumstances or labels.”
They stepped in silence onto the terrace a short distance from the front doors.
