Chapter Twenty-Five
That night, Catherine,John, Henrietta, and the three visiting Rank Rakes had an informal supper in the great hall. Henrietta, of course, had been delighted by the appearance of the Earl of Montaigne, the Marquess of Leith, and the Viscount of Tremberley. John knew that Henrietta had always looked forward to his friends’ visits to the Hall, in large part because they—especially Tremberley, who, as his best friend, had visited the most over the years—doted on her.
Leith’s carriage had broken down and his friends had been forced to take a dilapidated hack that let in water all the way from Woking. Now, John watched Catherine and Henrietta laugh as Montaigne imitated Leith finding a water beetle in his cravat. He felt contentment in his bones. He couldn’t remember a time he had felt so happy. With the exception of Henrietta still being under the impression that Catherine was “Miss Aster” and Mary Forster continuing to elude him, he couldn’t recall a single thing wrong with his life.
After supper and a lively game of charades, Catherine and Henrietta retired. Catherine had to nearly drag Henrietta up the stairs, because she wanted to stay with the gentlemen all evening. However, that far exceeded the bounds of propriety, especially since Henrietta was soon to debut and become a society young lady in earnest. When the ladies finally departed, John had to face his friends alone.
“As you can see,” John said, when they turned their questioning faces towards him, “I’m very well.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, mate,” Montaigne said. “We just fancied a visit to the Hall.”
“You’re rather arrogant,” said Tremberley, “assuming we came here for you.”
“Indeed, we came to see your sister’s lovely tutor,” Leith said. “I found her rather fetching when we met in that wayside tavern. I wondered if I might press my suit here.”
“Go to hell,” John said. “And you can’t. She is taken.”
His friends’ faces went from jovial to deadly serious all at once. It was really quite an amusing sight. Montaigne’s light blue eyes, Tremberley’s hazel ones, and Leith’s dark brown all went equally round.
“You did marry her,” Tremberley said. “I knew you would. Goddamn!”
“Not yet,” he said. “We can’t yet. Not until Henrietta has her season and finds her own match. But, once she does, we will.”
John couldn’t keep the smile from his face, half out of his own happiness and half from the abject horror on his friends’ faces.
Nevertheless, they gave him their congratulations, although they did seem glad that the marriage wasn’t imminent. They would have time to adjust to one of their set departing from bachelorhood. Montaigne called it the end of an era.
The next few days passed in this same state of happiness. With his friends at the hall to entertain Henrietta, he didn’t feel as guilty about stealing moments with Catherine. Not to mention that every night he went to her bedchamber and they had encounters that left him a changed man. With every touch, she tethered him to her all the more. He was utterly, desperately, conquered and, worse, he didn’t long to be anything else.
Two days after the arrival of his friends, they were all walking in the orchards, which had started to give forth apples. Although most of the fruit was still green, Henrietta was bent on collecting the few ripe ones that, every year, came early. His friends were squiring her on this mission so he could walk beside Catherine out of earshot of the others.
“Now that I am your betrothed,” she said in that half-mocking tone, which had become—over the past week—one of his favorites that she used with him, “there is one thing I would like to know.”
“Anything.”
“Why do you hate your cousin so much? The one who is to come into the money, if we don’t find Mary Forster?”
“Ah. That.”
They walked in silence for a moment and he tried to organize his thoughts. He wanted to explain it to her in the right way.
“When I first heard about my father’s will,” he started, “I might have let the sixty thousand pounds go, if it weren’t that he was leaving it to Baron Falk. I could give Henrietta a perfectly respectable dowry from my other funds. Yes, it would have seemed that my father was saying that she wasn’t his daughter, but there is a chance I may have decided to weather it to spite the old man. That is how badly I didn’t want to find your aunt or reopen this mess.”
She smiled. “And how badly you didn’t want to ask me for help.”
“Yes,” he smiled, “I certainly didn’t want to do that.”
They walked a bit more. The sun on his face, the shadows cast by the apple trees, and Catherine’s quiet expectation made him feel tranquil, despite the difficult history he was trying to relay.
“But my father left the money to Baron Falk. And I could never lethim—and my father knew this very well—have sixty thousand pounds from our estate.”
He noticed now that the others were fully out of sight. He couldn’t hear their voices anymore, so he took Catherine’s hand. He intertwined her fingers through his with ease, as if they had always done it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“When I was younger, Baron Falk and his father used to come and visit Edington Hall. In autumn, for grouse hunting and fox chase, that sort of thing. My father and the late baron were close. When his father died, Falk himself was still welcome, of course, and he continued to visit. And then when Henrietta was twelve, and Falk and I were around three-and-twenty, he proposed to my father that he and Henrietta marry.”
“He wanted to engage her when she wastwelve?”
Of course, John thought, Catherine had likely heard of aristocratic marriages arranged at young ages. It was irregular, if not unheard of, for a man to try and engage a twelve-year-old girl. But that had not been Falk’s intention.
