“Just as I have avoided being alone with any gentleman here,” she said. “Even those who are married. I have been raised always to behave with strict propriety even while remaining courteous to all.”
“And you do it superbly well,” he said. “However, we both know why you have been invited here.”
The color had not returned to her cheeks. “Papa is your commanding officer,” she said. “You have become friends. Lord Stratton has been kind enough to invite him here for a few weeks of the summer with his family.”
Her cheeks flooded with color then and she turned her face away and looked out toward the lake.
“I do beg your pardon,” he said. “We have enjoyed an easy friendship for some time, Grace, you and I. I have been a frequent guest in your home. I have been invited to join a number of your family outings—to the theater, to Kew, to private soirees and concerts. You have driven in Hyde Park with me. You have been unfailingly charming and amiable. But it has occurred to me since you came here how little I know you.”
“What more do you need or want to know?” she asked. She picked up her cup with a steady hand and drank from it.
“Tell me about your betrothals,” he said. “Or is the subject too personal? Still painful, perhaps? Did you love them both? You were very young at the time, I understand. Do you still grieve?”
He really ought not to have asked. The questions were indeed too personal and intrusive. But he needed to know. He needed to knowher.Had those betrothals been the result of duty, pressed upon her by her parents at the appropriate time, when she was still in her late teens and very early twenties? Or had they been personal choices? Had the deaths of the two men been merely painful? Or had they been heartbreakers, sending her to hide deep inside herself behind the facade of the perfect lady? He needed to know.
She opened her mouth as though to speak and then closed it again. She sat and thought for a while. He had offended her, he thought. Then she drew a deep, not quite steady breath.
“Oh, I was a foolish girl,” she blurted. “Giddy. I believed in happily-ever-after even while the men with whom I mingled lived the most unsafe existences possible. They were all military men at a time of warfare. I fell deeply in love with both of them, Colonel Ware. Separately, of course. I fell in love with the second two yearsafter losing the first. Each time my heart was broken irrevocably—or so I thought.”
She stopped speaking and swallowed awkwardly. “I believe I was in love with the idea of being in love,” she said. She sounded unusually bitter, and he knew the admission had cost her dearly.
“But eventually you recovered from your grief?” he asked after a few silent moments.
“I moved onward with my life,” she said.
Which was not necessarily the same thing. He watched as she almost visibly dragged her usual dignity about herself again. She finished her tea and set her cup down quietly on the saucer. He drank his own, though by now it was merely tepid, the way he most hated drinking tea.
“I am no longer that girl,” she said. “I learned my lesson and am far happier for it.”
He felt chilled. She was telling him, or so it seemed to Nicholas, that she was no longer foolish enough to believe in romantic love or any display of feeling—passion anyway. And it struck him that she was not happy. How could she be when she had amputated that part of herself that could bring joy and all the other array of emotions to her own life and to the lives of those around her? Loss, heartbreak. She had insulated herself against them all.
“You are ready again for marriage?” he asked.
She turned her face sharply away again. For a while she did not say anything. “Mama and Papa will not live forever,” she said. She did not elaborate. He did not know if General Haviland would leave everything to her or if there was a male relative somewhere who would take precedence over her. He had not yet had that conversation with her father. But clearly she felt the insecurity of a future in which she might be alone.
It was an understandable reason for choosing to marry.
But did he want such a bride?
He had no choice now, though. Could he make her feel again? Trust love again?
“But do youwishto marry?” he asked her. An unfair question. How could she answer it honestly when he was the man who had been chosen for her, the man she had tacitly accepted when she came here? Winifred Cunningham would answer such a question honestly, but the two women were as different from each other as night and day.
“Wishes are such pointless things,” she said. “Magic wands, fairy godmothers—they are for children, Colonel Ware. I am not a child. I am close to thirty years old.”
She had neatly sidestepped the question. He had not used the wordwishin the sense she described. But he would not press the issue. She had effectively answered him by refusing to answer.
She was not in love with him, or anyone else for that matter.
She did not wish to marry him. But she would do so because it was the practical, sensible thing to do. She would not do it cynically, however. He knew that much about her. She would be a good wife, even a perfect wife. And she would be a good mother, though he guessed she would not raise her children to be free and spontaneous as the Cunninghams did. Or as Devlin and Gwyneth did.
She poured them a second cup of tea before sitting back on the sofa and looking out calmly over the lawn and meadow and across the river and village to the patchwork of open fields beyond.
“I hope this lovely weather will hold for Saturday and the fete,” she said. “There will be many disappointed people if it rains.”
“Strange as it may seem, given the unpredictability of the British climate,” he said, “it never seems to rain on the day of the fete.I daresay there will be many indignant people if this year should prove to be the exception. There are always alternative plans, of course, but one always hopes they will not have to be implemented.”
Their discussion was at an end, it seemed. She wanted no more of it.
