In some ways, he was not unlike her oldest brother, Gabriel, who was also an earl. However, she caught herself just before telling him so.
“I like your sisters,” she said instead. “Your poor father, though. He was lucky to have had you first.” Dying without an heir was an aristocrat’s greatest fear. In her experience anyhow. It meant that the lord of the manor had failed to perform the most basic duty expected of him. Furthermore, most titled gentlemen weren’t happy with just one. If a lord was lucky, his wife presented him with not only one son but a second—a spare.
Her father had been quite fortunate. There had been two spares: Gilbert and then Nathaniel.
And then she’d come along, a pleasant afterthought that her father had occasionally complimented even though, in the grand scheme of it all, her arrival had been inconsequential.
“Did you miss having brothers?” Priscilla asked when he didn’t respond to her comment. She needed to be careful in what she said, remembering that Allison was an only child.
“One cannot miss what one never had.” He eased in front of her so that he could leap down a particularly steep step, landing with sure feet. And she forgot their conversation completely when his hands settled on her waist so he could assist her down the giant step.
She liked his touch so much that she nearly stopped breathing. Oh, dear, but she was in trouble.
“Bloodstone and Edgeworth grew up on nearby estates, so it’s not as though I grew up with only my sisters. As a matter of convenience, we shared the same tutor and eventually entered Eton together.”
“And then Oxford?”
“Bloodstone and I—Edgeworth suffered the inferior education imposed on him at Cambridge.”
Priscilla nodded, with Cambridge not far from Miss Primm’s, she understood the rivalry all too well.
“How old were you when you went away to school?”
“Eight,” he answered and she imagined him wearing short pants and buckled shoes, his large green eyes peering out from a child’s face. At eight years of age, had he already comprehended some of the responsibilities awaiting him as an adult?
“We have a handful of eight-year-old girls enrolled at Miss Primm’s. When I mentioned that they seemed too young, one of my… teachers reminded me that not all homes were nurturing. At least at the school, the girls are assured companionship and mentors.”
He glanced at her curiously. “Is teaching something you’re interested in? Miss Primm mentioned you might like to explore various careers.”
“Possibly.” She had not, in fact, spent her youth aspiring to become a teacher. She’d only entered the profession when it posed an adequate alternative to her other options. “I love cooking. I think, I would enjoy learning culinary techniques used by other cultures.” But that was only a dream. She’d like to travel someday. Priscilla had resources at her disposal. Although traveling as a spinster wasn’t the sort of adventures she’d imagined when she’d been younger… She’d imagined exploring faraway places with an attentive husband.
Spinsterhood had been the farthest thing from her mind before she’d ignored her brother’s advice regarding Lord Lockley.
“Interesting,” Hardwood answered noncommittally.
She’d just handed him the perfect opportunity to offer up all manner of promises to advance his campaign—if he was as desperate for her hand as he persisted in telling her.
But rather than romantically declare: Marry me, and I’ll show you the world, he touched his chin in that thoughtful way she was beginning to find endearing.
“Now that’s a novel idea.”
“Traveling?”
“No. But I find it novel that a young woman such as yourself would consider that the British way isn’t the only way to accomplish something.” An easy smile danced on his mouth. “We’re raised to believe that we, the English, know best, are we not?”
“It would be foolish to think otherwise,” she pointed out.
“True. It hinders our potential,” he agreed. “Take your father, for instance. If he hadn’t been watching what the Americans were up to, he’d still be tinkering away in that small little shop behind Bond Street.”
“Do you admire my father’s intellect in addition to his fortune?”
Most titled gentlemen scoffed at men like Mr. Meadowbrook. They considered the necessity of all that was involved with trade, strategizing costs and expenditures to be below them.
Priscilla secretly believed their disdain originated as much from fear and jealousy as it did from snobbery.
Because barons, earls, and even dukes with pockets to let were not so disdainful that they ignored opportunities to fatten their bank accounts.
“Difficult to separate the two,” he answered, surprising her with such honesty. “But I respect your father. He’s the sort of man someone like me is wise to watch.”
