And if not halfway, then far enough to ensure that they wouldn’t find it too terribly easy to follow her trail.
In the end, it had all proven almost frighteningly easy. Her entire family had been distracted by some grand announcement Colin planned to make, and so all she’d had to do was excuse herself to the ladies’ retiring room, slip out the back, and walk the short distance to her own home, where she’d hidden her bags in the back garden. From there, she needed only to walk to the corner, where she’d arranged to have a hired coach waiting.
Goodness, if she’d known it would be this easy to make her own way in the world, she would have done so years ago.
And now here she was, rolling toward Gloucestershire, rolling toward destiny, she supposed—or hoped, she wasn’t sure which—with nothing but a few changes of clothing and a pile of letters written to her by a man she’d never met.
A man she hoped she could love.
It was thrilling.
No, it was terrifying.
It was, she reflected, quite possibly the most foolhardy thing she’d done in her life, and she had to admit that she’d made a few foolish decisions in her day.
Or it might just be her only chance at happiness.
Eloise grimaced. She was growing fanciful. That was a bad sign. She needed to approach this adventure with all the practicality and pragmatism with which she always tried to make her decisions. There was still time to turn around. What did she know about this man, really? He’d said quite a lot over the course of a year’s correspondence—
He was thirty years of age, two years her elder.
He had attended Cambridge and studied botany.
He had been married to her fourth cousin Marina for eight years, which meant that he’d been twenty-one at his wedding.
He had brown hair.
He had all of his teeth.
He was a baronet.
He lived at Romney Hall, a stone structure built in the eighteenth century near Tetbury, Gloucestershire.
He liked to read scientific treatises and poetry but not novels and definitely not works of philosophy.
He liked the rain.
His favorite color was green.
He had never traveled outside of England.
He did not like fish.
Eloise fought a bubble of nervous laughter. He didn’t likefish? That was what she knew about him?
“Surely a sound basis for marriage,” she muttered to herself, trying to ignore the panic in her voice.
And what did he know about her? What could have possibly led him to propose marriage to a total stranger?
She tried to recall what she had included in her many letters—
She was twenty-eight.
She had brown hair (chestnut, really) and all of her teeth.
She had gray eyes.
She came from a large and loving family.
