"You refused," she repeated.
"I did."
"Why?"
The question seemed to catch him off guard. "I beg your pardon?"
"Why did you refuse? Many men would consider it an advantageous match."
Something flickered in Sebastian's eyes, there and gone too quickly to identify. "Many men, perhaps. But I am not interested in advantageous matches bought with desperation. If I wed, it will be because both parties enter the arrangement willingly, not because one of them has no other choice."
It was, Harriet had to admit, a rather noble sentiment. Annoyingly noble. The Sebastian Vane she had constructed in her imagination would never have refused such an opportunity,he would have seized it, used her family'smisfortune to his advantage, proved himself the villain she had always believed him to be.
This Sebastian was proving stubbornly resistant to her expectations.
"Well," she said finally, because she had to say something. "I suppose I should thank you for not attempting to purchase me like livestock."
"The bar for gratitude seems rather low."
"It is. And yet you've somehow managed to clear it."
Was that a smile? It was hard to tell with Sebastian. His mouth had quirked slightly at one corner, but whether in amusement or exasperation remained unclear.
Mr. Thornton cleared his throat. "If we might return to the matter at hand."
"The matter at hand," Harriet interrupted, "is that my family is in debt, our home is at risk, and the only solution anyone has proposed is resolved to sacrifice me to the first wealthy bachelor who crosses our threshold. Have I summarised correctly?"
"There are other options, my lady. They are simply... less palatable."
"Less palatable than selling myself into matrimony?"
"The sale of the estate would allow the family to settle elsewhere, in reduced circumstances. It would not be comfortable, but it would be respectable."
Reduced circumstances. Harriet knew what that meant. A small cottage somewhere, perhaps, or a set of rented rooms. Her mother, who had been born into luxury and married into more, spending her remaining years in genteel poverty. No more London seasons, no more country house parties, no more life as they had known it.
"There must be something else," she said. "Some other way."
"If there were, my lady, I would have found it by now. I have been managing your family's affairs for nigh on fifteen years. I assure you, I have exhausted every possibility."
Harriet looked at the documents spread across the desk, the ledgers and letters and legal papers that represented the sum total of her family's failure. Somewhere in those pages was the story of how they had come to this: her father's gambling, Richard's desperate attempts to save them, the slowly accumulating weight of debt that had finally become too heavy to bear.
She thought of her mother upstairs, frail and tired, bravely pretending that everything would be fine. She thought of Richard, who had died trying to fix what their father had broken. She thought of Fordshire Park itself, the gardens where she had played as a child, the library where she had hidden to read, the drawing room where she had once stood and read her poetry aloud to a boy who had laughed.
She could not lose this place. She could not let it be sold to strangers, carved up and parceled out like meat at a butcher's shop. This was her home. Her family's legacy. The only piece of Richard she had left.
"Give me time," she said. "To think. To consider our options."
"Of course, my lady. But I must warn you, the creditors will not wait indefinitely. We have perhaps a month, perhaps less, before they begin legal proceedings."
"A month." Harriet nodded slowly. "Very well. A month."
She turned and walked out of the study without looking at Sebastian, without looking at anyone. She needed air. She needed space. She needed to think.
Behind her, she heard Sebastian's voice, low and urgent, saying something to Mr. Thornton that she couldn't quite make out. She didn't stop to listen.
***
The gardens of Fordshire Park had always been Harriet's refuge.
