The contrast only made it more clear to Bess just how far he had come, how far they had come together—and how devastating it was to be cut off from him even though he stood not two feet away.
“I can’t,” Bess said, beseeching. “You must see that it’s impossible. A duke cannot marry a servant girl!”
“I’d hardly be the first.”
Bess threw her hands in the air. “That only proves my point! When your father married Henrietta, there were consequences they didn’t foresee and couldn’t defend against. You yourself suffered the worst of them, punished for their audacity in marrying outside their spheres, but Henrietta and the girls have not fared much better now that he is gone. It wasn’t only you who cut them off, you know—it was everyone they knew in London, all their supposed friends, so ready to throw them to the wolves the instant they lost their fortune. Which, in my view, means they were never truly accepted at all.”
“I would not leave you with nothing. I would protect you,” he argued, but in that stiff, unreadable way he used to speak—distant and cold. Bess couldn’t help but wonder if that was an indication of Nathaniel rethinking his impetuous proposal.
The thought pierced her heart, but she shoved the pain aside. It was good. He needed to see reason.
And if he wouldn’t, well. He wasn’t the only one who felt protective. She would save him from this madness, even if she couldn’t save herself.
She swiped at her damp cheeks, her mind echoing with Lord Phillip’s sneering words to her at the masked ball, taunting her with the possibility of Ashbourn losing his mind over her enough to marry her.
That was what people would think. That was what they would say about a union such as theirs. That Nathaniel was out of his senses to be marrying her.
Bess didn’t give a fig what they said about her—but she couldn’t bear the thought of them tearing Nathaniel down, tearing down everything he’d done and was trying to do to help others. Marrying her would be the ruin of him and all his goals. It would fly in the face of the society he’d insisted he needed to accomplish his aims. She could not allow that to happen.
Perhaps Nathaniel was out of his senses, in a way. And oh, that shouldn’t fill her with so much complicated, swelling, violent tenderness—the notion that Nathaniel was so overcome by his feelings for her that he had forgotten the most basic tenets of his world and his place in society.
Of course it was intoxicating to be the focus of such passion.
Bess was not immune—but she could not allow it to ruin both their lives, either. One of them had to keep their head.
“I wish that we lived in a world where we were free to marry anyone we want,” she said with difficulty. “But we must face reality, at last. Think of everything you’ve fought for. The bill you are trying to pass in Parliament, to help the women and children who need the Foundling Hospital. Your mother’s life’s work…”
He gazed at her. “I never had the chance to know my mother as an adult. But knowing what I do of her—knowing what she believed—I think she would have been the first to say that it’s up to us to make the sort of world we wish to live in.”
The words sank into Bess’s chest like a carving knife into a roast. How could she say that his mother was wrong? When Bess even believed the same, that progress was only possible if people had the will and the courage to change the way things had always been done.
But Bess was afraid. For him, more than for herself.
“If you marry me, we’ll be ostracized. You’ll be in the exact same position your father put your family in—the position you have dedicated your entire life to climbing out of!”
“My father never truly cared to regain his place in society. Thinking back, I believe he was far happier living at the fringes of the Polite World. I would do things differently.”
“Meaning what? You can’t force them to accept me!”
His jaw hardened obstinately. “I don’t care about them. I only care about you.”
“What about your family name? Your legacy?”
“I have come to realize those are not the same thing,” he shocked her by saying. “My family name—my father’s name. That’s not what matters. It’s not my father’s name that I wish to dedicate myself to carrying on. It’s my mother’s legacy, of charity and kindness, a helping hand to those in need. A fierce commitment to love.”
Bess wavered, caught up for a moment in the intensity of his stare, the ferocity of his conviction.
But fear snatched at her heart—fear, and a lifetime of hard lessons about the way the world worked.
“You don’t understand,” she said, closing her eyes. “Perhaps you can’t. You told me once you’d learned to make the world do as you wished—but that is not the world the rest of us must live in. There are rules. We all have our places…”
“Your place is with me. At my side. As my wife.”
Her eyes flew open. She stared at his uncompromising expression.
To Bess, it seemed all but a certainty that if she married him, he would wake up one morning in the ruins of his life and blame her for it.
If all the sweetness of their feelings now was poisoned by the hardships and difficulties faced by such an unequal match? If he ever looked at her with resentment in his eyes? If he ever was…God. Ashamed of her.
