“Susannah.”
Their first disagreement. He remembered other disagreements with a different woman. Vases breaking, shrieks of rage. His own immovable, glacial superiority.
He started again. “I will let you speak, but know I only mean to make some inquiries about the turnpike, see if there’s a way to keep coaches and horses and travelers coming to the village.”
“You would do that?” She’d gone from protestation to astonishment in the matter of a few seconds.
He nodded. “And if I am not able to mend the situation, we will put our heads together and decide what to do next. I know you want someone in the cottage in case your brothers return.”
“Oh, Henry!” She threw herself into his arms and had a sweet cry and let him kiss away her tears.
The rest of their journey back to Bledsoe Park had been filled with a great many kisses. And more than kisses.
“I don’t mind if you write a book about a girl,” Mina was saying now. “And I like the name Willa.”
“Wonderful,” Susannah said.
“But you must never run away again, Miss Beasley.” Mina took on a lecturing tone. “And Grandfather shouldn’t, either. It’s not honorable.”
Henry had thought he didn’t want a wife to manage him.He must take care that his granddaughter didn’t see that as her birthright, instead.
But Mina had been managing him all along, hadn’t she?
“We must defer to your grandfather in matters of honor,” Susannah said to Mina, but she still only had eyes for Henry.
“Oh,” Mina said and pointed. “Look.”
An enormous, gaudy carriage was coming down the drive, pulled by a team of prancing white horses. There was only one person in England who would both own that carriage and come to Bledsoe Park unannounced.
“It’s a queen,” Mina breathed.
“It won’t be a queen, Mina,” Susannah said but asked Henry in a low voice, “Will it?”
“A princess, then,” Mina said.
“No,” he said grimly. “It will be a marchioness. Come. We will meet her together.”
But the carriage was moving at a very fast pace and beat them to the house.
“Where?” he asked Eakins.
“The brown drawing room, my lord.”
Yes, of course. Eakins would know immediately that the brown drawing room—never once used in all the years of Henry’s tenure as earl—was the right place to put the Dowager Marchioness of Chalfont.
He heard Mina say to Susannah with awe in her voice, “We’re going to the brown drawing room.”
As a youth, Henry had been equally besotted with and terrified by his aunt. But he was not alone in this. Samuel Johnson had once famously said of the marchioness: “There are two kinds of men in England: those who fall in love with her and those who have never met her.”
But Henry had no worry about becoming besotted now. Every bit of him only yearned for one woman—Susannah.The fear, however, remained. He anticipated the marchioness had come to chide him for finding his own wife.
He entered the drawing room first and bowed to the seated marchioness.
“Henry,” the marchioness said.
“Lady Chalfont.”
Susannah and Mina came beside him and curtsied.
