“He hates that,” Nell said.
Jane’s mouth quirked to the side, and then excused herself, leaving Fatima alone to hold Nell upright. But Jane gathered up her fiancé, spoke to the manservant at the door, and then joined her parents in welcoming Beckett.
The dinner gong sounded, which was not a gong at all, but rather a light tinkling bell rung by the manservant. Unlike a great house, where guests might have to traverse stairs and long halls, here, the dining room was only a doorway away.
Jane’s father escorted Beckett over to Nell, as her dinner companion for the evening.
Cold air prickled Nell’s bare shoulders, and she regretted the en vogue style of such a daring neckline. She wished for her shawl. Her dressing robe. Her bed. She wished she could curl up and die.
Fatima squeezed her hand harder, which made Nell straighten. She was cowed, but she did not wish him to think it. So she donned her most imperious expression and faced him. The only man who had ever tempted her. The only man that made her believe that love was an emotion she was capable of feeling.
Chapter Twelve
She looked likea queen, and it took his breath away. It was not her finery—for she wore no jewels in her hair or around her throat. But the lack of frippery hinted at a sleekness one found in thoroughbreds, that fierce strength of her formidable intellect.
Her hair, which he had always loved, shone in the light, full of luster, twined and braided about, making him long to unpin it and run his fingers through it. Just as the alabaster expanse of her shoulders and neck beckoned his hands, wanting to test if her skin truly was cold as marble.
“You came,” she said.
He inclined his head because he did not feel he could trust his voice at this moment. Conflict tore at him, as it had for the last two days. He wanted her, but at what cost? Though he had set Timothy’s man to garner more information, none could be found.
Despite the one maid who had been happy to discuss village gossip, the rest of the small populace remained tight-lipped. No one had been willing to discuss the past with a stranger. No one could be convinced to discuss any young woman who might have grown up there and moved away, let alone the painting master whose last whereabouts were noted to be at that inn.
Mrs. Reid licked her lips, no doubt out of nervousness, but it sent a shiver down his spine. What was right and what he wanted were at opposite sides. His entire upbringing had taught him that he upheld the law. He was a force of reason and good for the British Empire. It was the backbone of the idealism his class had built. They were the law bringers, the civilizers, the reason in the chaos.
But looking at Mrs. Reid made him doubt all his training. If she was a wrongdoer, and he wanted to protect her, for he could see her value, her decency, then hurting her was not on the side of good, and everything he believed in was untrue in its very assumptions.
Unable to think properly, all he could manage to say was, “You look very beautiful, Mrs. Reid.”
“Thank you,” she said, as if his opinion were the least of her concerns.
There was another tinkle of a small bell, and Jane clapped her hands and laughed. “The dinner bell, everyone!”
Reflexively, Beckett extended his arm to process. But this was not that sort of dinner, he supposed. There was no one else of rank in attendance, no automatic lining up in order of nobility, no pairings made awkward by the barest of introductions. The people at this party knew one another,likedone another. He was the interloper, the one who did not belong.
Still, he felt a tentative hand loop around his proffered elbow. Even through the layers of fabric, her touch felt fevered and charged. His awareness of her was painfully acute, and he had the momentary thought that of all things, her proximity would kill him. His heart would pound so hard in his chest that it would burst when she turned to him. But no, that was foolishness. Like in all things, Beckett was a fool, and he hated to be confronted with proof of it.
There was no procession into the next room, where a table was set, seats crammed together with no room between for comfort. Food sat on the table already, which appalled Beckett, and the reaction shamed him.
“There is no seating chart,” the hostess, Mrs. Smith cried out, her voice merry. Was this dinner party the culmination of all things she’d hoped to accomplish in life? For her demeanor said that was so. She was a stout woman, missing a tooth in her smile, but her face was clear from smallpox scars, so by a certain accounting, she had led a charmed life.
He escorted Mrs. Reid to a chair and turned, meaning to take one farther away, as custom dictated with couples. But a puzzled look from the future bride’s father, Mr. Smith, kept him in his place, next to her. Beckett looked about, finding to his surprise, that no one observed the custom of alternating a man and a woman. There was no rhyme or reason to how they placed each other, and again, Beckett felt out of step.
As they all sank into their creaking chairs, many audibly wobbling on the uneven wood floor, making a cacophony in the small room, Beckett realized that as out of step as he felt here, this would be what he would subject Mrs. Reid to if she became his wife. Constantly out of step and out of place.
Again, he was a fool. He had not wanted to be married. He had wanted to wink out into oblivion, letting the title move to his sister’s boy, to let Parliament go on without him, to give Timothy his evenings back, to let everyone rest. And then Mrs. Reid turned her head and looked him square in the eye and saw him.Sawhim. Saw his foolish heart, his foolish mind, his unreasonable expectations of the world.
“I did not think you would come,” she said, quiet so no one else would hear.
Indeed, it was then that the ever-present November rain increased, and the future bride and groom laughed, as thecompany requested them to repeat what they’d said, because they could not hear over the noise.
“I said that I would.” How could he ask her the questions he needed to know? How could he confront her with such terrible ideas? But he had to—he owed it to himself and to the people of England, who relied upon him to guide the law and order of the land.
She nodded and turned her attention back to the table but did not strike up a conversation with anyone else.
To his mind, the table felt like chaos, no footman to serve and keep order. Rather, it was the women who spooned the gravy over their own meat, handing the dish to their partnered men, who did the same. How odd that at this table, the women commanded the order and instigated the serving, rather than the other way around. None of the women assembled simpered or batted their eyelashes at him, nor flirted with any of the other men. This was a far more relaxed dinner than any he had ever attended before, more akin to his boyhood days of long tables and barely contained, squirrelly schoolmates. These people were friends, where the rules of the world were suggestions, and not upheld as fortifications of social order.
Even his dinners with Timothy at the club had a prescribed agenda, aided by a footman to expertly place slices of meat and pour sauces with flourish. He blinked when Mrs. Reidhandedhim a plate of ham. Not that he’d never been handed a plate of food, that was not it. This was an engagement party. He was in his finery, as was everyone else. It was like wearing a crown to a sackcloth race.
