“She has had enough of that. And that’s why I’m beginning to change my mind about marriage.”
“Do you think marrying would protect her?” Charity asked.
“I don’t know, but at least, I think it would give me options,” Temperance said. “At the moment I have none. My mother’s situation is entirely at his discretion.”
She thought of Joseph at the breakfast table, sitting up straighter than was physically necessary and wondered how long it would be until he exerted the same sort of control over them.
“If I married, and if I had my own establishment, my own income, however modest, I could have my mother with me on my own terms and I could make choices for her that she couldn’t make for herself. I could make sure that no one else gets to decide what her life looks like.”
“That is,” Charity said carefully, “a very practical reason to marry. But you just walked away from the only suitor who’s agreed to dance with you this evening.”
“He was unpleasant,” Temperance groaned. “And just so terribly boring. And I suspect that he had been consuming the gossip mills far too much, and had already formed an opinion of me.”
“I know. I’m not criticizing,” Charity looked at her steadily. “But I’m observing that the man Harper found for you was not the right man, and that there will presumably be other men. Are you willing to sample through them, knowing your disdain for this sort of thing?”
Temperance looked at her, and heaved a sigh.
If someone had mentioned this to her a year ago, she could have never seen herself agreeing. But now things had changed since the arrival of the heir.
“I am all right with it,” Temperance said. “As I said, I don’t seem to have much of a choice about the matter.”
“It is a tough situation,” Charity frowned. “But perhaps something good can come out of it. Do you think that the duke has your best interests at heart, or do you trust him?”
“I simply have not known him long enough,” she frowned. “But he seems to not trust me around his son, which I find rather offensive.”
“I suppose he will come around when he gets to know you,” she said. “By the way, he has been watching you like a hawk this entire evening.”
“Suppose he has little better to do.”
“Oh, god,” Charity said, alarmed. “And I don’t think that he looks very happy at the moment either. I suspect he might be vexed that you’re not with Mr. Alford anymore.”
“I can explain my reasonings,” she shrugged in response.
Charity made a small sound that was almost a laugh and converted it at the last moment into something more neutral.
“What is your mother doing?” Charity asked.
Across the ballroom, Albina was having a very pleasant evening and Harper was standing beside her, watching Temperance talk to her friends.
“She left him,” he said, trying to reel in his anger even though he was more than a little annoyed by the whole thing.
“She finished the dance and then she left. Yes, which should be fine?”
“I found her a perfectly respectable man, and she is squandering the opportunity.”
“You found her a man,” Albina said pleasantly. “Whether he was perfectly anything remains to be established.”
“He is well regarded. His income is rather sizable as well, which will be important,” Harper looked at her.
Sometimes, he felt as though that the two ladies lived in a different world of their own. They had their own way of looking at the world, and it felt like the larger rules of society simply did not apply to them.
Or at least that they chose not to pay any heed to them.
If he was going to help them, he knew that was going to change.
“His income is not the point.” Albina accepted a glass of champagne from a passing footman, “My daughter is not rude, only that she has her opinions and she expresses them without particular apology, but she does not simply walk away from a dance without reason. If she walked away, something must have happened.”
“Nothing happened,” Harper said. “You are giving her far too much grace and she is now studiously ignoring the entire side of the room where I am standing, which is….”
