These words came from Mr. Wilson, who stood with his wife behind the butler. Both wore polite smiles that didn’t reach their eyes. Ambrose didn’t know them well, but even so, he could see the strain on their faces.
“Hello,” Violet said, elbowing him to one side. “We have come to visit with Tilly.”
Mr. Wilson looked at his wife, and Ambrose thought something passed between them, and then they were stepping back.
“Please, come this way, and we shall take tea,” Mr. Wilson said.
“We will not keep you long,” Mrs. Wilson added when Ambrose hesitated.
They followed them to a parlor, and all settled in seats.
Mr. Wilson was the first to speak. “Our daughter told us of your offer for her hand, my lord.”
That surprised him. He’d thought Tilly would keep that to herself.
“She has no wish to marry me,” he said.But she will.
The Wilsons looked at each other again.
“She has a valid reason, but I can assure you, it is not because of her lack of feeling toward you, Lord Talbot.”
Ambrose looked at Mrs. Wilson, whose hands were clasped tightly in her lap, her knuckles pale.
“Then I wish she had shared it with me,” he said carefully, “so I could have addressed it.”
“It is not something that can be addressed,” Mr. Wilson said. “Or so she believes.”
“Harrison.” Mrs. Wilson said her husband’s name quietly, a note of warning in it.
“Do you love our daughter, my lord?”
“I do, Mr. Wilson, very much,” Ambrose said.
His sisters all sighed in unison at his confession.
Mr. Wilson set down his teacup then and looked directly at Ambrose. “We will not tell you the reason, my lord. It is Tilly’s secret to share, or not, as she chooses. But I will tell you this. When she refused you, it was not because she wished to. It was because she felt she had no other honorable course.”
“She was protecting you,” Mrs. Wilson added softly and then pressed her lips together as though she had said more than she intended.
Ambrose sat with that for a moment. Protecting him. That was so entirely Tilly that he almost wanted to laugh, except that nothing about this day felt remotely close to humorous.
“I see,” he said.
“Do you?” Mr. Wilson asked.
“I see that she has made a decision on my behalf that was mine to make. And I see that whatever her reason is, she has decided it matters more than what either of us wants.” He paused. “She is wrong.”
Mrs. Wilson made a small sound that was almost a sigh of relief.
“You will not find it easy to tell her so,” Mr. Wilson said with the particular expression of a man who had spent many years being wrong in the vicinity of a very determined woman and had made his peace with it.
“I am aware.” Ambrose set down his own cup and rose. “I am sorry to have called without notice, and I am grateful for your candor. I intend to find her, and when I do, I intend to ask her again. I wanted you to know that.”
The Wilsons rose with him. Something in their posture had shifted, a tension going out of them both, replaced with relief.
“She is at The Iris Club,” Mrs. Wilson said. “She went this morning and had not returned when Mr. Howard called.”
“Did you tell him where she’d gone?” he asked.
