“Three weeks!”Netty said, her faux exasperation no mask for her apparent happiness.“I never said three weeks.”
“As soon as we can get the banns read,” Ezra protested.“I can wait no longer.”
“I need at least two months.To prepare all of my things.My ma will be furious if I marry before she’s finished the sewing.”
“She can finish the sewing after we’re wed,” Ezra groaned, his eyes riveted to his betrothed’s face.
There was no mistaking, Malcolm had to note, the desire in Ezra’s expression.He had waited a long while for Netty.So Malcolm supposed he would wait the two months as well, if that was the only way he could have her.
Beatrice had often intimated to Malcolm that if he wouldn’t come to London to find a wife or court a woman from the respectable orders around Parkhorne, then he should marry a local girl like Netty.He understood her implication.For many local girls, marrying Malcolm would be desirable from a worldly perspective.It would be a large step up in the local hierarchy.
And there were women in this very room whom Malcolm found attractive.
Netty was very pretty herself, there was no denying.
And other women who danced and whirled in the crowd had caught his eye from time to time.
But he could never think of marrying them.
He didn’t trust himself.
Not after what his father had been.
A brute who ruined women without care.
And he suspected that, like his father, he wasn’t suited to marriage.
He wasn’t cruel like his father had been.But he wasn’t warm, either.He didn’t know the right words to say when someone was sad or ailing.He wasn’t the type of man who found easy intimacy with others.He knew even his own family, his siblings, regarded him as emotionally remote.Difficult, even.They wished him otherwise, of course, and tried to get close to him.And in his way, hewasclose to them.But he wasn’t the type of man, he was sure, who could make a woman happy for a lifetime.
Any woman who married him would soon find herself disappointed.
A young woman bounded up to Netty, her dark hair flying behind her due to the swiftness of her step.
It was Kitty Rogers.
“Ah, Mr.Brown,” she said.“You’ve come to join the party.”
He nodded in response, trying not to meet her eyes.
Kitty was very pretty, a good seven years his junior, and known for having a rather flamingtendrefor him.
His workers teased him about it constantly.
And at one time, he had been tempted by Kitty.
She was thin, thinner than he was wont to prefer his ladies, but still very comely and sweet.She would make him a good, eager young wife.
But after a few conversations with her, he had realized the error of his thinking.He could not play the lover, especially not with a woman so young and ardent.Young ladies like Kitty—just like the young ladies up at the house—wanted to be courted.They wanted sweet nothings and a man of gallant words and sweeping promises.While his prospects would look very good to the daughter of a cottager, he was no more capable of gallantry with her than he had been with Miss Scarlett Perkins tonight.And, worse, if he trapped Kitty into marriage with him, she would have no resources to leave.She would have to limp along with him, no matter how miserable he made her.
Not to mention, in their few conversations, he had observed no particular compatibility between them.
“Will you dance this evening, Mr.Brown?”Kitty asked, breathless.
Malcolm seldom ever danced.
“Not this evening, Miss Rogers,” he said.
Her face fell, as it often did around him, but he was saved from any more awkwardness by a young man, a laborer at Parkhorne, who came to claim Kitty for the next dance.As he watched them bound off together and then her easy smiles at her partner, he suspected that someday soon the lad would probably convince Kitty to become his wife.
