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“A duchess!” Emmeline clapped her hands. “So you do know Sarah Bernhardt and the Prince of Wales! I thought you must be lying.”
“She was lying,” said Kelyn softly. “Lying about quite a bit more than who she knows. She lied about who she was. Neal, were you a part of this deception?”
“No,” Lavinia spoke up before he could answer. “I lied to everyone, including him. To run away from my marriage. I borrowed Mrs. Pendrake’s identity. She’s got it back, though. Don’t worry. She is every bit as extraordinary as ever and doing all sorts of inspiring things to advance science and women’s education, and I’m sure you’d all adore her. She’s exactly the sort of woman Neal should marry, and if I thought she’d truly make him happier than I could, I wouldn’t stand in their way. Because I love Neal.”
She paused to gulp air. “I would have come sooner, but I wanted to spare him embarrassment. I knew he’d disappoint you all, turning up with a debutante. But I was disappointing him, staying away. So I’m here to tell you that I may be a flibbertigibbet, but I love him with every particle of my being. I make him laugh, and I am prepared to race to his rescue whenever he tries to get himself killed, and we don’t know about any of the same things so we’ll never get bored with each other, which we might do if we were just agreeing all the time on the right way to pack bulbs or rehashing the life of Darwin!”
She had to gulp again and this time the pause was punctuated by Jenni’s snort. Lavinia looked at her, brow furrowed.
“I think it might be best to marry someone with whom you have very little in common, to keep things from getting dull,” she continued. “And he loves me.”
Neal’s mother sat heavily in a chair, hand clutching the snow-white braid that hung over her shoulder.
“Forgive me,” she said. “My brain has been sluggish of late. You are not a botanist. You are a duchess who abandoned her husband. That husband, I assume, given your attire, has since passed on.”
“Correct,” said Lavinia with touching concentration. She looked like a schoolboy summoned to a difficult recitation. “I am a dowager.”
“And after meeting my son under false pretenses, you now intend to marry him, in part because you have so little in common.” His mother’s voice was as dry as fossils in sandstone. “Your interests are . . . ? Not botany, I take it.”
“Fashion.” Lavinia had gone rigid. “Particularly theatrical fashions. Dancing. France. I speak fluent French. Novels—reading and writing them. I’ve completed a romance, in fact. A romance of the high seas. I like to shop.”
Neal’s mother looked like she’d been presented with a reconstruction of a dinosaur with the head at the wrong end.
“Will you introduce me to the Prince of Wales?” asked Emmeline.
Jenni and Nessa were exchanging glances. Perran was mouthing romance of the high seas at Jory, who was trying to hide a smile. Christ. The Traymaynes were a judgmental lot. Terrible snobs. Assertive. Righteous. Eager to boss the family baby, who, left to his own devices, tended to land in trouble. Neal bit the inside of his cheek. This old dynamic. He rebelled or he tried to please. It was hard to know his own mind, to separate his convictions from all their strong opinions.
Bollocks, said Neal’s father. What’s hard is your head. Don’t just stand there like a post. Do you love the woman?
“Lavinia’s right,” said Neal. Eyes swiveled. Suddenly, he was at the intersection of all their gazes. Lavinia’s was the one that drew him.
“I love her,” he declared, watching her eyes widen. “It’s an incontrovertible point. Not open for debate.”
Yes. That’s it.
He grinned. “If that hatbox she brought contains a hat with the last dodo bird stuck on top, I’ll still love her.”
Jenni sucked in her breath. “Crikey.”
“I’d mind it, of course.” Neal couldn’t help but laugh at the image. “We’d have a rip-roaring fight, perhaps.” He sobered. “But I’d trust, when it was over, that we’d both see the world through slightly different eyes. And we’d love each other all the more.”
Color flooded Lavinia’s cheeks. She took several steps backward, as though she needed room to take him in. To take it in.
He realized in that moment that he’d surprised her. Her eyes were brilliant. Glorious.
“The last dodo,” repeated Jenni, frowning and laughing at the same time. “If any part of a dodo is in that hatbox, we’re taking it to the Natural History Museum.”
Suddenly, Lavinia laughed too, her shoulders loosening.
Neal’s next realization was more astounding, more humbling.
She hadn’t been sure that he was sure of her. She hadn’t fully expected him to speak up, to speak back. To present their love as an article of faith.
Her doubt made him ache. But the joy spreading now over her face—it acted as a balm. He’d never seen anything as beautiful.
“No dodo.” Still laughing, she lifted the lid off the hatbox on the chair. “I dug up dandelions.” She said it breathlessly.
Perran, Jory, Nessa, and Jenni crowded around the chair to peer inside the box. Lavinia had lined it with newspaper covered liberally with damp dirt. Neal touched the soft flower head of the wilted dandelion plant.
