“I will go to Alvesley with you,” she said very deliberately, “as your betrothed.”
He sat very still.
“As your temporary betrothed,” she explained. “I will go with you and be presented to your family and be everything you hoped I would be. I will be there while you establish yourself again as your father’s son and while you take your rightful place in his home as his heir. I will be there so that a distasteful engagement will not be pressed upon either you or the lady who once chose your brother rather than you. I will give you some breathing room, so to speak, during the house party and the birthday celebrations. But I will not marry you. At the end of the summer I will leave Alvesley and break the engagement. I will do it in such a way that no censure will fall upon you. By that time it is to be hoped that your family will have accepted your right to choose your own bride in your own time.”
He could not possibly be misunderstanding her. She spoke very precisely. But what the devil?
“You would break the engagement?” he said, frowning. “Do you realize what a scandal that would cause? You would put yourself beyond the social pale.”
“I think not,” she said with a faint smile for her hands. “There would be those who would congratulate me upon having freed myself just in time from marriage to a rakehell. But I care little anyway. I have told you that I am not in search of a husband, that I have no intention of marrying. What I have realized only very recently is that I need to break free of my well-meaning relatives, who treat me as if I were both a green girl and excessively fragile goods. In reality I am a woman who long ago reached her majority, and I have a comfortable independence. I intend to set up my own home, perhaps in Bath. After spending the summer at Alvesley, supposedly as your betrothed, and then breaking the connection, I will find it far easier to do what I ought to have done a year ago. None of my relatives will argue with me. I will be demonstrably unmarriage-able.”
What the devil? He stared at her profile and realized fully what he should have realized long ago—that he did not know this woman at all. Yet he had been prepared to marry her within the next two weeks.
“Were you deeply attached to Kilbourne, then?” he asked her.
Her head dipped a little lower. Her fingers closed and then spread again.
“I grew up with him at Newbury Abbey,” she said, “from the time I was taken there at the age of three. In some ways he seemed like my brother as much as he was Gwen’s. But I always knew too that we were intended for each other when we grew up. I shaped my life to the expectation that one day I would be his countess. Even when he bought his commission and went away, telling me not to wait for him but to feel free to marry someone else if I wished, I remained loyal. I waited. But while he was gone he married secretly and then watched his wife die in an ambush in Portugal—or so he thought. He came home and would have married me after all. It seemed as if life would proceed in the direction I had always expected it to take. But Lily did not die. She came home to Neville—on my wedding day.”
He was not deceived by the lack of emotion in her voice. This story had been the sensation of last year. But almost all the gossip, he guessed, had focused upon the glorious love story that was Kilbourne and his lady’s. Lauren Edgeworth had been pitied, spoken of, no doubt, in hushed, shocked whispers. How many people, himself included, Kit thought, deeply ashamed, had really considered the pain the woman must have suffered and must still suffer? She had been within a few minutes of fulfilling a lifetime’s dream only to have it shattered most cruelly.
“You loved him?” he asked. Though he was not sure the past tense was strictly appropriate.
“Love,” she said softly. “What is love? The word has so many meanings. Of course I loved him. But not in the way Neville and Lily love each other. Love of that sort is a disordered, undisciplined emotion, best avoided. I would have remained loyal and faithful and . . . Of course I loved him.” She sighed. “I will contemplate no other marriage, Lord Ravensberg.”
He gazed at her, deep pity—and guilt—holding him silent. But she appeared to read his thoughts.
“I am not asking for your pity,” she said. “Please do not offer it or even feel it. I need only to be accorded the privilege that men expect as a natural right—to be allowed to live my life my way without having those who claim to love me forever knowing better than I what it is that will make me happy. I want to be alone and independent. If I ruin my reputation this summer, I will achieve that for which I ought not to have to fight.”
“Good Lord,” he said, running the fingers of one hand through his hair and then leaning forward to rest his forearms across his legs. “How can I agree to this? Having spoken of honor just a few minutes ago, how can I now agree to deceive both my family and yours? And how can I leave all the burden of breaking our betrothal to you? You do understand, do you not, that as a gentleman I could not possibly break it myself?”
“And therein is your answer,” she said. “To you the betrothal would have to be a real one, my lord, would it not? If I were to behave dishonorably, you see, and refuse to break it off even after striking a bargain with you, you would have no choice but to marry me. And so you would be involved in no deception if you were to agree to my suggestion.”
He tried to find a flaw in her argument. But really there was none. Of course if he agreed to her strange proposal the betrothal would be a real one for him. And perhaps—yes, perhaps he could redeem the honor he had lost in the past few weeks and persuade her after all during the summer to marry him. Perhaps he could persuade her that what he had to offer was slightly more appealing than a life alone. Women, even those with the means to live independent lives, had very little real freedom.
He did not love Lauren Edgeworth. He did not even know her, he admitted ruefully. But of one thing he had grown painfully aware during the past half hour or so. She was a very real person with very real feelings. And she was one for whom he felt a certain regard. And one to whom he owed a debt.
“Are you sure a large house party would be to your taste?” he asked her, sitting upright again.
For the first time she turned her head to look at him. “I believe it would suit me admirably,” she said. “I was brought up to be a countess, remember? I was brought up to expect to run Newbury Abbey one day, to be the lady of the manor. Going to Alvesley as the betrothed of the Earl of Redfield’s heir would be something I could contemplate with the greatest confidence and ease. You would not be disappointed in me.”
He frowned into her eyes. “But why would you do all this merely to convince your family to leave you to your chosen way of life?” he asked. “Pardon me, but you are no timid or easily dominated female, Miss Edgeworth. All you really need to do, surely, is tell them that you have made up your own mind about your future and they might as soon save their breath to cool their porridge as seek to change your mind.”
She looked away again—to the dark trees at the other side of the path, to the sky above, just visible through the branches of the trees.
“Your confession tonight confirmed me in all the bad things I have thought or been told about you,” she said. “For a while I could think of nothing but getting away from you and never seeing you again. But . . .”
For a while it seemed that she would not continue. He waited.
“My life has been quiet and decorous,” she said. “I have only recently realized that it is also dull. Its dullness suits me. It is what I know, what I am comfortable with, what I will live with quite contentedly for the rest of my life. But recently I have felt a craving to know just once what it would be like to have some sort of adventure. To . . . Ah, I do not know how to put the feeling into words. I think that spending a summer in your company, masquerading as your betrothed, would be rather . . . adventurous. This all sounds very lame put into words.”