Page 16 of Duke of Moonstone
“The sort of declaration that bears very little relation to the actual circumstances and is designed primarily to produce a desired response. I have not offered you false poetry. I have offered you the truth.”
“You have offered me a business arrangement,” Frances said. “You have proposed marriage to me the way you might propose the purchase of a new horse. Sensible, practical, and entirely devoid of anything that might be mistaken for feeling.”
“We made each other’s acquaintances four days ago.”
“Three,” she corrected before she could stop herself.
The corner of his mouth moved. It was not quite a smile, and it was gone almost immediately, but she saw it, and it did something entirely inconvenient to her train of thought. “Three days,” he agreed. “I submit that declarations of feeling at this juncture would not only be inaccurate but would insult your intelligence which I have no desire to do.”
Frances looked at him. The genuinely aggravating thing was that this was almost a reasonable argument. She could see the logic in it. She could also see that the logic was doing a great deal of work to cover the fact that she was sitting in her sister’s drawing room, being proposed to by a man who had not once, in any of their interactions, looked at her as though she were a person rather than a situation to be managed.
And yet he came,said some quiet, traitorous part of her mind.He dressed himself and came here at half past ten in the morning. He did not send a letter.
She pushed that thought firmly away.
“This is not how I imagined a proposal,” she complained. “Not remotely.”
“I cannot speak to your imaginings,” he said. “I can speak only to the situation as it stands.”
“And the situation, as it stands, is that you have decided marriage is the logical solution, and you have come here to inform me of it.”
“I have come here to propose it,” he said. “There is a distinction. I am asking, Lady Frances. Not instructing.”
She looked at him for a long moment. She wanted to say no. She wanted to say it immediately, completely, and with enough conviction to end the conversation.
I will not,she thought.I will not marry a man who looks at me like a ledger entry and speaks of our future as though it is an estate problem to be solved.
But she also knew, with a clarity she very much wished she did not have, that wanting something different did not make her alternatives any better.
“I will think about it,” she said.
He held her gaze for a moment, and she could not tell, she never could tell with him, what was happening behind those watchful eyes.
Then he inclined his head.
“I will await your answer,” he said and turned to leave. Frances sat very still, looking at the door that had closed behind him, andshe thought about how thoroughly, how completely, her life had stopped resembling anything she had planned for it.
CHAPTER 7
Your Grace,
I have considered your proposal and find myself unable to identify an adequate alternative. Consequently, I accept with the understanding that the arrangement will be executed with mutual respect and that you will not anticipate from me more than what the situation warrants.
Sincerely,
Lady Frances Pembroke
Alexander read it once, set it on the desk, and read it again.Unable to identify an adequate alternative.He supposed he ought not to have expected anything warmer given that his own proposal had not exactly been constructed for warmth.
She had accepted, which was the operative fact, and she had set her terms plainly, which was, he had to admit, consistent with everything he had observed of her so far.
He folded the letter and set it aside.
His thoughts went, without his permission, to the gardens. To the moment of catching her, the sudden weight of her against his arm, the way she had gone still almost immediately. And then the mask coming away, and the look in her eyes, which had been frightened and braced and underneath both of those things entirely, stubbornly present.
He pushed the thought aside and reached for the next letter in the pile which was considerably more straightforward—an inquiry from his steward at Whitestone about the drainage on the south field—and he applied himself to it with more concentration than the drainage on the south field strictly required.
There was a knock at the study door.
