The Proposal

at Penderris were rarely planned.

Everyone else seemed to be enjoying Lady Muir’s company. No one else appeared to resent her. Perhaps that was because she was a lady and was a part of their world. She joined in the conversation with apparent ease, yet without in any way trying to dominate it. She could talk on virtually any topic. She could listen and laugh and make just the right comments and ask just the right questions. She liked them all, it seemed, and they had grown to like her. She was the perfect lady.

Or perhaps it was because none of the others had kissed her—twice.

Ben was appointed to take dinner with her. Both he and she seemed happy with the arrangement. Not long after dinner she suggested retiring to her room.

“You are in pain, Lady Muir?” George asked.

“Hardly at all when I keep still,” she said. “But you are a club. I daresay the evenings are the time when you most enjoy being together for companionship and conversation. I will withdraw.”

She was sensitive too. And tactful. More evidence of the perfect lady.

“There is really no need,” George said.

“A sprained ankle qualifies as a war wound,” Ben said, “and a club stagnates if it never increases its membership. We will expand to include you, Lady Muir, at least for this year. Consider yourself an honorary member.”

She laughed.

“Thank you,” she said. “I am honored. Actually, I am in some discomfort even if it does not quite amount to pain. I shall be more comfortable lying on my bed.”

“I shall summon a footman, then,” George said, but Hugo was already on his feet.

“No need,” he said. “I shall carry Lady Muir upstairs.”

He resented her most because she disturbed him. He did not dislike her, as he had yesterday. But she was of an alien world. She was beautiful and elegant and well dressed and self-possessed and charming. She was everything a lady ought to be. And she attracted him, a fact that annoyed him. He had always been able to look at ladies, even sometimes to appreciate their looks and allure, without ever desiring them. One ought not to desire alien species, no matter how beautiful they were.

Was he totally daft?

He had even told her this afternoon—alas, there was no possibility that his memory was playing tricks on him—that he would like to bed her.

He wondered if he ought to apologize. But an apology would only bring that scene in the garden alive again. It was perhaps best forgotten or at least left to lie dormant.

Besides, how could one apologize for kissing a woman twice? Once might be explained away as an impulsive accident. Twice suggested definite intent or a serious lack of control.

His foot was on the top stair before either of them spoke.

“You have been very silent tonight, Lord Trentham,” she said.

“At the moment I need all my breath to carry you,” he told her.

He paused outside her room while she turned the handle of the door. He stepped inside with her and set her down on the bed.

He propped a few of the many pillows behind her back and positioned one beneath her right foot. He straightened up and clasped his hands behind his back. Someone had already lit the candles, he realized.

He would love to turn on his heel and leave the room without another word or a backward glance, but he would make himself look like an idiot or an unmannerly clod if he did so.

“Thank you,” she said. And in the next breath, “I am sorry.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“You are sorry?”

“It must be a coveted treat to return here each year,” she said. “But you have been uncomfortable this evening, and I can only conclude that I am the cause. I have written to my brother and asked him to send the carriage as soon as possible, but it will be a few days before it arrives to take me home. In the meanwhile, I shall try to stay out of your way. Any serious involvement between us is out of the question for all sorts of reasons—it is out of the question for both of us. And I have never been one for meaningless flirtation or dalliance. My guess is that you have not either.”

“You came up early tonight because of me?” he asked her.

“You are a member of a group,” she said. “I came up because of the group. And I really am a little tired. Sitting around all day makes me sleepy.”

Any serious involvement between us is out of the question for all sorts of reasons.

Only one reason came to mind. She was of the aristocracy; he was of a lower class despite his title. It was the only reason. She was being dishonest with herself. But it was a huge reason. On both their parts, as she had said. He needed a wife who would pull cabbages from the kitchen garden with him, and help feed those lambs that could not suck from their mothers, and shoo chickens and their squawking and flapping wings out of the way in order to retrieve their eggs. He needed someone who knew the social world of the middle classes so that a husband could be found for Constance.

He bowed stiffly. Words were clearly superfluous.

“Good night, ma’am,” he said and left the room without waiting for her reply.

He thought he heard a sigh as he closed the door.

It was mostly Vincent’s turn that night.

He had woken up in a fit of panic in the morning and had been fighting it all day. Such episodes were growing less frequent, he reported, but when they did happen, they were every bit as intense as they had ever been.

When Vincent first came to Penderris, he had still been more than half deaf as well as totally blind—a result of a cannon exploding close enough to have propelled him all the way back to England in a million pieces. By some miracle he had escaped both dismemberment and death. He had still been something of a wild thing, whom only George had been able to calm. George had often taken the boy right into his arms and held him close, sometimes for hours at a time, crooning to him like a baby until he slept. Vincent had been seventeen at the time.

The deafness had cleared, but the blindness had not and never would. Vincent had given up hope fairly early and had adjusted his life to the new condition with remarkable determination and resilience. But hope, pushed deep inside rather than banished completely, surfaced occasionally when his defenses were low, usually while he slept. And he would awake expecting to see, be terrified when he discovered he could not, and then be catapulted down to the depths of a dark hell when he realized that he never would.

“It robs me of breath,” he said, “and I think I am going to die from lack of air. Part of my mind tells me to stop fighting, to accept death as a merciful gift. But the instinct to survive is more powerful than any other and I breathe again.”

“And what a good thing that is,” George said. “Despite all that might be said to the contrary, this life is worth living to the final breath with which nature endows us.”

The rather heavy silence that succeeded his words testified to the fact that it was not always an easy philosophy to adopt.

“I can picture some things and some people quite clearly in my head,” Vincent said. “But I cannot with others. This morning it struck me—for only about the five thousandth time—that I have never seen any of your faces, that I never will. Yet every time I have such a thought, it is as raw as it was the first time I thought it.”

“In the case of Hugo’s ugly countenance,” Flavian said, “that is a signal mercy, Vincent. We have to look at it every day. And in the case of my face … Well, if you were to see it, you would despair, for you will never look so handsome yourself.”

Vincent laughed, and all of them smiled.

Hugo noticed Flavian blinking away tears.

Imogen patted Vincent’s hand.

“Tell me, Hugo,” Vincent said, “were you kissing Lady Muir when I came to fetch you in for tea? I could hear no conversation as I approached the flower garden though Ralph had assured me you were