The Proposal

“If I could fall in love with Kit, considering my frame of mind when I first saw him,” Lauren said, “and considering the fact that he was behaving most scandalously, stripped to the waist in the middle of Hyde Park for all the world to see while he fought with two laborers simultaneously and was using language that shocked me to the core—if I could fall in love with him anyway, Gwen, then why would you not fall in love with Lord Trentham?”

“But it is an impossibility,” Gwen said. “He has no real patience with the upper classes even though some of his dearest friends are aristocrats. He thinks us a frivolous, idle lot. He is middle-class and proud of it. And why should he not be? There is nothing inherently superior about us, is there? But I am not sure I could be the wife of a businessman, even a wealthy and successful one. Besides, there is a darkness in his soul, and I do not want to have to live with that again.”

“Again?” Lauren repeated softly.

Gwen looked down at her hands once more and said nothing.

“I am not saying another word,” Lauren said, “until you start at the beginning and tell me the whole story.”

Gwen told her everything.

And, strangely, they ended up convulsed with laughter over the way he had bungled his marriage proposal earlier by giving the impression that his only reason for asking her was so that his sister might attend a ton ball.

“I suppose,” Lauren said, drying her eyes, “you will be taking her to a ball?”

“I will,” Gwen said.

“It is a good thing I am still firmly in love with Kit,” Lauren said. “If I were not, I believe I might be falling a little in love with Lord Trentham myself.”

“We had better go back upstairs to the drawing room,” Gwen said, getting to her feet. “I suppose everyone had plenty more to say after I left. Wilma, for example.”

“Well,” Lauren said, following her out of the room, “you know Wilma. Every family has some cross to bear.”

They laughed again and Lauren linked an arm through Gwen’s.

The letter arrived more than two weeks later.

It had been an endless fortnight.

Hugo had thrown himself headlong into work. And he was reminded of how he had never been able to do things by halves. When he was a boy, he had spent every spare moment with his father, learning everything he possibly could about the businesses and developing ideas of his own, some of which his father had actually implemented. And when he had taken his commission, he had worked tirelessly to achieve his goal of becoming a general—perhaps the youngest in the army. He might have got there too if he had not first gone out of his head.

Now he was owner of the businesses, and he was immersed in the running of them, though part of him longed to be back at Crosslands, where he had lived an entirely different sort of life, not driven either by the demands of work or by the press of ambition.

He took Constance out walking or driving or shopping or to the library almost every day. He continued to take her calling upon their relatives too. He took her to a party at a cousin’s home one evening, and she promptly acquired two potential beaux, both of them respectable and personable enough, though Constance on the way home pronounced one to be a prosy bore and the other a boastful bore. It was just as well she did not wish to encourage them as Hugo had found his fingers itching all evening to plant them both a facer.

He did not tell her about his visit to Newbury Abbey or its outcome. He did not wish to raise her hopes only to have them dashed again if no letter ever arrived. Though even if Lady Muir did not carry through on her promise, of course, then he was going to have to carry through on his. He had promised to take his sister to a ton ball.

He must know a few ex-officers who had not been hostile to him and who also happened to be in London. And George had said he was coming to town sometime soon. Flavian and Ralph sometimes came during the spring. There must be some way of wangling an invitation, even if it was only to one of the less popular ton balls of the Season, one to which the hostess would welcome anyone willing to attend short of her chimney sweep.

He kept his distance from Fiona as much as he could during those two weeks. She was very unhappy to be left alone so often, but she refused to go out with her daughter and stepson. She had long ago broken off all communication with her own family, though Hugo knew that his father had gone to the trouble of raising her parents and her brother and sister out of grinding poverty. He had bought a small house for them and set them up in the grocery shop beneath it. They had managed the shop well and made a decent living out of it. But Fiona would have nothing to do with them. Neither would she consort with her husband’s relatives, who looked down upon her and treated her with contempt, she claimed, though Hugo had never seen any evidence of it.

She chose to remain at home now and wallow in her imaginary ailments. Or perhaps some of them were real. It was impossible to know for sure.

She fawned upon him when Constance was present. She whined at him on the few occasions when they were alone. She was lonely and neglected and he hated her, she claimed. It had been a different story when she had been young and beautiful. He had not hated her then.

He had.

But then he had been a boy, clever at his schoolwork and astute in business, but naive and gauche when it came to more personal matters. Fiona, dissatisfied with the wealthy, hardworking, adoring husband who worked long hours and was many years her senior, had fancied her young stepson as he grew closer to manhood and set out to seduce him. She had almost succeeded too, just before his eighteenth birthday. It had happened on an evening when his father was out and she had sat beside Hugo on the love seat in the sitting room and rubbed her hand over his chest while she told him some tale to which he could not even listen. And the hand had slid lower until it had no lower to go.

He had hardened into full arousal, and she had laughed softly and closed her hand about his erection over his clothing.

He had been upstairs in his room less than one minute later, dealing with the erection for himself and crying at the same time.

The next morning he had been in his father’s office early, demanding that his father purchase a commission for him in an infantry regiment. Nothing would change his mind, he had declared. It was his lifelong ambition to go into the military, and he could suppress it no longer. If his father refused to make the purchase, then Hugo would go and take the king’s shilling and enlist in the ranks.

He had broken his father’s heart. His own too, actually.

He was no longer a naive, gauche boy.

“Of course you are lonely, Fiona,” he said. “My father has been gone longer than a year. And of course you feel neglected. He is dead. But your year of mourning is over, you know, and difficult as it may be, you need to get out into the world again. You are still young. You still have your looks. You are wealthy. You can remain here, wallowing in self-pity and making a companion of your pills and your hartshorn. Or you can begin a new life.”

She was weeping silently, making no attempt to dry her tears or cover her face.

“You are hard-hearted, Hugo,” she said. “You used not to be. You loved me once until your father discovered it and sent you away.”

“I went away at my own insistence,” he said brutally. “I never loved you, Fiona. You were and are my stepmother. My father’s wife. I would have been fond of you if you had allowed it. You did not.”

He turned on his heel and left the room.

How different his life would have been if she had been content with his affection after her marriage to his father. But there was no point in such thoughts or in imagining what that other life might have been. It might have been worse. Or better. But it did not exist. That other life had never been lived.

Life was made up of choices, all of which, even the smallest, made all the difference to the rest of one’s life.