Mary Balogh - The Proposal

“We have always told you, Hugo,” Vincent said, “that being a recluse is not really suited to your nature.”

“More specifically,” Ben said, “we have compared you to an unexploded firecracker, Hugo, just waiting for a spark to ignite it.”

Hugo sighed.

“I like my life as it is,” he said.

“So the fact that you were given your title as a reward for extraordinary valor is to mean nothing after all?” Ralph asked. “You are planning to return to your middle-class roots, Hugo?”

Hugo frowned again.

“I never left them,” he said. “I have never wanted to be a member of the upper classes. I would despise them all collectively, as my father always did, if it were not for the six of you. Purchasing Crosslands might have seemed a bit pretentious, but I wanted my own little bit of the country in which to be at peace. That’s all.”

“And it will always be there for you,” the duke said. “It will be a quiet retreat when the press of business is getting you down.”

“It’s the son part that is getting me down now,” Hugo said. “He would have to be legitimate, wouldn’t he? I would have to have a wife in order to produce him. That’s what is facing me after I leave here. I have decided. I have to find a wife. Perish the thought. Pardon me, Imogen. I have nothing whatsoever against women. I just don’t really want one permanently in my life. Or in my home.”

“You are not looking for romance or romantic love, then, Hugo?” Flavian asked. “That is very wise of you, old chap. Love is the very d-devil and to be avoided as one would the plague.”

The lady to whom Flavian had been betrothed when he went to war had broken off their engagement when she found herself unable to cope with the wounds he brought home from the Peninsula. Within two months she had married someone else, a man he had once considered his best friend.

“Do you have anyone in mind, Hugo?” the duke asked.

“Not really.” Hugo sighed. “I have an army of female cousins and aunts who would be only too delighted to present me with a parade of possibilities if I were to say the word, even though I have neglected them all shamefully for years. But I would feel out of control from the first moment. I would hate that. Actually, I was hoping someone here would have some advice for me. On how to go about finding a wife, that is.”

That silenced them all.

“It is actually quite simple, Hugo,” Ralph said at last. “You approach the first reasonably personable woman you see, tell her that you are a lord and indecently wealthy to boot, and ask her if she would fancy marrying you. Then you stand back and watch her trip all over her tongue in her eagerness to say yes.”

The others laughed.

“It is that easy, is it?” Hugo said. “What a huge relief. I shall go down onto the beach tomorrow, then, weather permitting, and wait for reasonably personable women to hove by. My problem will be solved even before I leave Penderris.”

“Oh, not women, Hugo,” Ben said. “Not plural. They will be fighting over you, and there is much to fight over, even apart from your title and wealth. Go down to the beach and find one woman. We will make it easy for you and stay away from there all day. For me, of course, that will be simple, since I do not have a decent pair of legs with which to get down there anyway.”

“Now that we have your future satisfactorily settled, Hugo,” the duke said, getting to his feet, “we will allow you to go to your room to freshen up and change and perhaps rest before dinner. We will, however, discuss the matter more seriously during the coming days. Perhaps we will even be able to suggest some practical course of action. In the meanwhile, let me just say how very splendid it is to have the Survivors’ Club all together again this year. I have longed for this moment.”

Hugo gathered up his greatcoat and left the room with the duke, feeling all the seductive comfort and pleasure of being back at Penderris in company with the six people who meant most to him in the world.

Even the rain pattering against the windowpanes only served to add a feeling of coziness.

Gwendoline Grayson, Lady Muir, hunched her shoulders and drew her cloak more snugly about her. It was a brisk, blustery March day, made chillier by the fact that she was standing down at the fishing harbor below the village where she was staying. It was low tide, and a number of fishing boats lay half keeled over on the wet sand, waiting for the water to return and float them upright again.

She should go back to the house. She had been out for longer than an hour, and part of her longed for the warmth of a fire and the comfort of a steaming cup of tea. Unfortunately, though, Vera Parkinson’s home was not hers, only the house where she was staying for a month. And she and Vera had just quarreled—or at least, Vera had quarreled with her and upset her. She was not ready to go back yet. She would rather endure the elements.

She could not walk to her left. A jutting headland barred her way. To the right, though, a pebbled beach beneath high cliffs stretched into the distance. It would be several hours yet before the tide came up high enough to cover it.

Gwen usually avoided walking down by the water, even though she lived close to the sea herself at the dower house of Newbury Abbey in Dorsetshire. She found beaches too vast, cliffs too threatening, the sea too elemental. She preferred a smaller, more ordered world, over which she could exert some semblance of control—a carefully cultivated flower garden, for example.

But today she needed to be away from Vera for a while longer, and from the village and country lanes where she might run into Vera’s neighbors and feel obliged to engage in cheerful conversation. She needed to be alone, and the pebbled beach was deserted for as far into the distance as she could see before it curved inland. She stepped down onto it.

She realized after a very short distance, however, why no one else was walking here. For though most of the pebbles were ancient and had been worn smooth and rounded by thousands of tides, a significant number of them were of more recent date, and they were larger, rougher, more jagged. Walking across them was not easy and would not have been even if she had had two sound legs. As it was, her right leg had never healed properly from a break eight years ago, when she had been thrown from her horse. She walked with a habitual limp even on level ground.

She did not turn back, though. She trudged stubbornly onward, careful where she set her feet. She was not in any great hurry to get anywhere, after all.

This had really been the most horrid day of a horrid fortnight. She had come for a month-long visit, entirely from impulse, when Vera had written to inform her of the sad passing a couple of months earlier of her husband, who had been ailing for several years. Vera had added the complaint that no one in either Mr. Parkinson’s family or her own was paying any attention whatsoever to her suffering despite the fact that she was almost prostrate with grief and exhaustion after nursing him for so long. She was missing him dreadfully. Would Gwen care to come?

They had been friends of a sort for a brief few months during the whirlwind of their come-out Season in London and had exchanged infrequent letters after Vera’s marriage to Mr. Parkinson, a younger brother of Sir Roger Parkinson, and Gwen’s to Viscount Muir. Vera had written a long letter of sympathy after Vernon’s death, and had invited Gwen to come and stay with her and Mr. Parkinson for as long as she wished since Vera was neglected by almost everyone, including Mr. Parkinson himself, and would welcome her company. Gwen had declined the invitation then, but she had responded to Vera’s plea on this occasion despite a few misgivings. She knew what grief and exhaustion and loneliness after the death of a spouse felt like.

It was a decision she had regretted almost from the first day. Vera, as her letters had suggested, was a moaner and whiner, and while Gwen tried to make allowances for the fact that she had tended a sick husband for a few years and had just lost him, she soon came to the conclusion that the years since their come-out had soured Vera and made her permanently disagreeable. Most of her neighbors avoided her whenever possible. Her only friends were a group of ladies who much resembled her in character. Sitting and listening to their conversation felt very like being sucked into a black hole and deprived of enough air to breathe, Gwen had been finding. They knew only how to see what was wrong in their lives and in the world and never what was right.

And that was precisely what she was doing now when thinking of them, Gwen realized with a mental shake of the head. Negativity could be frighteningly contagious.

Even before this morning she had been wishing that she had not committed herself to such a long visit. Two weeks would have been quite sufficient—she would actually be going home by now. But she had agreed to a month, and a month it would have to be. This morning, however, her stoicism had been put to the test.

She had received a letter from her mother, who lived at the dower house with her, and in it her mother had recounted a few amusing anecdotes involving Sylvie and Leo, Neville and Lily’s elder children—Neville, Earl of Kilbourne, was Gwen’s brother and lived at Newbury Abbey itself. Gwen read that part of the letter aloud to Vera at the breakfast table in the hope of coaxing a smile or a chuckle from her. Instead, she had found herself at the receiving end of a petulant tirade, the basic thrust of which was that it was very easy for Gwen to laugh at and make light of her suffering when Gwen’s husband had died years ago and left her very comfortably well off, and when she had had a brother and mother both willing and eager to receive her back into the family fold, and when her sensibilities did not run very deep anyway. It was easy to be callous and cruel when she had married for money and status instead of love. Everyone had known that truth about her during the spring of their come-out, just as everyone had known that she, Vera, had married beneath her because she and Mr. Parkinson had loved each other to distraction and nothing else had mattered.

Gwen had stared mutely back at her friend when she finally fell silent apart from some wrenching sobs into her handkerchief. She dared not open her mouth. She might have given the tirade right back and thereby have reduced herself to the level of Vera’s own spitefulness. She would not be drawn into an unseemly scrap. But she almost vibrated with anger. And she was deeply hurt.

“I am going out for a walk, Vera,” she had said at last, getting to her feet and pushing back her chair. “When I return, you may inform me whether you wish me to remain here for another two weeks, as planned, or whether you would prefer that I return to Newbury without further delay.”

She would have to go by post or the public stagecoach. It would take the best part of a week for Neville’s carriage to come for her, after she wrote to inform him that she needed it earlier than planned.

Vera had wept harder and begged her not to be cruel, but Gwen had come out anyway.

She would be perfectly happy, she thought now, if she never returned to Vera’s house. What a dreadful mistake it had been to come, and for a whole month, on the strength of a very brief and long-ago acquaintance.

Eventually she rounded the headland she had seen from the harbor and discovered that the beach, wider here, stretched onward, seemingly to infinity, and that in the near distance the stones gave way to sand, which would be far easier to walk along. However, she must not go too far. Although the tide was still out, she could see that it was definitely on the way in, and in some very flat places it could rush in far faster than one anticipated. She had lived close to the sea long enough to know that. Besides, she could not stay away from Vera’s forever, though she wished she could. She must return soon.

Close by there was a gap in the cliffs, and it looked possible to get up onto the headland high above if one was willing to climb a steep slope of pebbles and then a slightly more gradual slope of scrubby grass. If she could just get up there, she would be able to walk back to the village along the top instead of having to pick her way back across these very tricky stones.

Her weak leg was aching a bit, she realized. She had been foolish to come so far.

She stood still for a moment and looked out to the still-distant line of the incoming tide. And she was hit suddenly and quite unexpectedly, not by a wave of water, but by a tidal wave of loneliness, one that washed over her and deprived her of both breath and the will to resist.