She looked into her teacup.
She had longed to see him again, but she hadn’t been ready to meet his parents. Even his sister had been on hand, he’d told her, sitting in the servants’ hall disguised as their groom, visiting with the house’s meager staff.
They barely knew each other. They’d had three conversations months ago, during the Season, while he pretended to be someone else. Since then, he’d sent her a few small tokens of his regard, but had not appeared before her again until the dinner five nights ago, as she sat expecting Sir Henry’s newest business associate and his family.
Thank goodness her parents still had no idea what was going on, still thought of young Mr. Openshaw as an excellent but unlikely prospect for Livia. Everyone else, however, knew the true purpose of the visits: Stephen Marbleton was serious enough about Livia that his parents had no choice but to meet—and judge—her in person.
Too soon. Too soon. When she didn’t even know whether she wished to maintain her affection for him or to let it wither away in his continued absence—the wiser choice, given that the life he led was not one she would have chosen for herself.
The parlor filled with small talk, carried on capably by Stephen Marbleton. But soon Lady Holmes inquired, with no preamble and even less subtlety, whether young Mr. Openshaw would care for a stroll in the garden, accompanied by her daughter. Stephen Marbleton responded with just the right amount of enthusiasm to please, but not embarrass, Livia.
But as they exited the house, properly coated and gloved against the damp, chilly day, her heart palpitated with apprehension.
No, with dread.
What if he should offer her the choice to leave behind her current existence, which she hated, for something that would not resemble anything she’d ever known?
She didn’t know whether she dared to commit herself to Mr. Marbleton. She didn’t know whether marriage would suit her—her sister Charlotte wasn’t the only Holmes girl with deeply skeptical views on matrimony. And above all else, she didn’t know—though she had an unhappy suspicion—whether a trying marriage wouldn’t turn her into an exact replica of her disappointing mother.
Livia glanced back at the house. Through the rain-streaked window of the parlor her mother was just visible, gesticulating with too much force. Lady Holmes could be vain, petty, and coarse, sometimes all at once. Yet Livia still saw, on the rare occasion, the echo of the girl Lady Holmes must have been, once upon a time. Before she fell in love with Sir Henry Holmes, before she learned to her lasting bitterness that Sir Henry had never reciprocated her sentiments—and had courted her only to spite his former fiancée, Lady Amelia Drummond, by marrying another on the day originally intended for their wedding.
And the ghost of that girl reminded Livia uncomfortably of herself: She too possessed a fierce pride, alongside a bottomless need for affection and a desire to give that warred constantly with the fear of rejection.
Trapped in a miserable marriage, far away from family and friends, having for companions only a philandering husband and a quartet of difficult children, Lady Holmes had succumbed to all the worst tendencies of her character and hardened into an utterly unlovely woman.
Livia stepped on the garden path. The uneven gravel poked into the thinning soles of her Wellington boots—a sensation of jabbing discomfort, much like her awareness of the unlovelier elements in her own character. She could hold a grudge—oh, how she could hold a grudge. She was angry at the world and mistrustful of people. She wanted too much—wealth, fame, wild acclaim, not to mention abject groveling from everyone who had ever slighted her, however unintentionally.
Could the young man next to her, strolling lightly on the leaf-strewn garden path, know all that? Or was he under the illusion that she was someone whose gratitude at being rescued would ensure that she would remain a happy, pliant partner for the rest of her life?
“I think we fear the same thing,” he said softly. “That you would choose me—and someday regret your choice.”
She halted midstep. Their eyes met; his were clear, but with a trace of melancholy. For a fraction of a moment it hurt that he had fears—that his feelings for her hadn’t inspired an invulnerable courage, blind to all obstacles. And then relief inundated her, so much so that her heart beat wildly and her fingertips tingled, as if they were recovering sensation after being chilled to the bone.
“I mistrust myself,” she said, resuming her progress. “I’m not happy here, and there’s a chance I’ll bring that unhappiness with me wherever I go. I’d be concerned to be asked to make a home for anyone.”
“Some people are like desert plants, needing only a bit of condensate and perhaps a rainstorm every few years. The rest of us require decent soil and a reasonable climate. It is no fault of yours not to have thrived at the edge of a desert. Your eldest sister married a stupid man at the earliest opportunity to get away. Your younger sister chose to shed her respectability rather than to remain under your father’s thumb.”
Charlotte would have preferred to overthrow their father’s control while keeping that respectability, but Livia understood his argument. “They are women of strength. I would label Henrietta a brute, but brutes know what they want and they care not what impediments stand in their path. And while Charlotte is no brute, she is both ruthless and resilient.
“More than anything else I envy her that resilience. She goes around if she cannot go through—and a cup of tea and a slice of cake seem to be all she needs to keep herself even-keeled. But I will work myself into a state. I will teeter between desperate hope and black despair. And I fear that I will not bend but simply break, should life become too heavy to bear.”
He sighed. The sound conveyed no impatience, only a deep wistfulness. “You are telling me that before you can be sure of your affections, you must be sure of yourself.”
And she was so very unsure of herself.
“I will gladly attribute some of the blame to Charlotte. She has always viewed romantic love as highly perishable.”
“I hold a slightly more optimistic view of romantic love. I see it not as doomed to spoilage but as prone to change. Yes, it can dwindle to nothing. Or harden into bitterness and enmity. But it can also ripen like a fine vintage, becoming something with extraordinary depth and maturity.”
He spoke with confidence and conviction. Briefly her gloved hand came to rest against the topmost button of her bodice. How did it feel to hold such lovely, uplifting views—was it like having been born with wings? His views did not change her own, but she rued that her own beliefs were nowhere near as luminous.
The garden path turned—she’d been waiting for this moment, when they would be temporarily hidden from view by an arbor. She gave him a letter. “Will you drop this in the post for my sister?”
He stowed the missive inside his coat. “Of course.”