‘Shall I pour for you, my lady?’
‘Oh, no, thank you. I prefer to let it steep for a minute or two. And I am sure you must be far too busy to be kept waiting upon us.’
And with one smile, and a polite little speech, Clare obtained the result he’d been unable to produce by glowering and being rude. The landlord bowed himself out of the room and left them to pour their own drinks.
‘So,’ he said, as she took a seat by the table and lifted the lid of the teapot to peer inside, ‘where were we?’
She glanced at him as he took the seat opposite, her cheeks turning pink again.
‘You were telling me that when you saw me emerging from the duck pond, dripping with slime and holding a bag of dead puppies in my arms, you were not in fact mocking my predicament, but actually making a genuine proposal of marriage.’
Put like that, it did sound unbelievable.
‘Dead puppies? Was that what you’d been doing in the pond? Trying to fish them out?’
‘You surely did not think I had been wading in it for my own amusement,’ she replied snippily, replacing the teapot lid with a resounding clink.
‘I… I did not really think of that aspect of it at all. You just looked so…’
‘Ridiculous.’
‘Adorable.’
‘Covered in pond slime?’
He shrugged. ‘To my eyes, all I could see was a naiad come to life.’
‘A naiad,’ she repeated with a scornful sniff. ‘Had you, perchance, just emerged from a tavern?’
‘I was not foxed! You were so…’
‘Wet.’
‘I was going to say beautiful.’
She pulled her lips into a flat line. ‘You don’t have to say things like that,’ she said, averting her gaze as she reached for the milk jug.
He reached out across the table and stayed her hand.
‘Somebody needs to say them. And who better than your husband?’
‘I don’t hold with the telling of falsehoods,’ she said vehemently.
‘I am not telling falsehoods. You are an extremely attractive woman, Clare.’
‘Fustian!’
‘It is no such thing.’
‘But you never… I mean, the kind of women you took up with… I mean…’ She glanced down at the front of her coat. And went an even deeper shade of pink.
‘You don’t have the more obvious attributes that attract the notice of young men who are just beginning to notice the difference between males and females, no. But you have something of far greater merit.’
‘Oh? And what’s that?’ She lifted her chin in what looked like a combination of defiance and hope. As though she wanted him to pay her a compliment, but was braced to receive whatever else might come from his mouth next.
‘You have character. You have integrity. You have—’ he shrugged with one shoulder ‘—passion. You never hesitated to wade in on the side of anyone you thought was enduring persecutions or tribulations, no matter what anyone else did.’
‘I…what do you mean? How could you know…?’
‘I have always made it my business to know everything that occurs within all the estates for which I am responsible. And your name was always coming up in connection with good works of one sort or another.’
‘You cannot have wanted to marry me because of my good works,’ she said with a touch of scorn.
‘No, I confess, I did not think of it until that morning I saw you emerging from the pond, your gown plastered to your figure, leaving nothing to the imagination, your eyes flashing defiance, your hair escaping its proper arrangement and snaking round your shoulders like damp flames.’
‘You thought of marriage, because my dress was wet? And proposed on the spot?’
‘I think,’ he said, feeling a creeping impatience with her flat refusal to see the romantic aspect of what had, to him, felt like the fabled coup de foudre, ‘that we have exhausted all there is to say upon this topic.’
‘Oh, no, we haven’t.’ She sloshed some milk into her cup and slammed the jug down on the tray. ‘You said you were in earnest about that marriage proposal when I’ve always believed you’d been making fun of me. And what’s more, that you believed I’d turned you down, which means you must have spoken to somebody about it…’