Not Quite a Lady (The Dressmakers 4)

“I cannot make flowery speeches,” he went on. “It were absurd to feign to be other than the plain fellow I am. I shall not bore you with my accomplishments or prospects. You know them already and have formed your own judgment. You know I can keep you in the style to which you are accustomed, that my position in the world is not low and in time shall be higher. There is no need to expand upon these matters. What I wish to say, simply, is that I admire and love you exceedingly. I want nothing more than to protect and cherish you. I hope you will allow me to do so by doing me the great honor of becoming my wife.”

If he had made a flowery speech or boasted of his accomplishments and prospects, it would have been easier for her. As it was, she was grieved to disappoint him.

Oh, why had he not given her some warning!

She took time to try to calm herself and assemble the words she must say. She took a deep breath and let it out again. “Colonel Morrell, you do me a great honor,” she said. “I hold you in high esteem, and I have been grateful for your friendship, but I cannot offer more than that. I cannot accept your offer.”

He let out a sigh. “Ah, well, I expected as much,” he said. “I had better not keep you any longer from your errand. May I accompany you as far as the gates?”

She nodded, relieved that the matter was disposed of so easily, that he took it so well.

He was a soldier, after all, as both he and Mr. Carsington had pointed out.

She gave her horse leave to walk on, and the colonel did likewise.

“I collect your business at Beechwood is important, to take you back so soon,” he said.

“It is rather important,” she said. “I heard that the boy Pip—the one who walks Lady Lithby’s dog—got into a fight with another boy and is to be sent back to the workhouse. I’m not sure that Mr. Carsington has been informed of this turn of events. I wanted to warn him.”

“Ah, yes, the apprentice boy in whom Mr. Carsington has taken so much interest,” the colonel said. “Does he know that Pip is your son?”

Darius sat at his desk, regarding Tyler through narrowed eyes. “This had better not be a trick,” he said. “I will not be made a game of.”

“It ain’t no game, sir,” Tyler said. “Pip’s bolted.”

“That makes no sense at all,” Darius said.

“He took the dog back to Lithby Hall afore noon,” Tyler said. “He was to come straight back and do an errand for me. It’s two hours now, and he ain’t back.”

“He’s a boy,” Darius said. “They’re easily distracted. What would make you think he’s run away?”

Tyler shuffled and looked everywhere but at Darius. “That fight yesterday, with Jowett’s boy. My missus had a deal of work cleaning and mending Pip’s coat and breeches. She said he was an ungrateful boy, and deserved to be sent back to the workhouse.” Tyler wrung the cap in his hands. “She didn’t mean it, sir. She was vexed was all.”

Darius did not believe Pip was foolish enough to run away. Had Darius not told the child to come to him if he lost his place? Surely he trusted Darius to keep his word?

Still, he was a boy, and they were not the most logical beings.

“I’ll look for him,” Darius said. “I doubt he’s gone far.”

Your son.

Long practice kept Charlotte firmly in her saddle. Years of self-discipline kept her countenance calm while within she reeled from the blow, so sudden, so utterly unexpected.

The cold came first, a chill so deep that she might have believed, for an instant, that her heart had given way and she was dying.

“You didn’t know, then,” Colonel Morrell said. “I wasn’t sure. I’m sorry to distress you but it cannot be helped. I learned of it. Others might.”

She found her voice. “You cannot be serious,” she said.

“I wish I were not,” he said. “But one cannot change the facts. Philip Ogden was born in the year 1812 on the twenty-fourth of May near Halifax, in the West Riding of Yorkshire.”

Halifax. Twenty-fourth of May. Born at four o’clock in the morning. Gone out of her life within an hour.

“He was the son of Captain George Blaine,” Colonel Morrell went on. “The captain was killed in a duel the previous November. The mother, reputed to have died in childbed, did not die, though she was gravely ill for a long time afterward. Her name was—is—Lady Charlotte Hayward.”

Pip. Her son. Alive.

She’d known. Of course she’d known, the instant she’d seen the child. She had known in a deep, secret place in her heart. Everything else she’d thought and told herself since that moment was pretending, as she’d always done. Trying to follow the rules. Trying to be sensible. Trying not to upset anybody. Trying to live up to her father’s love and Lizzie’s, too. Trying to be a good girl.

She wasn’t a good girl. Never had been. Never would be.

“It was his eyes, you see,” Colonel Morrell said. “Frederick Blaine served under me. I knew his brother George’s reputation, and I remembered that he’d been stationed near here not many months before his death. About the time of his death, you fell ill suddenly and were taken to Yorkshire. But you were not ill then. You were pregnant with his child.”

He went on to describe Pip’s early life: the death of the Ogdens, the two years with Mr. Welton before he, too, died, then the time in the workhouse.

“The facts were all readily available but scattered and apparently unrelated,” Colonel Morrell said. “It was an odd happenstance that I had more facts at hand than most people. This made it relatively easy for me to piece together the story.”

“You sound as though you have no doubt you’ve pieced it together correctly,” she said.

“No doubt whatsoever,” he said. “Last week I made sure to be traveling the road to Altrincham at the same hour Mr. Tyler and his apprentice walked to work,” he said. “The boy has the Blaine eyes. Everything else…” He paused and smiled faintly. “Everything else seems to be his mother’s.”

Mine, she thought. Everything else is mine.

“I would rather not have to tell you this,” he said.

“Yet you have,” she said.

“The charade cannot continue for much longer,” he said. “You had a discontented former coachman at large. Though he knew next to nothing, he made a great deal of it, and dropped obscure hints about skeletons in the family closet. If I hit upon the kernel of truth in his drunken maunderings, others could do the same.”

Fewkes, she thought. He’d been a groom ten years ago. Was he the one Geordie had bribed to get near her?

“Fewkes is on his way to foreign parts,” Colonel Morrell went on. “This is but one of many precautions that ought to be taken. I can do a great deal more. Something must be done about the boy, certainly. Buying his articles of indenture is only the first step, no trouble at all. While it is impossible to acknowledge him, one must see that he’s raised in a good home and given a gentleman’s education. This can be arranged discreetly. Your honor—and that of your family—must be protected. This trouble must not burden your father. Among other things, he must not learn of your stepmother’s role in the deception. Naturally, I should feel it my responsibility to see to all this and more…for my wife.”

What had Mr. Carsington said? Males will do whatever is necessary…and they are not overly scrupulous…

“I see,” she said.

She saw clearly: no way out.

“You need only reconsider the answer you gave a moment ago to my proposal of marriage,” Colonel Morrell said. “You need only give me a different answer, and I shall serve you as I serve my king—to the utmost of my ability.”

There’s always a choice, poor mad old Lady Margaret had written.

No, there wasn’t, not always.

Chapter 14

“No,” said Lady Charlotte.

Colonel Morrell had prepared himself for everything. He had all his facts in order. He had gauged this meeting to a nicety.

He was not prepared for no, and

he couldn’t believe his ears.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I thought you said no.”

“That is what I said,” she said. “No the first time and no again. I can hardly believe you would use these tactics. But yes, I must believe it, because I know men can be unscrupulous in such matters.”