Someone to Wed (Westcott 3)

He still did not know exactly why he was making this journey. And why did distances always seem to shorten when one did not particularly want to reach one’s destination? he wondered as the carriage turned onto the driveway to Withington House. Perhaps he ought not to have come again. There was something about Miss Heyden that repelled him. It was not her face. She could not help that, and he fully believed what he had told her, that he would soon become so accustomed to the birthmark that he would no longer notice it. It was not her height either, though the fact that she must have been close to six feet tall might have daunted many men. He was taller. No, it had nothing to do with her appearance.

What repelled him was, paradoxically, the very thing that had brought him back here. Her pain. It was very carefully guarded. It was veiled more heavily than her face was, in fact. It was encased in a coolly poised manner. But it screamed at him from the very depths of her, and he was both horrified and fascinated. He was horrified because he did not want to get drawn into it and because he suspected the pain could engulf her if her poise ever slipped. He was compelled by her, though, because she was human and he had been blessed or cursed with a compassion for human suffering.

But here he was, regardless of all the thoughts and doubts that had teemed through his mind and prevented him from properly enjoying his surroundings. It was too late now not to come. She would probably have heard his arrival, though he was not expected specifically today, and a groom was already coming from the stables. Perhaps she was out, though it seemed unlikely when she was a recluse.

She was not out. She was not in the drawing room either. She came to him there a couple of minutes after he had been shown in, her gray dress looking old and a bit rumpled, her hair twisted up into a simple and rather untidy knot high on the back of her head, her right cheek a bit flushed—and yes, he could see that detail because she wore no veil. She seemed a little breathless, a little bright eyed, and for the first time it struck him that she was more than coldly beautiful. She was rather pretty.

“Lord Riverdale,” she said.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I have taken you by surprise. Is this an inconvenient time?”

“No.” She came across the room and offered him her hand. “I was in the study adding up a long column of figures. I shall have to start again when I go back, but that is my fault for not subdividing the column and adding one section at a time. I did not expect that you would come again, and I was so engrossed that I did not even hear your arrival. I hope I have not kept you waiting too long.”

“Not at all.” He took her hand in his and let his gaze linger on her. He had clearly surprised her, and it was taking her a few moments to don her accustomed armor. It was happening, though, before his eyes. Her breathing was being brought under control. The color was receding from her cheek and the sparkle from her eyes. Her manner was becoming cooler and more poised. It was a telling transformation.

Her eyes fell to their hands, and she removed her own. “Well?” she said. “Did you notice today?”

That she was not wearing a veil? But then he realized what she meant—though I noticed the last time and notice again now, I would be willing to wager that after seeing you a few more times I will not even see the blemish any longer. “Yes, I did,” he said. “But it is only the third time I have seen you. I have still not recoiled, however, or run screaming from the room.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “you are very desperate for my money.”

He drew a slow breath before allowing himself to reply. “And perhaps, Miss Heyden,” he said, “I will take my leave and allow you to start adding from the top of that column again.”

The color had flooded back into her cheek. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I ought not to have said that.”

“Why did you?” he asked her. “Do you value yourself so little that you believe only your money gives you any worth at all?”

She was taking the question seriously, he could see. She was thinking about it. “Yes,” she said.

It was the moment at which he really ought to have taken his leave. It was a devastating answer, and it had not even been given in haste. He could not possibly take on such brokenness, even if she had all the riches in the world to offer. Good God, all because of an unsightly birthmark?

“What happened to you?” he asked her, but he held up a staying hand even as he spoke the words. “No. I have no right to an answer. But I will not marry you for your money alone, Miss Heyden. If you truly believe that you have no more to offer than that, and if you truly believe that I have nothing but marriage to offer in exchange for your money, then say so now and we will put an end to this. I will take my leave and you need never see me again.”

She took a long time answering. She receded even further inside the cool shell of herself, becoming seemingly taller, thinner, more poised, more austere—good God, the woman really did not need a veil except to hide the birthmark. She could hide quite effectively in plain sight. He felt chilled, repelled again. He willed her to say the word, and he prayed she would not.

“I think,” she said at last, “you are a good man, Lord Riverdale. I think you deserve and … need more than I could possibly offer. You have been put in a desperate situation, made worse by the fact that you have a conscience. I cannot bring you anything but money. Go and find someone else—with my sincere good wishes.”

Good God!

She even stepped to one side, her hands clasped at her waist, to give him a clear path to the door.

He drew another slow breath and allowed it out and drew another before he said anything. And why did he not just go? “Do you ever step outdoors?” he asked her. “It is a beautiful spring day out there, even warm in a fresh sort of way. And you have what looks like a sizable and pretty garden. Come and walk there with me, and we will leave behind this tense drama we have been enacting and talk about the weather and the flowers and what is pleasant and meaningful in our lives. We will get to know each other a little better.”

She never said anything in haste, this woman. She regarded him in silence for several moments before answering. “I shall go fetch a shawl and bonnet,” she said at last, “and change my shoes.”

It was indeed a lovely day. Wren stood at the foot of the steps outside the front door, lifted her face to the sky, and inhaled deeply.

“Is it not a strange thing,” he said, “that we need all the dreary rain we get in these often soggy British Isles in order to be able to enjoy the lush beauty of gardens like this?”

“I have seen pictures of lands that get almost no rain,” she said. “Parched vegetation or outright desert. Yet even that appears to have a sort of beauty of its own. Our world is made up of such contrasts, as is life itself. Perhaps we could never enjoy this if there were not also that, or here if there were not also there, or now if there were not also then.”

“Or a perfect right side of a face if there were not also a blemished left,” he said.

She turned toward him in astonishment. He was smiling, and his eyes were laughing. But instead of being offended by his words, she was … arrested. “Perfect?” she said.

“You must have been told that before,” he said.

She had not. But then very few people had seen her. She did not like the direction this conversation was taking. “Come and see the daffodil bank,” she said, turning to her right and striding diagonally across the south lawn.