Page 68 of Reforming Lord Ragsdale
“I trust you will forgive me,” he said with a smile, all the while writhing inside and wondering if he had been so vacuous before his reformation. The realization that he had been that petty and more so did nothing to raise his spirits.
He allowed her to tease him into an explanation, partly to placate her for the disruption to her usual itinerary. “I wish to begin an annuity for Mrs. Mary Roney, the sister of my former secretary. That is all, Clarissa.”
He paused, knowing that she would fawn over him for his kindness to the downtrodden and embarrass him with her praise. He waited uneasily for her to laud him for such benevolence to someone who had cheated him. What she said surprised him.
“You cannot be serious,” Clarissa said, her voice a trifle flat, the music gone out of it.
“Of course I am,” he replied, wondering where this was going.
“You are actually going to help the sister of the man who robbed you?”
He nodded. “It seems about the least I can do for David Breedlow, who only thieved from me to help his sister in her great need.”
“John, what do you think prisons are for?” she asked, stamping her foot. “A servant should never steal from his master.”
“Not even when the master was a stupid lout who should have cared enough to see to his servant’s needs?” He heard his voice rising. “Clarissa, there is a man on his way to exile and possible death in a place I wouldn’t wish on a dog because I whined about twenty pounds.”
Clarissa, her eyes big at his outburst, yanked her arm from his and hurried to her mother’s side. “I can only hope that you do not dole out too much of your income to gutter rats.”
There will still be plenty of it left, and then some, for your ribbons, hats, and shoes, he thought. “But I thought you were pleased when I mentioned my work among the prisons?” he asked, reminding her of his fiction of several days ago.
“It is one thing to take Bible tracts and jellies to prisoners, but it is quite another to give them your money and encourage them,” she said. “Come, Mother. I feel a headache coming on.”
He ate in solitary splendor in the private dining room that night, and the food was excellent. To aid his digestion, he went for a long walk that took him through the village, out into the surrounding farmland, and back again. On the walk out, he had almost convinced himself not to make Clarissa Partridge an offer. On the way back, he realized that was impossible.
She expects me to propose, he thought,and I would be ungentlemanly not to. My reformation will be complete, and I will free Emma from her indenture. If she ever finds that her father and brother are truly in Australia, she will go to them.He stood still in the road and watched the lamps lit in houses on the village outskirts.And even if she never leaves England, she has seen me at my worst and could not possibly want anything to do with me.
No, he would speak to Clarissa’s father tomorrow in Bath, propose, present her with a stupefying diamond, and become an unexceptionable husband. No one would ever know that he was in love with his secretary.How odd it is, he considered,that here I am, trying to help Emma find her relatives. If I succeed, she will certainly leave.
“The old Ragsdale never would have done this,” he said out loud to a cow by the fence. “The old Ragsdale would have dragged his feet and whined and not lifted a finger to help, especially if by so doing, he ruined his own chances. I am a fool.”
He walked back slowly, trying to figure out at what point he fell in love with Emma. As he stood outside the tavern, he realized that he must have felt something that night she stood beside him with her fate resting on the turn of a card.Is it possible that what I took for hopeless submissiveness was courage on a scale so great that my own puny resources could not measure it?he reflected.Was that when something in me began to understand what Emma Costello meant?
He couldn’t go inside. He stood beside the door, wondering at the workings of fate.If things had been different, Emma, perhaps you could have loved me too. How tragic for us, this endless war between our people. You have been misunderstood, scotched, lied to, and diddled at every turn. I can only be grateful that at least you do not hate me anymore.
~
Clarissa was in good spirits in the morning. When hereturned from his errand at the bank, she condescended to take his arm and allow him to walk with her to the waiting carriage. He helped her inside, then climbed in after her.
Lady Partridge was still inside the inn, giving a portion of her mind she could ill spare to the landlord over the damp sheets. He turned to Clarissa. Now was as good a time as any. He took a deep breath.
“Clarissa, I am sure you are aware of my pleasure in your company.”I should take her hand, he thought, so he did. “I wonder if you would do me the honor, the ineffable honor, of consenting to become my wife.”
There. That wasn’t so difficult. It was words strung together, and from Clarissa’s reaction, they were the right ones. She squeezed his hand, and he returned the pressure.
“I know a lady ought to turn down a first proposal,” she said, and his heart rose for a moment. “But I shall not,” she continued, “for I fear it would disappoint you, my dear. Yes, I will be your wife. Nothing would make me happier than to put some regularity into your disordered life.”
He almost winced at her words and, by the greatest effort, choked back his own indignation.Regularity? Regularity?he wanted to shout.I am so regular now that Greenwich could set its clock by me. You will make me boring, and prosy, and stuffy, and my children will only suffer me. They’ll never know there was a time when I was fun and a bit of a scoundrel.
“I am so pleased,” he said and kissed her.
It was a test, really, and not a kiss, and he failed. Her lips were every bit as soft as Emma’s, if anything, but he felt nothing beyond the usual stirrings of the healthy male. She wasn’t Emma, and he didn’t care from his heart.
He was spared from another demonstration by the arrival of his future mother-in-law. Clarissa, all blushes and breathless sentences, told her the good news, and he was rewarded with a beaming smile from Lady Partridge and the assurance that she would devote the remainder of the Season to arranging the most brilliant wedding.
He was content to suffer in silence for the remainder of the trip to Bath. Clarissa and her mother moved with lightning speed from silver patterns to china to damask curtains, and were careening onto the honeymoon itself when Bath appeared like a benediction. He sighed with relief and called their attention to the city before them, using it like raw meat before wolves to distract them. “Now tell me how I should approach your father,” he interrupted, not wishing to think about his honeymoon because Emma would not be the last person he saw when his eye closed, and his first sight in the morning.
“Papa will be delighted,” Clarissa assured him. “Only do not bump his foot or ask for sherry. The doctor has put Papa on a strict regimen of pump water mixed with vinegar and cloves.”
