Page 44 of Miss Determined
“Which you gave me leave to use, of all the shocking familiarities.” She sounded pleased.
Trevor took courage from that. “We’re in Crosspatch, where friendliness comes as no shock to anybody, but, Amaryllis, you should know that my father was the late Marquess of Tavistock.”
The fellow everybody, including Trevor, had disliked. If Trevor’s lineage cost him Amaryllis’s affection, he might graduate to hating the old shade.
“Lord Tavistock was your father?”
“And I hold him in as low esteem as the rest of the village does, but I cannot deny my patrimony.”
Trevor expected Amaryllis to leap off the window seat, or at least rise, make a brisk remark about the time, and state a pressing need to rehearse some duet or other with Caroline.
Amaryllis put her head on his shoulder. “You cannot help who your father was any more than I can help that mine was the son of a prosperous shop owner, not that I’d want to change that. We are not our parents, Trevor.” She took a firmer hold of his hand, and Trevor wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
“He was awful to my mother, awful to women generally, but not much better to any man who didn’t outrank him. He demanded toadying, then insulted those who toadied because they lacked a spine. He excelled at giving other people nothing but bad choices.”
“Like denying my father ownership of Twidboro. Papa could continue on as a tenant subject to his lordship’s whims when it came to maintaining the property, or Papa could uproot us and admit that Tavistock had rejected a shopkeeper’s coin.”
An extraordinary thought emerged from the relief coursing through Trevor: Amaryllis not only took no issue with Trevor’s station, shesympathizedwith him.
“I was to be an obedient son, but if I was too obedient, then I was, in his lordship’s words, a disgraceful invertebrate,” Trevor said. “I was to be smart, but if I was too smart, then I was an arrogant little bookworm. I was to be polite, but if I was too polite, then I was a disgusting little prig. I was never what he wanted me to be, but then, he was never what I wanted him to be either.”
“He’s dead,” Amaryllis said in the same tones she might have noted that the pansies beneath the market cross were wilted. “You are quite alive and apparently thriving. I do not hold your patrimony against you, Trevor, and nobody else in Crosspatch will either. The old marquess was a blight upon society and apparently a blight upon your life as well.”
The situation wasn’t as simple as that. Papa had also been conscientious about managing his marquessate. He’d had cronies, if not friends. He’d been denied the nursery full of sons he’d longed for, and he’d seen his legitimate heir well educated and more than adequately fed, clothed, and housed.
He’d done his duty, however begrudgingly.
Amaryllis kissed Trevor’s cheek. “This has been weighing on your mind, hasn’t it?”
“Terribly. Would you want to claim a connection to a man who’s universally reviled in the village?”
“No, but neither would I dignify that connection with subterfuges meant to hide it. I have not been riding out with the late marquess. I haven’t been turning my family loose on him to test his manners and patience. I certainly haven’t been kissing him, and it’s not the late marquess I’m dreaming of.”
Trevor’s dread of this conversation was replaced by a sense of lightness and joy, and—it took his mind some groping about to find the word—hope.
Amaryllis’s great good sense, her pragmatism and inherent kindness, were seeing him through. “You dream of me?”
She nuzzled his shoulder. “I ought to know better, but there you have it. When I should be stitching a new pair of gloves to match my retrimmed bonnets, I’m instead wondering, ‘What does Trevor look like with his shirt off? Does he have a favorite poem? Where did he learn to ride so well?’”
“My riding skills were honed on every back road and farm lane in France, for the most part. Do you truly dream of me?” He dreamed of her, though he knew the lanes and paths where she’d learned her riding skills, and he’d already memorized her favorite Shakespearean sonnet.
Not the romantic flights of Sonnet 18 or the pretty comparisons of Sonnet 116, though Amaryllis granted them honorable mention. Her favorite was the sober and reflective Sonnet 29.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state…Haply I think on thee…For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
“I think of you,” Amaryllis said. “I think of matters a young lady doesn’t admit to dwelling on.”
He hugged her. “How you flatter me.”
She drew back and regarded him with a focus that tossed Shakespeare’s pretty rhymes right out the window.
“I am not asking for a commitment, Trevor, but I am asking for a memory. We have time, we have privacy, we have—”
He silenced her with a swift buss to the cheek. “When it comes to the commitment, I do the asking. I put my entire future and my heart into your hands. Then you decide whether to accept or reject my proposal. If you want the bended-knee bit, I’m happy to oblige, but your mother, grandmother, and sisters would probably like to eavesdrop on that exchange.”
Amaryllis leaned against him and was silent for a fraught moment. “They would, but I’m not sure I can allow that. Some conversations should be private. Before we get to the pretty speeches, Trevor, I’d like to…”
He felt the heat of her blush because they sat cheek to cheek in the window seat.
