Page 92 of The MacGregor's Lady
Lady Quinworth sniffed. “You’ve spent the night out on the moors without shelter or chaperone, which comes close enough to a declaration for anybody. That old fool Fenimore has ferreted out the details. Spathfoy says the baron’s man stumbled into their parlor after you’d departed for points north. Quite a tale came spilling forth over tea and crumpets—the entirety of which was dispatched to Fenimore by wire and letter before Draper had even reached London. I can hardly credit it, myself.” She shot an appraising look at Asher. “The moors in winter are no place to be caught without food and shelter.”
Much less a chaperone.
Hannah raised unhappy eyes to his. “There’s to be an announcement?”
Fenimore’s doing, no doubt, the rotten, old, conniving sod. “An announcement doesn’t make us engaged, Hannah.”
“Don’t listen to him, Miss Cooper. It’s one thing to break an engagement—that merely ruinsyou. It’s quite another to make a fool of Fenimore and Balfour both while you do. Balfour is toothsome, well-heeled, and reasonable—as men go—but he has an unfortunate past. I suggest you accommodate the notion that you are to be his countess, lest you create all manner of awkwardness for him and his family.”
Hannah looked inclined to argue. She looked, in fact, inclined to toss all twelve stone of the marchioness out of the coach.
“Hannah.” He spoke quietly, willing her to understand that they’d talk later, not caring at all that Lady Quinworth had noted his informal address. “We’re tired, hungry, and the announcement is apparently already in print. Even an engagement need not necessarily end in marriage.”
She sat back, glancing out the window for the first time since they’d crammed themselves into the coach. “Later then, when we are assured of some privacy.”
That last was a snub, a blatant, uncompromising snub of the marchioness, whose efforts had been directed at preserving them both from walking straight into complete, unsalvageable folly.
“Of course you’ll have some privacy,” the marchioness said pleasantly. “Engaged couples are always afforded a great deal of latitude that unattached couples would never be permitted.”
Hannah stared resolutely out the window, while Asher fished through his pockets for his flask.
***
“What would be so awful about being Asher MacGregor’s wife?”
Augusta posed the question in the most pleasant tones from her perch on Hannah’s settee, while Hannah grabbed for her patience. This was the opening salvo in what would be four weeks of relentless, well-meant cross-examination.
“My brothers have years to go before they reach their majorities,” Hannah replied, taking the first pair of slippers—Spanish Bullets, or something metallic—from a trunk and setting them in an enormous wardrobe. “My grandmother, for all her great age, should also have years left, and my mother…”
She trailed off. Mama’s circumstances were in some ways the most precarious. No less authority than the Bible, backed up by the law and the good fellows of the American legal system, dictated that Mama remain entirely under her husband’s control. In the name of marital discipline, a man could beat his wife, exercise his marital privileges against her will, starve her, and clothe her in rags, and the wife would have no recourse.
“What about your mother?”
“I am all she has, and there’s little enough I can do. Sometimes, though, a person will moderate his behavior simply from the knowledge that it is witnessed by others.” Hannah paused, her Maiden’s Blush dancing slippers in her hands, the right now sporting a discreet lift to the heel. “My stepfather is quite sensitive to public opinion, which is probably why Grandmama continues to live with us.”
Augusta fingered the tassel of a bright blue pillow trimmed in gold. “Asher has many business associates on the American seaboard. He could keep an eye on matters in Boston easily enough.”
Not only the pink pair, but every pair of Hannah’s slippers, shoes, and boots sported a small lift on the heel. When had Asher done this?
Because he’d done it himself. Hannah knew that from the way the edge of each heel had been sanded smooth, the wood matched so the lifts would not be obvious.
“Asher cannot have somebody present at every meal to ensure my mother is permitted to eat. He cannot ensure correspondence is delivered unopened to the intended recipient—or delivered at all. He cannot examine my brothers, mother, or grandmother for bruises in unlikely places. He cannot post a guard who will hear every time somebody in the house is in distress.”
Not that her mother screamed. She’d once told Hannah that any show of resistance only made matters worse.
Augusta set the pillow aside, rose, and wandered to a trunk as yet unopened. “Asher can, however, be sure something nasty is slipped into your stepfather’s drink when the dratted man is whiling away an evening at his club. I expect a physician has more than a passing acquaintance with poisons.”
Hannah started hanging stockings, of which she had acquired an abundance. That such a genteel lady as Augusta MacGregor would leap to ideas Hannah had taken years to approach was reassuring.
“Then I would be as bad as my stepfather, wouldn’t I? Worse, in fact, because he only slaps and bullies, while I contemplate murder.”
And then Augusta was there, right beside her, without having made a sound. “You have contemplated murder, though, haven’t you? Things are that bad.”
Such a wealth of compassion communicated itself from Augusta’s violet-blue eyes. Hannah tossed the last of the stockings toward a hook. “One grows desperate, and weary, which is why I cannot…”
Augusta was a good six inches taller than Hannah, and she was a mother. When she slipped her arms around Hannah’s waist, tears welled from the bottom of Hannah’s heart. She leaned into Augusta’s support when the weight of impending regrets would have brought her to her knees.
“My youngest brother, we call him Bertie—” Unless the boy’s father was in the room, and then, by God, Hannah addressed him as Albert.
