Page 16 of Baron in Check
“I’m your guardian, permission granted.”
“You’ll have to pass the guardianship to someone else, give them a power of attorney, and then you can marry me if and when they approve.” She gulped at the words,marry me. Oh, how she’d conjured these words up in her dreams, which were paved with the most delicious escapades. Yet she’d never said the words before, and now they just slipped out. Under false pretense, but not really.
“I’ll ask Fave.”
“Pearler?”
“Yes.”
“They won’t allow it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m the daughter of an Earl.”
“We’re all someone’s son or daughter. Fave is Gustav and Eve’s son. Crown Jewelers?—”
“I know who they are, and the law doesn’t let Jews take over the guardianship of gentiles, especially not aristocrats.”
“I trust only Fave and Arnold. Would you prefer that I ask Arnold or one of the Klonimus brothers?”
“They have the same problem, Greg.”
“I don’t see it as a problem, Hermy. It’s a question of who’s trustworthy. They are my friends.”
She loved him for considering trust above all else in appointing someone to step into his responsibility over her. “The world won’t see it like that! They don’t know the Pearlers or the Klonimuses as you do.”
“The Pearlers are very well-known in London. And at St. James, these days. I was there when they became Crown Jewelers, it was quite something.”
Hermy shook her head. He was still as idealistic as he’d been as a boy.
“Plus, the world that you think of so highly is stripping you, the heiress, of your house, land, and even autonomy over your own life. I’m not so convinced that ‘the world’ always knows what it’s doing.”
He was right. But no portal magically transferred idealistic fairness to the real world, especially not when it came to society. The respect a person earned wasn’t necessarily given to them. That only happened in books.
“Who’s supposed to take over the Earldom?” Greg asked.
She wished he hadn’t. “That’s a long story.” Hermy stuffed her mouth with a piece of pear. She needed another moment to think about how to explain that she wouldn’t be his Baroness but his Countess.
CHAPTER 9
Greg tugged at his fencing mask and brushed his hair off his forehead.
“How familiar are you with the process of resolving an abeyance and potentially passing a title?” Greg asked Fave while they practiced fencing with Arnold.
The Pearler’s elegant house had so many bedrooms that the top floor had been converted into a large room with a smooth parquet for Fave and Arnold to fence, Caleb to practice kung fu, and an indoor play area for the children for the frequent rainy London days.
“You’d have to petition the Crown … oh no!” Fave froze and lifted his fencing mask. “Please don’t tell me you’re trying to ascend in rank by taking someone’s title!”
“I hadn’t considered it, but it comes with the bride. She’d lose the rank because there aren’t enough male heirs in her line and?—
“Who’s this girl?” Arnold asked, pushing his sword into the holster.
“Lady Hermione Eleanor Augusta Ellsworth, sister to and daughter of the late Dukes of Ellsworth.”
Fave combed one hand through his hair, holding his foil with the other. “You can’t marry Hermy.” Clearly, he rememberedHermy from the many Yuletide balls Mother gave when the Ellsworths were in town every winter.
Arnold paced the room, his footsteps resonating with a harsh echo on the parquet in the almost empty training room. “It’s madness, Greg! Her brother was the Earl of Ashby.”
