Page 29 of A Gentleman's Offer
‘Yes, I think that’s right, though perhaps sometimes easier to say than to do.’ He grimaced, but went on, still holding her, taking comfort and giving it, ‘Very well, my dear. You are right, of course. My mother told me yesterday that the marriage was no plan of my father’s – that was a lie she concocted to persuade me. And the scheme was not hers either; instead, she felt she had no choice in the matter, and was desperate to bring about the match for the most disturbing reason. I am sorry to say that your father is blackmailing her.’
Meg remained silent for a moment, aware of Sir Dominic’s eyes on her face. Her brain was whirling, struggling to fit all these pieces together to form a coherent picture. ‘He had learned your father’s secret,’ she said at last, once she had digested this most unexpected and unwelcome news and made some sense of it.
‘Yes, exactly that, though I still have no idea how. I have realised since yesterday that perhaps he did not actually know the full truth, but was guessing based on some rumour he happened to recall, and my mother’s horrified reaction only confirmed his suspicions. It scarcely matters, after all. My mother is extremely anxious that it should not be spread abroad, and so complied with his insistence that she press the match on me. He certainly cannot complain that she has not done exactly as he asked. But I doubt that will be enough to satisfy him if the marriage with your sister does not go ahead.’
He sighed, letting her go at last and running his hands through his immaculate honey-brown locks and disarranging them in a way that showed how disturbed he was. Her fingers itched to smooth them back into their habitual order, as an excuse to touch him again, to be close to him, but this was scarcely the time.
‘My poor mama does not emerge with a great deal of credit from the crisis. I expect you can imagine her ignoble reasons for wanting to keep matters secret. They go beyond the understandable wish not to be humiliated before all the world by the knowledge that her husband had a mistress and a child. Such illicit affairs and their result are common enough, in all conscience; that is not what she minds. And however little sympathy I have with her motives, it would be useless to deny that Angela and Annie would be the ones who suffered most if the truth were revealed. Not that she cares for that, of course, but I do. I must. For one thing, I imagine it would be nigh on impossible for Angela to continue in her present situation, which is so much more than a job to her, if the fact of Annie’s illegitimacy were revealed. It has been hard enough for her in the past, when she was pretending to be a widow. She could lose her position, her home of many years and her purpose in life. Of course I will always support her, but she is a proud woman and places a high value on her independence, as why should she not? And Tom Gilbert’s adoptive family would hardly welcome the public scandal and notoriety, even though they do already know the truth of Annie’s parentage. A great many people would be hurt, most of them entirely innocent. The poor lost street children most of all, if Angela is taken from them. It’s like a stone thrown in a pond – the ripples spreading outwards. Ripples of malice.’
‘I am so sorry.’ The words seemed sadly inadequate; Meg felt helpless in the face of this new catastrophe.
He shook his head emphatically. ‘There is no need at all for you to apologise for your father’s conduct. You have been as much a victim of his freakish behaviour as anyone else, as has your sister. But now you see why I hesitated to tell you, and why I knew I must at last. It is most unhappy tidings, and makes matters even more complicated.’
‘I suppose I cannot be surprised at anything he does. His motives are always a mystery to me, and I am quite ready to believe him capable of anything hurtful. But Dominic, this explains a great deal, but it does not explain everything.Whyis my father so anxious to marry Maria to you, and willing to go to such extraordinary lengths to gain his desire? The news of his horrible blackmail scheme makes it all the more inexplicable, really, not less. What possible reason can there be for such desperate urgency? Whatever can he hope to gain from it?’
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Dominic said slowly, ‘I asked my mother as much, and she had no answer to give me other than that that perhaps Lord Nightingale is a lunatic, which may be true, I suppose, but hardly takes us any further. But it’s a very good point. Nothing that you have told me about your father and nothing that I have seen in my short acquaintance with him leads me to think that he cares at all for your sister’s wellbeing, whether he is sane or mad.’
‘Certainly not enough to make him seek to blackmail an eligible gentleman into offering for her,’ Meg agreed. ‘As soon as you say it out loud, it’s quite plain how ridiculous the whole idea is. He cares a great deal for his mother and his youngest sister, or the idea of them at any rate, now they’re safely dead and can’t trouble him with any demands, but he doesn’t give a fig for any other woman alive. Not my aunt, not me, and not Maria. And he’s not in the least mad, just extraordinarily selfish and in love with the idea of his own consequence. It doesn’t make any sense! If he was so eager to see Maria well bestowed – which honestly I can’t believe he has ever been – he needed only to approach your mother like a normal person and suggest the match. Itis, on paper, an excellent idea. I’m sure she’d have been ready enough to agree, since you’ve told me she was already eager to see you married. My sister’s a great heiress! Why should anything so extreme as blackmail be needed?’
‘You’re right, my dear. The curious nature of his behaviour is clearer now that we know about the coercion. Can we puzzle it out, do you think? It feels as though we have almost all the pieces, could we but put them together in the right manner.’
Meg jumped to her feet and began to pace up and down the small room, her skirts and petticoats swishing emphatically with every turn she made. ‘I keep thinking I know something!’ she exclaimed. ‘I keep thinking that the clue to it all is almost within my grasp, but then it slips away from me when I try to seize hold of it. What can it be?’
Dominic regarded her with fond amusement. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me on this occasion if I don’t get up and join you. There really isn’t room for both of us, and I should feel foolish standing watching you. Does the pacing help you think?’
‘Not so far, but I can’t be sitting still – I feel so restless. My mother has always taught me to break problems down into their separate parts, and deal with them that way. Can we do that, Dominic? What do we know for certain – I mean things that we are absolutely sure of, rather than things we merely suppose to be true?’
‘The main thing we know,’ said Dominic seriously, ‘is that your father is extraordinarily keen, one might even say desperate, to have your sister marry me. Not just anyone who might be equally eligible, but me. And we also know he has, or thinks he has, a hold over my family.’
‘That’s very well put. We do know both these things as facts. Can we say, then, that he is desperate for Maria to marry you in particular, just because he has a hold over your family, and no other?’ Meg asked. ‘I know that isn’t certain, not like the other two points, but can we test it as an idea for a moment?’
‘Of course. So, my extremely obvious eligibility lies, we may suggest, not – as one might have expected – in my many sterling qualities of person and character, nor even the numerous favours nature and circumstance have blessed me with…’
‘But only in the stark fact that my father has power over you,’ she finished for him triumphantly. They were both grinning. ‘Really, Dominic, it’s beginning to seem to me that apart from that you could be almost anybody.’
‘I’m sure it’s good for me, you know, to endure these constant blows to my self-esteem and nobly rise above them,’ he mused. ‘I might have been wandering around London at this very moment thinking myself the devil of a fellow if I hadn’t been drawn into the orbit of your family. Your sister flees from me as if I had the plague, your father doesn’t care what the hell I am as long as he can blackmail me, you jump to the worst possible conclusion…’
‘You’ll get over it, I’m sure,’ she said, blushing a little. ‘You don’t appear to me to be suffering noticeably from a deficit of self-esteem. But anyway, to prove the point sufficiently, it’s not all about you, you know. It’s not aboutwhoMaria must marry, it’s aboutwhy.’
‘Why your father needs your sister to marry someone who is in his power?’
‘Exactly.’
He frowned in concentration. ‘Logic suggests that the marriage itself might not be his end goal. There must be something further. In truth, he gains nothing financially from your sister’s union with me. It could be argued that he gains socially, of course. If his estrangement from your mother has somehow damaged his reputation, or the reputation of your family, and he wishes to rehabilitate it though this connection…’
Meg shook her head vigorously, still pacing though more slowly now. ‘I’m not sure it has been damaged, or not very much. Many married people in your world live apart. Many married people are notoriously and frequently unfaithful, for that matter, which my parents aren’t, and as long as they are reasonably discreet in their amours, nobody cares much. And according to Maria he never goes into society, and only spends time with scholars like himself, who barely know what century it is. The latest scandal they concerned themselves with probably involved the Emperor Commodus. I really don’t think it can be that.’
‘Very well, then. In which case, the power must be the important thing. The power that the marriage gives him over me, and my family, even after the wedding. I put this to my mother, in slightly different terms, and she disagreed. She thought that a threat to expose our secrets would be toothless once our families were inextricably linked, because the gossip would hurt him too.’
‘But that’s not true, is it, Dominic?’ she said excitedly, pausing and gazing at him. ‘If my father doesn’t care at all about being the subject of scandal, which I don’t think he does, he could very easily threaten to spread rumours about you at any time, and mean it.’
‘Spread rumours unless we do what, or to prevent us from doing what?’
‘That’s the point, isn’t it? How can we know?’
‘What if he has a secret of his own, one which might be revealed to me – or must be revealed to me – once the marriage has gone ahead? And one which I might otherwise be tempted to expose, only I won’t be able to, because of the hold he has over me. Imagine if your sister married anyone else, someone uncompromised, how would they react on finding out whatever it is? That’s a good question to ask, I think.’
