Page 5 of To Marry and to Meddle
“Whatever the word, it did not sound pleasant,” she said primly. “Though,” she added, in a confessional tone of voice, “Diana has at least two dozen freckles on her nose, and it does not appear to have hurt her matrimonial prospects. Lord Willingham seems to find her suitably enticing.”
“To say the least,” Julian said, thinking of the gazes Willingham had been giving Emily’s friend Diana, Lady Templeton, of late, which were barely suitable for polite company. Julian did not consider himself a prude, but apparently even he had his limits. Fortunately, the two had announced their engagement a couple of days earlier, which offered the hope that this phase of lustful mooning would soon be ended by the dreary reality of marriage.
“Emily,” he said, addressing her for the first time without using her courtesy title, and she turned to look at him. Her bonnet slid farther back from her face, exposing more of her skin to the sunlight filtering through the oak tree’s leaves.
“I was not jesting a moment ago. I want to marry you.”
Want, he supposed, might be a bit of an exaggeration—he could not, in all honesty, confess to wanting to marry anyone. But he’d recently come to realize that matrimony was his best chance at rehabilitating his rather blackened reputation and, having decided upon Emily as the most suitable candidate, he certainly didn’t want to have to start over again with someone else.
She gazed at him for a long moment, a slight frown forming a faint line between her eyebrows. “Why?” she asked.
If Julian was as much of a cad as some portions of society believed him to be, he would lie to her now—convince her that he’d fallen in love, overcome by her beauty; he could recite poetry, fling himself at her feet, and give an all-around convincing portrayal of a man who’d turned over a new leaf, changed by love.
But while he did hope to convince the rest of society that he had done just that, he couldn’t bring himself to enter into marriage with a bride who believed it, too.
“I need a wife,” he said bluntly. “And, furthermore, I need a wife who can withstand the scandal of marriage to a man who owns a theater with a reputation as unsavory as the Belfry’s—whose reputation can elevate my own, rather than being muddied by it.” He wasn’t certain whether she’d be offended by his implicit reference to her family’s various scandals, but he wanted to be honest with her. This was not, after all, a typical courtship, when a man might seduce a lady with sweet words and promises he had no intention of keeping. What he proposed was a mutually agreeable arrangement absent of any deep sentiment. He had no intention of luring her into marriage under false pretenses.
“Butwhy?” she asked again, a faint note of frustration in her voice. “Until the past fortnight, I didn’t think you actually meant anything by your courtship—I thought it was all for show.”
He did not pretend not to take her meaning, because she was entirely correct—or at least, shehadbeen. They’d met in July when she’d attended a show at the Belfry in the company of her friends, an outing that, as he understood it, they’d had to coordinate with the precision of a general planning an attack on the battlefield in orderto ensure that her mother didn’t understand where her daughter was that evening.
He’d taken notice of her, of course, because she was beautiful. It had to be the first thing about her that anyone noticed, and Julian was certainly not a man to disregard a pretty face. But then, almost as quickly, he had realized that this was the only daughter of the Marquess of Rowanbridge, who, if rumor was to be believed, was in horrendous debt to Oswald Cartham, a man who had used his distant aristocratic connections (he was the second son of a second son of a second son, whose family had emigrated to the colonies a generation earlier) to draw gentlemen of thetonto the notorious gaming hell he’d founded a decade earlier.
And, Julian had recalled, if he’d heard correctly, the daughter was being used as some sort of pawn—rumor had it Rowanbridge was allowing Cartham to escort her to society events in exchange for keeping his debts at bay. Julian had also heard faint whisperings that Cartham might be blackmailing Rowanbridge—that the marquess’s debt was not merely monetary. It was all quite… unsavory. And so Julian had gazed with some curiosity that evening at this unspeakably lovely, doe-eyed creature, who seemed far too innocent to have gotten caught up in her father’s sordid affairs.
And he’d found himself strangely… intrigued.
So he’d gone to a ball—not specifically to see her, if anyone had asked, and yet, by the evening’s end, he had realized how any appearance of interest on his part could perhaps allow him to bask in the respectable glow that surrounded her. And so, the following week, he’d escorted her to a Venetian breakfast—an event that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have rather flung himself from a roof than attend. He’d gone riding with her in Hyde Park. He’d called on herat home—even braved the horrifying experience that was taking tea with her mother.
And yet, all the while, he hadn’t been terribly serious—his reputation preceded him, after all. But there had been advantages to them both nonetheless: Julian found himself being gazed at with curious speculation by ladies of theton—a breed that even a month earlier would have discussed him in shocked whispers, their daughters tucked safely behind them. And Emily—well, she got to dance with someone other than that bounder Cartham, which Julian supposed was nothing short of a blessed relief for her.
There’d been nothing more in it than that.
Until he’d begun to wonder if perhaps there should be.
It had been an offhand conversation with his friend Bridgeworth that had first lodged the thought in his mind. Bridgeworth was a chum from his Oxford days and they’d lingered over a bottle of claret late one evening about a week before Willingham’s house party had begun.
“You’ve turned respectable now, Bridgeworth,” Julian had said lazily, turning the wineglass in his hand, watching the candlelight reflected in its surface. It was a warm evening, the grate empty, and Julian had long since discarded his cravat, his collar open to allow a bit of breeze wafting into the room to cool his skin.
“No more late nights carousing with a bottle of brandy and a willing woman—or two,” Julian added, pausing to spare a thought for that particularly fond memory. “Instead, you’ll be spending your evenings tucked up beside the fire, warming your slippers, a book in hand.” He was speaking largely in jest; Julian was fond of Jemma, who was a young widow Bridgeworth had met at a ball earlier that summer. What had started as a heated affair had turned into a marriage within a matter of weeks—so quickly that Julian found himself blinking atthe realization that he’d lost one of his best friends to matrimony, before he’d even had the chance to fully consider the changes this would bring to his own life.
Bridgeworth, for his part, regarded Julian with a tolerant smile. “You’ve been acting fairly respectable yourself these days, old chap. I can’t recall the last time you met me for a ride still in your cups from the night before—and, from what I hear, you’ve been sniffing around the skirts of an eligible lady.” He gave Julian a pointed look. “If you’re so desperate for the approval of thetonthen why don’t you just get married?”
Why don’t you just get married?
Julian had laughed the comment off at the time, and the conversation had soon turned to other matters, but Bridgeworth’s words had stuck with him. Was marriage the key, then? Was it his path to respectability—to convincing polite society that he had changed, that his theater was worthy of notice?
The thought, at first, was wildly unappealing—despite his parents’ and sister’s (eventual) happy marriages, the institution had never seemed terribly enticing to him. He liked answering only to himself, and found it hard to imagine coming home to a wife each evening, inquiring after her day, feigning interest in whatever news she had to share with him. And yet, the more he considered it, the more he thought Bridgeworth might be correct. Julian had recently turned thirty, and while he was not precisely in his dotage, it was undeniably true that his exploits had gotten less raucous of late. Was marriage really such a sacrifice? He could still keep a mistress, he supposed, if he grew bored with whomever he married. Would it truly be so difficult to smile charmingly across the breakfast table at the same woman for the rest of his life? It wasn’t as though their lives need be linked in other ways—there werecertainly numerous married couples of thetonwho rarely saw one another, aside from across the dinner table from time to time.
The more he thought about it, in fact, the more convinced he became—and the more certain, too, he was that Lady Emily Turner would make the perfect wife for him. After all, he’d already given the impression that he was courting her—why waste all that work? So he’d followed her here, to Elderwild, to Willingham’s house party, determined to convince her of the wisdom of his new plan.
“I will not pretend to have fallen in love with you,” he said bluntly to her now, barely managing to refrain from a wince as the words left his mouth. It was in his nature to be charming, to smooth the uttering of any difficult truths with the rakish smile that never failed to set female hearts fluttering, but he did not want to win her hand by nefarious means. He was determined to do this honestly. “But I do like you quite a bit, which is certainly more than many men can say.”
“This is not very romantic,” Emily said mildly.
Julian refrained from uttering the first reply that leapt to mind—that as far as he was concerned there was absolutely nothing romantic about the entire ghastly institution of marriage—and instead lifted an eyebrow at her. “And would you trust anything I said if I came to you and made a pretty speech and compared your eyes to pools of starlight and your cheeks to rosy apples and your nose to—to—that of a baby bunny?” he asked, feeling that perhaps he had lost his way a bit at the end there.
“I like bunnies,” she said, smiling at him.
