Page 45 of A Brilliant Match
Mary murmured her agreement and left the room, and Miles sat across from his mother. He could not know what she was going to say, but he felt sure it would be something direct and that he would likely wish to evade any questions she might ask. He steeled himself for what was to come.
She sighed and raised her eyes to him, the gentle lines on her face tracing the compassion in her features. “Miles…this Lady Dorothea. You will forgive my asking you such a thing directly, but yours is not a mere friendship, is it?”
His resistance deserted him like a puff of smoke as soon as she mentioned Dorothea’s name. He knew his mother would never force a confidence, and—grown man that he was—he had a sudden desire to speak openly. He had been able to think of little else.
“I asked her to marry me.”
“And she…?” Lady Isabelle let the word dangle.
“She refused me. She didn’t give a reason, but I know her desire is to marry a man of more wealth and consequence than I can boast.”
“And yet, she has some feelings for you, I believe,” his mother observed tenderly. “She must have, or my disclosure would not have bothered her the way it so obviously did.”
“I had once thought she felt something for me.” Miles turned his face toward the bow windows of the drawing room. It was a cheerful room, even when the sun hid behind the clouds, but he drew no comfort from it. “Of course, she thought my only motivation for proposing was for her wealth, but that was not true. Now, she is sure of it.”
“Of course it was not true,” his mother consoled. “I don’t believe you could offer for a woman you had not developed a deeptendrefor. You are very like your father.”
Love, thought Miles, then.A woman I’ve fallen in love with.
When his father had died, he felt a grief of the deepest kind. He could not compare that grief to the pain of watching Dorothea slip from his life. But it was still a crushing thing to lose her. A thing one did not easily recover from.
“I do not regret a single day of my life with your father,” Lady Isabelle said, pulling him from his reverie.
Her tone caused Miles to look up at her. He had heard the words before, but this was the first time he’d heard them said with something that sounded like a caveat.
“I do not regret anything, but I am a woman who can be happy with simple things. I am happy in a home where there is bread on the table, and where there is love. It is all I need. I cannot say that every woman in thetoncan be so content, even if there is love. If you want a truly happy marriage, you will have to look for contentment with little. This, in addition to all the other qualities.”
Miles did not answer right away. She was right, as hard as it was for him to hear.
“You are wise, Mother, and I would be a fool not to heed your words.” He shook his head. “I will not seek out Lady Dorothea, for I fear she will not be content with the little I can offer her.”
His mother made a sound of sympathy in her throat. After a beat, she said, “There is always friendship. It might seem like a poor substitute now, but friendship always has value.”
After a slight pause, he shook his head. “I do not believe she wants even that from me.”
“I see.” Her voice was soft. “I am sorry, my son.”
Lady Isabelle did not offer platitudes, and for that he was grateful. There was nothing she could say to improve the situation. Therefore, the sooner he made peace with it, the sooner he could move on.
Chapter17
Dorothea was still enraged when she thought about Miles Shaw’s duplicity, even two days later. She did not know quite how she finished her conversation with his mother. Blessedly, it had been cut short because Lady Poole indicated she thought they’d stayed long enough. For once, Dorothea was inclined to agree with her mother.
Miles had lied to her when he said he was not hanging out for a rich wife, she was sure of it. It was one thing to be in a general state of financial distress, as he had led her to believe. When one was impoverished, one might continue to scrape by and attempt to shift one’s fortunes over the course of a lifetime. It would not cause a man with any scruples to push a courtship to a happy resolution for financial gain.
However, it was quite another thing to have one’s roof caving in on one’s mother in a way that could only be resolved through the urgent acquisition of funds—the kind a gentleman could only obtain through marriage. She had compassion for Lady Isabelle, of course, who had seemed like a lovely, honorable woman. Even though she’d spoken with more direct honesty than Dorothea thought quite proper, she was a lady in every way.
Lady Isabelle had not lost the elegant bearing of her youth in all her years of poverty, although her financial state was evident in other aspects of her person, such as her outmoded gown. Lady Berkley seemed to pay no mind to the disparity in wealth, so not all members of thetonwere quite as particular as Dorothea had been led to believe. She had understood from the things her father said, and did not say, that nothing short of perfection was required.
Nevertheless, the fact remained that Miles had been pursuing her to get his hands on her dowry. It had not been the proposal of passion and love like she’d thought it was—a proposal of the heart that made it difficult to remember why she had refused in the days that followed. It had not been that he’d offered for her against his will and his reason, after having made a point about not marrying a woman for her dowry. No. He was pursuing her with only one goal in mind: her financial worth.
Ooooh.She clenched her hands into fists. The desire to give him a set-down was so strong, she had nearly written to summon him so she might do so without delay. She had refrained, of course, but the desire had been almost impossible to master.
Instead, in the days that followed the revelation in Lady Berkley’s salon, Dorothea looked for him in all the places she thought he might be, with the sole object of giving him a piece of her mind. The opportunity had not appeared, despite her efforts, leaving her in a state of constant disgruntlement.
Arguments were stacked against him, and every bit of evidence in her recollection was catalogued to support those arguments. She longed for the opportunity when she could tell him exactly what she thought of him, so she might put him out of her mind and never think of him again.
She was sitting at the desk in the drawing room, sorting through the correspondence and invitations. At last, so many invitations arrived each day, she had to pick and choose and often send her regrets. Dorothea had rekindled some of the relationships with the writers of those letters to her late father, thereby bringing her family into fashion through those old connections. She had done well to keep them, for she could say with something close to honesty that her father had spoken of them in his lifetime. Oh, perhaps it was not so very honest, but he had kept their letters, had he not?
