Page 22 of What's an Earl Gotta Do?
“Surely,” Michael replied once he had regained the ability to speak, “you do not expect me to dignify that with an answer.”
“I for one,” Fauconbridge interjected, “would very much prefer that you not.”
“We’re of one mind on that.” Michael went to spear another bite of meat, only to have his fork clang against an empty plate. As he pulled his final beefsteak close, Michael saw the four men who had been occupying the adjacent table rise and depart. He glanced around. They were now the only ones in this end of the room.
There was a question that had been bothering him for four years, one he hadn’t had the opportunity to ask in the crush last night. He leaned forward, dropping his voice. “Listen, there’s something I need to ask you two. I’ve always wondered how it came to pass that Anne didn’t receive my proposal.”
“We’ve wondered that as well,” Fauconbridge said. “Yarwood swears she read your letter. Says he placed it in her hands himself. But it eventually became clear that Anne had no idea you had proposed.”
“I have a theory,” Michael said. “Perhaps you can confirm something for me. The man she married, Wynters—did he carry a walking stick with a silver handle in the shape of an icicle?”
“Took it with him everywhere he went,” Harrington confirmed. “Because he was ‘Lord Wynters.’” The exaggerated eyeroll with which Harrington accompanied this statement conveyed his opinion of the late earl’s sartorial choice.
Fauconbridge’s eyes had sharpened. “I didn’t realize you’d met Wynters.”
Michael stared unseeingly across the room. It didn’t really come as a surprise. Deep down, he’d known it all along. “Apparently I did. You see,” he blinked out of his trance, and found both Astley brothers staring at him intently, “he was there. That morning four years ago, when I scrawled out my proposal for Anne, then hurried off to board my ship. He was there, and I think he must have—”
“Fauconbridge, thank God you’re here.” Michael turned and saw the speaker’s eyes narrow as he noticed Harrington. “Oh. It’s you.”
It was the Marquess Graverley. Michael remembered Graverley from school, and he looked much the same—lithe, blond, and haughty, with preternaturally high cheekbones and boots so shiny Michael could have checked his teeth in them.
An argument ensued about whether Fauconbridge would be willing to join Graverley for a drink. “Alone,” the marquess clarified, glaring at Harrington.
It happened that Fauconbridge was unwilling to abandon his brother. Michael sighed. He’d finished his beefsteaks and, glancing at his watch, he saw that he needed to get going if he was going to make his horrifying appointment with the shoemaker. It appeared that he had learned as much as he was going to about Lord Wynters.
Well, no matter. He had learned what he needed to know.
He excused himself and wandered down the stairs and out onto St. James’s Street in a daze. Yes, he had learned what he needed to know, had confirmed what he’d suspected all along: that it had been no unfortunate happenstance that Anne never received his proposal. That he had been sabotaged, and the man who had done it had gone on to become Anne’s husband.
Now he just had to figure out what he was going to do about it. Should he tell Anne? After he proposed, she was bound to ask how his decision came about. He didn’t want to lie to her. Hell, he doubted he could lie to her convincingly (growing up, they always joked that they knew each other so well they could practically read each other’s faces).
He wanted to tell Anne that he loved her. He wanted to laugh with her about that picnic they’d had when they were fifteen, when he’d wound up lying on top of her and still somehow managed not to kiss her. He didn’t want to give her some nonsense about how it was a smart match, and about how they would get on well because they were “such good friends.”
The problem was, telling her the truth, that love had struck him down like a bolt from the blue when they were fourteen, when he’d returned home from Eton for summer break and had suddenly seen his best friend with the eyes of a young man, rather than those of a boy, was bound to lead to a whole series of questions. Questions like, Why didn’t you propose before you left? that had answers like, Actually, I did. Answers that led inexorably to the dishonorable act carried out by her first husband.
It wasn’t hard to guess that Anne would have strong feelings about being informed that her marriage had been built on a lie. Would she blame Wynters? Or would she resent Michael for telling her an uncomfortable truth? Hell, a lot of women would probably refuse his proposal on the grounds that he had besmirched the honor of their dearly departed husband.
And so he had a decision to make.
It wasn’t as if much was riding on it.
Just his future happiness.
He shuddered as he mounted the steps to the shoemaker’s shop, but not for the reasons he would’ve supposed an hour ago. How remarkable. There was something he was dreading even more than getting fitted for that pair of dancing pumps.
Chapter 7
Anne spent the afternoon hunched over her writing desk at her charity’s lodging house in St. Giles. The Christmas when Anne had been fourteen, there was an incident in which the Astley family’s longtime nursemaid, Bridget, fell pregnant. Bridget had sworn up and down that she had been raped by one of Lord Cheltenham’s houseguests, a Lord Fitzhenry. Anne’s father hadn’t wanted to believe this and had dismissed Bridget. Anne had pleaded with him on Bridget’s behalf. She had begged. She had even cried. But nothing she said had swayed him.
It was Michael who saved Bridget in the end by going to his own father and persuading the marquess to intervene. When Lord Redditch told Anne’s father that he believed that Fitzhenry fellow to be the worst sort of cad, that personally he believed Bridget when she said it had been rape, and that he thought Cheltenham was being overly harsh, Anne’s father had finally yielded.
The incident had shaken Anne’s sheltered existence to its very foundations. This wasn’t some whispered tale about a neighbor’s cousin’s maid, it was Bridget, someone Anne loved. It had opened Anne’s eyes to how fragile a woman’s place in the world truly was, and how easily a woman could find herself cast out and abandoned through no fault of her own. After that, Anne had become determined to assist those women upon whom society had turned its back, and the Ladies’ Society for the Relief of the Destitute was the result.
When Anne first came to London and began planning her charity, she had been shocked to discover the extent to which the cards were stacked against the poor, and especially poor women. One could be forgiven for assuming that a fancy West End mansion with marble floors and gilded plasterwork cost more to rent than a dilapidated shed in St. Giles, but you would be wrong—tenement housing rented for four times the price per square foot, and often more.
It was expensive to be poor. If you couldn’t afford to buy a full haunch of meat, you had to settle for scraps that were mostly gristle and bone, paying the same price per pound and getting little nutrition in return. It didn’t end there—the reputable shops wouldn’t sell tea in quantities of less than a pound, and thus the poor were forced to pay unscrupulous dealers twice the price per ounce for adulterated products. The same principle applied to everything from coal to oats to potatoes to sugar (sugar! As if Anne’s residents could afford sugar). If you couldn’t afford to buy in the quantities sold by the high street shops, you had no choice but to get your daily bread from the disreputable. And thus, those who could least afford it ended up being charged the dearest prices for their daily necessities.
The situation was bad for all the working class, but it was worse for poor women than for poor men, because women’s wages were on average one-third to one-half lower than men’s, even when they were performing the exact same work. Wedgwood paid the women who painted flowers on its china sixty percent of what it paid men to perform the same task. Male weavers were paid decent wages to knit stockings, but the women who seamed those same stockings by hand worked for pennies. And male tailors were paid a living wage, while women received an absolute pittance for their sewing.
