Page 44 of A Duke in Disguise
Verity refused to be embarrassed. “Yes. I wrote it in a moment of delusion. If you’ve come to warn me off Ash, there’s no need. We parted on exceedingly bad terms.”
“Unequal marriages are notoriously difficult,” said Lady Caroline. “Everybody says so.”
“Quite,” snapped Verity, not needing the point driven home. “Neither of us is contemplating marriage.”
“It’s going to be bad enough for my nephew, trying to exist in the circles that his birth ought to have entitled him. Marrying a commoner will make it quite impossible.”
“Ma’am,” Verity said with rising exasperation, “you don’t need to convince me. You, Ash, and I are all in perfect agreement on this matter.”
Lady Caroline appeared not to have heard her. “On the other hand, it would not precisely be a marriage of unequals because he has been a tradesman and you are a tradesman’s daughter.”
“I’m a tradesman myself, I’ll have you know,” she said before realizing that this was not at all the point. “Besides, Ash and I are equal, and you and I are equal, and—” Verity did not want to lecture this woman on Locke.
“Oh, I’ve read that Wollstonecraft book. But I’m not the one you need to convince.”
“I’m not trying to convince you and I’m certain Ash needs no convincing on that topic,” Verity said, bewildered as to how Mary Wollstonecraft entered the conversation.
“Precisely!” Lady Caroline said. “Indeed, there is something charming about a man who remains loyal to his childhood sweetheart despite a change in circumstance.”
Verity’s head was spinning. “I’m finding it difficult to follow the thread of this conversation, ma’am.”
“Would you have married him if he were a commoner?”
Portia had asked her the same question in this very room, not a week earlier. “I never wanted to marry. I always thought the last thing in the world I needed was a husband.”
“Very wise.”
“My parents—” Verity shook her head in a way that she hoped the lady would interpret ashad a marriage one would not wish on one’s worst enemies.
“Mine as well, I’m afraid.”
“And the letters I get only confirm my earlier beliefs.”
“A very flawed institution, marriage is,” Lady Caroline said.
“Quite,” Verity agreed.
“A thoroughly difficult group of people, men,” the lady added.
Verity nodded.
“Despite all of that, I believe my nephew is a good man.”
“Certainly,” Verity said.
“So you would have married him?” Lady Caroline asked.
Verity had lived long enough with Nate to know she was being argued into a corner. She thought again of the conversation she had with Portia not long ago. “If he had asked me, if he truly wanted that of me, maybe. Eventually, yes, I probably would have given in,” she admitted. She was aware that this was not a stirring declaration of love, but the fact was that a month ago she would have rejected the possibility of marriage out of hand. That she was considering it, even so tepidly, was a radical shift, and, she feared, the thin end of the wedge.
“Do you not believe that he’d be as good a husband as a duke as he would have as an engraver?”
“That isn’t the point,” Verity protested.
Lady Caroline removed a piece of paper and a pair of spectacles from her reticule. “Do you not believe you and he are fundamentally equal and—” she read from the paper “—it is long past time to do away with meaningless distinctions of rank?”
Verity knew that phrase. That was from a piece she and Nate had written for theRegistermonths ago. “We were referring to universal suffrage, not marriage.”
“To be perfectly honest, Miss Plum, I don’t care who he marries or who he takes as a mistress. I know I ought to, but I’ve spent twenty years wondering what happened to the child I tried to save, and now that I see him safe and sound I only want him to be happy. My nephew will make a good duke,” Lady Caroline said, rising and shaking out her skirts. “And as long as this nation has dukes, it can only be for the best to have as many good men in that position as possible. He’s kind and he’s fair. He reminds me of his father, who was the best of brothers. And while I can’t expect this to mean anything to you, it makes me proud to know that one day soon there will be a worthy Duke of Arundel.”
