Mary Balogh - The Proposal

“He may well weep, Vince,” Ralph said.

“I have been known to have that effect upon my listeners,” Vincent said, laughing.

Hugo removed his coat and tossed it over the back of a chair before sitting down with everyone else. They all drank tea despite the duke’s offer of something stronger.

“We were very sorry not to see you last year, Hugo,” he said after they had chatted for a while. “We were even sorrier about the reason for your absence.”

“I was all ready to come here,” Hugo said, “when word of my father’s heart seizure reached me. So I was prepared to leave almost immediately, and I arrived before he died. I was even able to speak with him. I ought to have done it sooner. There was no real need of the near estrangement between us, even though I broke his heart after I insisted that he purchase a commission for me, when all my life he had expected that I would follow him into the family business. He loved me to the end, you know. I suppose I will always be thankful that I arrived in time to tell him that I loved him too, though it might have seemed that words came cheap.”

Imogen, who was seated beside him on a love seat, patted his hand.

“He would have understood,” she said. “People do understand the language of the heart, you know, even if the head does not always comprehend it.”

They all looked at her for a silent moment, including Vincent.

“He left a small fortune to Fiona, my stepmother,” Hugo said, “and a large dowry to Constance, my half sister. But he left the bulk of his vast business and trading empire to me. I am indecently wealthy.”

He frowned. The wealth sometimes felt like something of a millstone about his neck. But the obligation it had brought with it was worse.

“Poor, poor Hugo,” Flavian said, pulling a linen handkerchief from a pocket and dabbing his eyes with it. “My heart bleeds for you.”

“He expected me to take over the running of the businesses,” Hugo said. “Not that he demanded it. He just expected that it was what I would want, and his face glowed with pleasure at the prospect even though he was dying. And he spoke of my passing it all on to my son when the time comes.”

Imogen patted his hand again and poured him another cup of tea.

“The thing is,” Hugo said, “that I have been happy with my quiet life in the country. I was happy in my cottage for two years, and I have been happy at Crosslands Park for the past year—though, of course, it was bought with some of my newfound wealth. I have been able to excuse my procrastination by telling myself that this is a year of mourning and it would be unseemly to rush into action as though all I ever wanted was his fortune. But the anniversary of his death is tomorrow. I have no further excuse.”

“We have always told you, Hugo,” Vincent said, “that being a recluse is not really suited to your nature.”

“More specifically,” Ben said, “we have compared you to an unexploded firecracker, Hugo, just waiting for a spark to ignite it.”

Hugo sighed.

“I like my life as it is,” he said.

“So the fact that you were given your title as a reward for extraordinary valor is to mean nothing after all?” Ralph asked. “You are planning to return to your middle-class roots, Hugo?”

Hugo frowned again.

“I never left them,” he said. “I have never wanted to be a member of the upper classes. I would despise them all collectively, as my father always did, if it were not for the six of you. Purchasing Crosslands might have seemed a bit pretentious, but I wanted my own little bit of the country in which to be at peace. That’s all.”

“And it will always be there for you,” the duke said. “It will be a quiet retreat when the press of business is getting you down.”

“It’s the son part that is getting me down now,” Hugo said. “He would have to be legitimate, wouldn’t he? I would have to have a wife in order to produce him. That’s what is facing me after I leave here. I have decided. I have to find a wife. Perish the thought. Pardon me, Imogen. I have nothing whatsoever against women. I just don’t really want one permanently in my life. Or in my home.”

“You are not looking for romance or romantic love, then, Hugo?” Flavian asked. “That is very wise of you, old chap. Love is the very d-devil and to be avoided as one would the plague.”

The lady to whom Flavian had been betrothed when he went to war had broken off their engagement when she found herself unable to cope with the wounds he brought home from the Peninsula. Within two months she had married someone else, a man he had once considered his best friend.

“Do you have anyone in mind, Hugo?” the duke asked.

“Not really.” Hugo sighed. “I have an army of female cousins and aunts who would be only too delighted to present me with a parade of possibilities if I were to say the word, even though I have neglected them all shamefully for years. But I would feel out of control from the first moment. I would hate that. Actually, I was hoping someone here would have some advice for me. On how to go about finding a wife, that is.”

That silenced them all.

“It is actually quite simple, Hugo,” Ralph said at last. “You approach the first reasonably personable woman you see, tell her that you are a lord and indecently wealthy to boot, and ask her if she would fancy marrying you. Then you stand back and watch her trip all over her tongue in her eagerness to say yes.”

The others laughed.

“It is that easy, is it?” Hugo said. “What a huge relief. I shall go down onto the beach tomorrow, then, weather permitting, and wait for reasonably personable women to hove by. My problem will be solved even before I leave Penderris.”

“Oh, not women, Hugo,” Ben said. “Not plural. They will be fighting over you, and there is much to fight over, even apart from your title and wealth. Go down to the beach and find one woman. We will make it easy for you and stay away from there all day. For me, of course, that will be simple, since I do not have a decent pair of legs with which to get down there anyway.”

“Now that we have your future satisfactorily settled, Hugo,” the duke said, getting to his feet, “we will allow you to go to your room to freshen up and change and perhaps rest before dinner. We will, however, discuss the matter more seriously during the coming days. Perhaps we will even be able to suggest some practical course of action. In the meanwhile, let me just say how very splendid it is to have the Survivors’ Club all together again this year. I have longed for this moment.”

Hugo gathered up his greatcoat and left the room with the duke, feeling all the seductive comfort and pleasure of being back at Penderris in company with the six people who meant most to him in the world.

Even the rain pattering against the windowpanes only served to add a feeling of coziness.

Gwendoline Grayson, Lady Muir, hunched her shoulders and drew her cloak more snugly about her. It was a brisk, blustery March day, made chillier by the fact that she was standing down at the fishing harbor below the village where she was staying. It was low tide, and a number of fishing boats lay half keeled over on the wet sand, waiting for the water to return and float them upright again.

She should go back to the house. She had been out for longer than an hour, and part of her longed for the warmth of a fire and the comfort of a steaming cup of tea. Unfortunately, though, Vera Parkinson’s home was not hers, only the house where she was staying for a month. And she and Vera had just quarreled—or at least, Vera had quarreled with her and upset her. She was not ready to go back yet. She would rather endure the elements.

She could not walk to her left. A jutting headland barred her way. To the right, though, a pebbled beach beneath high cliffs stretched into the distance. It would be several hours yet before the tide came up high enough to cover it.

Gwen usually avoided walking down by the water, even though she lived close to the sea herself at the dower house of Newbury Abbey in Dorsetshire. She found beaches too vast, cliffs too threatening, the sea too elemental. She preferred a smaller, more ordered world, over which she could exert some semblance of control—a carefully cultivated flower garden, for example.

But today she needed to be away from Vera for a while longer, and from the village and country lanes where she might run into Vera’s neighbors and feel obliged to engage in cheerful conversation. She needed to be alone, and the pebbled beach was deserted for as far into the distance as she could see before it curved inland. She stepped down onto it.

She realized after a very short distance, however, why no one else was walking here. For though most of the pebbles were ancient and had been worn smooth and rounded by thousands of tides, a significant number of them were of more recent date, and they were larger, rougher, more jagged. Walking across them was not easy and would not have been even if she had had two sound legs. As it was, her right leg had never healed properly from a break eight years ago, when she had been thrown from her horse. She walked with a habitual limp even on level ground.

She did not turn back, though. She trudged stubbornly onward, careful where she set her feet. She was not in any great hurry to get anywhere, after all.

This had really been the most horrid day of a horrid fortnight. She had come for a month-long visit, entirely from impulse, when Vera had written to inform her of the sad passing a couple of months earlier of her husband, who had been ailing for several years. Vera had added the complaint that no one in either Mr. Parkinson’s family or her own was paying any attention whatsoever to her suffering despite the fact that she was almost prostrate with grief and exhaustion after nursing him for so long. She was missing him dreadfully. Would Gwen care to come?