“I know you’re from a good family,” Lord Sheene eventually said, his voice gentle. He’d used the same tone when she was sick and he’d believed her his enemy. Even then, his voice had quieted the screeching devils in her heart. “Were you an only child?”
She’d been struggling to work out how to begin. Although talking about Philip was always painful, she forced herself to answer. “I had one brother. He died two years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, I am too.” And sorrier still for the mess he’d made of his life. Philip had been clever and handsome and charming, but spoiled. He’d died in a duel over another man’s wife after a drunken quarrel in a Soho gambling hell.
With an abrupt movement, she bent to pluck a late bluebell. She nervously twirled the frail flower in her fingers. Heavens, why was it so difficult to find the words? “When I was sixteen, I fell in love with a poor man. Worse, my suitor was in trade and a radical.”
She waited for some derisive comment but the marquess remained silent as he followed the shaded track at her side.
Eventually, she went on in a more natural tone. “Josiah was the local bookseller. He used to talk to me about big things, important things. It was so flattering to be treated as an intelligent woman and not just a silly girl. Of course, I was just a silly girl. Conceited and headstrong and selfish and with far too high an opinion of my cleverness.”
“You’re not the first chit to have her head turned by male attention. You’re being too hard on yourself.”
“No,” she said hollowly. “No, I’m not being too hard on myself. My vanity and foolishness broke my father’s heart.”
“Grace.”
Just one word in that deep, deep voice. He reached out to still the busy fingers that shredded the bluebell. The touch lasted the sheerest instant. Still it scorched her to the marrow. She relaxed her deathlike grip on the ruined flower and dropped it to the edge of the path. She sucked in a steadying breath.
“When Josiah realized I was interested in his cause, he lent me books, books that would have given my father an apoplexy if he’d known. Shelley. Southey. Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin. Cobbett.”
“That’s a list to chill the heart of every landlord in the kingdom.”
She read his carefully neutral response as tacit criticism. “You disapprove.”
“Not at all. The country groans under inequality.” He stepped in front of her to hold a dripping branch out of her way. “Although I wonder what sympathy I’d have for the downtrodden if I hadn’t suffered my own injustice. My uncle’s an unregenerate reactionary who invokes the death sentence for the most minor offenses. I loathe that he uses my fortune to support his merciless conservatism.”
She ducked under the branch and waited for the marquess. “When I met Josiah, he was in his fifties but still on fire to save the world. He was like a prophet out of the Bible.” How she remembered the vivid excitement of those weeks. Her sheltered existence had never offered anything to match it. “Even after my maid betrayed me to my father, Josiah still smuggled letters to the hall. Wonderful letters about how he and his followers would create heaven on earth. I was so eager to join the crusade.”
“Even so, it’s a huge step for such a man to offer marriage to a well-born miss of sixteen. Or was he blinded by the family fortune?”
The sardonic note in Lord Sheene’s voice made her curious. She cast him a searching glance under her lashes, noticing the severe line of his usually expressive mouth. He claimed to support reform, yet his demeanor reeked of hostility.
Having started her story, though, she found herself determined to finish it, whatever it cost. Something in her was desperate to reveal the sorry, disastrous facts. Perhaps because if the marquess scorned her, it would break the growing intimacy and attraction that bound her to him.
“No, I proposed to Josiah. I couldn’t share his quest without the world calling me harlot. That would only harm the great mission. I was a forward baggage. I didn’t think how my actions would affect my family. All I cared about was what I wanted.”
Lord Sheene hooked his hand around her arm, swinging her round to face him. He dropped his hand quickly. Once she’d have thought that was because he didn’t want to touch her. Now she knew better.
“Jesus, Grace, Paget didn’t have to agree. You were little more than a child and he was a man in his maturity.”
Yes, the marquess was angry. She wondered why he cared about the fate of a harebrained girl and her overbearing old lover. She began to walk again. Motion somehow made words come more easily. When Lord Sheene caught up, she began to speak in a flat voice.
“Josiah wasn’t happy about the marriage. Family life distracted him from his glorious task. But I was so dedicated, so avid to learn. Nobody else was. Josiah had such hopes of founding the New Jerusalem. When it didn’t happen, he was a disappointed man.” In spite of her attempt to sound composed, sadness seeped into her tone. “Disappointment became his stock in trade, much more than his shelv
es of dusty unsold books.”
How it had hurt to discover that her idol was a sanctimonious, narrow-minded prig. She’d soon learned that she’d been tragically mistaken in her judgment of Josiah’s qualities. By then, it was too late to undo the harm she’d done to herself and others, including Josiah. She’d exchanged a loving family for a ranting martinet who never forgave her for being better born than he. Her disillusionment and his disappointment had combined into a bitter brew that tainted every moment of her married life.
The marquess frowned at the path ahead but she sensed his vision remained fixed on a purely internal landscape. “Your father must have been furious when he learned what you’d been up to.”
“Furious. Frustrated. Disbelieving. He’d planned a great match, a viscount at least. I wasted myself on an indigent shopkeeper forty years my senior and a blasted democrat as well. After he found out, he gave me a terrible scolding. He banished Josiah from the village, easy when you own every stick and stone.” She took a breath, striving to reclaim her unemotional tone. “Josiah left and set up in York and we decided to run away, then seek forgiveness. He was never happy I disobeyed my parents—the Bible says you must honor your father and mother.”
“So you eloped?”
The marquess still didn’t look at her. Was he condemning her as she’d condemned herself so often in the lonely reaches of her soul? He should.