“So you say, so you say. Now, I would that you strive to answer me cleanly and directly.”
“A wit should be a wit for all occasions. I’m distressed that you disapprove. Very well, sir. What would you like to know?”
“I would like to know about this Duncan fellow. I would like to meet him and ascertain his intentions toward you. You will be a rich young lady come tomorrow and I want to convince myself that he isn’t a fortune hunter. Indeed, I insist upon meeting him. This evening, for dinner. It is only fair to Owen, don’t you think? Even frivolous young ladies should strive for a modicum of sensitivity and goodwill toward
young men who are truly in love with them.”
Owen in love with her? She and Owen were like two bored dogs who would eye each other and yawn. Not only did her fatuous guardian dislike her humor—her only weapon against him—he believed her stupid and ineffectual, which perhaps she was, for after all there weren’t any fires in any of the fireplaces, were there?
“I don’t know if Mr. Duncan will be free for dinner this evening.”
“You know, dear Miss Derwent-Jones, I cannot, in good conscience, allow you to enter into an alliance that I haven’t approved. It would be against your best interests. I wouldn’t be fulfilling my responsibility toward you. Indeed, there is a clause in your father’s will that allows my discretion in the matter of your marriage. I naturally hadn’t thought of it until now since I believed you and Owen would make a match of it.”
She stared at him. No, she couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe it. She managed to keep her outrage behind her tongue and said, “I didn’t know of any stipulations about my marriage, sir, or my lack of marriage. Actually, before I met Mr. Duncan, I hadn’t planned to marry at all. I would like to see my father’s will.”
“Certainly, Miss Derwent-Jones.” There was no dear this time, which was an improvement. “However, I hardly expect a young lady to understand it. There are legal terms that would surely confound a lady’s faculties.”
“I will contrive to raise my level of wit, sir, just for the occasion.”
He looked at her as if he would like to strike her, and that pleased her, for surely she would like to stick a knife between his ribs. “Shall I read this part of my father’s will right now, sir?”
“Unfortunately your father’s will is in my office, in London. It will require some time for me to write to my clerk and more time for him to send it here to Honeymead Manor.”
“I see,” she said, and was very afraid that she did indeed see.
“In brief, your father wanted my approval of any suitor to your hand, Miss Derwent-Jones. If I refuse my approval then I am to continue as your guardian until you reach twenty-five or find a gentleman of whom I do approve.”
“Very well, sir, you force me to admit to another wretched jest. There is no Mr. Duncan. There is no man I wish to marry. Therefore, sir, tomorrow, on my nineteenth birthday, I come into my parents’ money—all of it—and you, sir, are no longer snapping the whip over my head.”
“I thought as much,” Mr. Ffalkes said, and she knew then he’d outmaneuvered her. He’d lied about that stipulation in her father’s will, and she’d fallen for it. Then he struck a conciliatory pose, his palms upward. “You and I shouldn’t be adversaries, my dear. Indeed, I have much admired you since you became such a lovely young woman. As has my son. Now, it’s true that you will come into your fortune tomorrow. However, it is also true that I will continue as your trustee until you wed.”
“And just what are a trustee’s duties as opposed to a guardian’s?”
“As a trustee, I will advise you on investments, oversee all legal matters, grant you a sufficient allowance to meet your needs, see to your continued well-being. I was your father’s cousin, Miss Derwent-Jones. He trusted me to care for you, to see you well placed. I am pleased there is no Mr. Duncan. Men aren’t always what they seem, you know. No, you don’t know, do you? You have been protected, sheltered from gentlemen who would take advantage of your innocence. I will continue to protect you, Miss Derwent-Jones.”
Just as he’d protected her by sending her to Chudleigh’s Young Ladies’ Academy in Nottingham, whence she’d managed to escape only three years before. She’d believed a convent couldn’t be more stifling, more deadening than the echoing chambers at Chudleigh’s, with all its giggling girls with naught on their minds but the dancing master’s dimples. The mistresses had been so unrelenting in their quest to make every single girl just like every other single girl, all of them to be stupid but somehow charming to men, to nod and pretend to listen until their brains quite froze through, and to stitch samplers until death would thankfully overtake them, after, naturally, they’d produced a suitable number of surviving offspring.
Thus when she’d been sixteen, she’d come down with something akin to the plague that had scared even the headmistress, Miss Beemis, into near incontinence. She’d been packed quickly back to Honeymead Manor and dear Mrs. Tailstrop. The spots, made from walnut dye mixed with a thick gray clay and smashed oak leaves until it resembled oozing boils, had finally washed off.
“Yes,” Mr. Ffalkes continued, “I will continue to guide you. Perhaps you will be content to remain here at Honeymead Manor, Miss Derwent-Jones. Owen much loves the country.”
“I doubt that, Mr. Ffalkes. I doubt that very much.”
“That Owen loves the country? Of a certainty he does.”
She said nothing. She turned and walked back into the manor. Tomorrow she would shriek at him to her heart’s content and then she would order him off her property.
It was Morna, the upstairs maid, who grabbed her sleeve, placed her finger over her lips, and hissed in her ear, “Come, miss, quickly, quickly!” She ran after Morna down the long first-floor hallway to the small estate room tucked at the rear of the manor, a quite ugly chamber that she avoided because it reminded her of too many men grown tedious and dull over the generations, all of them pondering and brooding in this room, doubtless worried about their groats.
The door wasn’t quite closed. Morna nodded to her and gently shoved her closer. It was then she heard Owen’s voice low and clear. “Please listen to me, Father. I know you want me to marry her. You’ve wanted it all along, but just listen to me this once. Caroline isn’t an easy girl. She’s stubborn. She is well used to doing just as she pleases. She doesn’t dislike me but she thinks me a fool. She won’t agree to marry me. I’ve told you that again and again. She won’t change toward me.”
“Yes,” Mr. Ffalkes said finally. “You have mucked it right and proper, Owen.”
She stopped cold and leaned against the crack in the door. She could hear Morna breathing rapidly behind her.
“I can’t very well rape her,” Owen said, sounding as petulant and sulky as a child, as he always did around his father.
“Why the devil not?”