Chapter 11

T he pieces of his life, so scattered and broken for the past week, slotted together and Victor felt whole again, gazing down at Isabel and all his heart’s desire.

She only asked, “How are you here?”

She looked steadier than she had a week ago in a bookshop. It looked well on her. Steadier, but shocked.

He’d asked a question; she had not answered.

But he’d spent six months negotiating a treaty between nations; he could wait much longer for this answer, which for him had more important implications.

So calmly he said, “I walk here every day. You see, my wife ordered several books at this shop.” He half-turned and shrugged a shoulder in the direction of Pritchard’s. “She told them she would return to deliver the books herself, and I dare not risk missing it.”

She blinked. It astonished him, how her eyes could be so full of both sunlight and snow. He would happily spend the rest of his life contemplating their beauty.

She said, “You paid for them. I would have seen that you got them.”

“I do not want the books. I want you.”

Hope, happiness, so many emotions flashed across her face at once that Victor didn’t know whether to celebrate or despair. Then her mouth turned down and she looked so sad. “I cannot, your lordship. I am sorry.”

“Cannot what?” His dreams felt suspended by a thread over a deep, dark chasm.

Fleetingly she glanced around. Passers-by who had stopped to watch the fight between drivers had drifted away, and no one was watching. “I wanted to care for you, Lord Hartwick, I did. But you have so many servants. I have nothing to offer.”

“Servants are not a wife.” The swoop of hope he felt when she said she wanted to care for him, the sinking despair when she said but. He hid how the words cut, habitual as it was with him to hide everything he felt. But that was how he had lost her once; he could not lose her again.

He moved closer, not to speak in a more intimate way, but because it would offend her less, perhaps, than sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her back to his house, which was what he really wanted to do. “I have never used sweet words before. I have never heard them spoken. But I am good with words, Miss Snow. Please. Let me practice. I will learn.”

“I never expected sweet words. Or anything. Not books, or jewels, or coin. You need not fear blackmail or... or a child.”

Another swoop of hope, another soul-crushing disappointment. He could not keep surviving them.

Victor had no idea how women knew such things but clearly Isabel spoke only the plain truth. He struggled to find a response that conveyed how he felt the blow, but was determined to put it in its best light. “I can learn new words. But learning to be a father... trust me when I say I’ve never seen that done either. Perhaps I could not learn something so vast, so all-encompassing. You must have been relieved.”

And then his Isabel did something peculiar. She twitched all over, not from nerves, but from some sort of physical urge attempting to win its release. Her whole body shifted, adjusted, her fingers clenched, and he had the impression that were she a sailor from the docks, she would throw a punch.

Finally the burst of emotion worked its way out of her in the tiniest stomp of her foot.

She probably thought her mild scold was a storm of reproach. “You must not speak so. You would be magnificent. I was so disappointed.”

Victor was a quick study. It was obvious that her quiet manner hid vast emotions, much like the ones raging in him. When his Isabel said she was disappointed, the blow must have been crushing.

Isabel stomped her foot again. “We met in a bookshop. We had our Christmas Eve.” She pressed a mittened hand to her mouth to stop anything else from coming out, frustrating Victor, who wanted to hear everything she had to say about that endless, glorious night. “It was a stroke of great good luck, but now it is over. There are no consequences. Your life can go on.”

Just the prospect of more lonely years without her made his glower return. It was not the right expression for this moment but he could not prevent it. When he leaned closer to speak privately, she did not back away.

“Go on? Without you?” When she nodded a tiny little nod, the pressure in his chest forced out the hardest words. “Did you not notice when I gave you my heart?”

Her mittened hand fell away; her mouth fell open.

“Is there nothing you will not give away as payment?” was what she said.

This was going so badly. They had not found conversing before so difficult.

“I cannot be your mistress.” This she whispered. “I simply cannot. Please, Lord Hartwick, do not ask it of me. I cannot do it.”

The law had a language, a style. It was not useful for swaying women. He had no useful words for conveying emotion that were appropriate. Or even true.

Yet law had given him words when his father had not allowed him any.

He must find a way to use them for both their sakes.

Taking her gently by the elbow he turned and walked her back toward Pritchard’s bookstore, where he had spent six days stalking the pavement back and forth along Piccadilly, looking for any sign of her.

He opened the shop door far enough to ring the bell. “Bring a chair!” he barked inside.

When the shopkeeper came, running and sweating and carrying a three-legged stool, Victor took the stool from him with one hand and closed the door in his face with the other.

He placed the stool carefully so it would not rock and urged Isabel to sit. He knelt beside her, heedless of the wet snow.

People walked past gave them curious looks, but Victor ignored them.

She had tears in her eyes. He cursed himself for the fool he was. All she really knew about him was his title and his problems. No woman would find that appealing.

When two parties came to the table to negotiate, they came with unspoken assumptions. He had not taken the time to share his or uncover hers. He could treat this as a contract.

Persuade her, for he could not bear to lose her warmth and wit and sweetness, and all he had to offer in return was a dry, rather battered soul.

“Madame, I have offended you.” The evidence was crushingly clear. Her leaving him in the wee hours, her current rebuff.

Of course he would accept if he lost his case, but not without giving his best argument first. For persuasion it must be. He wouldn’t beg for her heart; if she gave it, she would give it freely. But he could beg for her hand. If she would marry him, in time, he could persuade her of the love that he was doing such a bad job of showing.

“I can see I asked to be forgiven for my lack of sweet words without making an effort to use any. I cannot erase my failures, because wishes cannot make that so. But let me do better every day for the rest of our lives. Please. Marry me. I may be a poor bargain, but my heart is yours. And I want yours in return.”

“Oh, God.” Now both her mittened hands were clasped into a knot pressed against her mouth. Between the mittens and the trembling rim of her bonnet he barely heard her exclamation and could not tell if it was a prayer or a cry for help.

Either way, he held his position.

Her eyes were huge behind her mittened fists. “You cannot wish to marry me.”

Odd retort, but he could manage it. “I assure you I can. I do. That is not the question before us. The question is whether you will.”

“You live such a grand life,” she whispered.

“I live in offices and ship cabins. My life is not grand. Do you not like the old Hartwick house? I’ll burn it down.”

“Never, no! I only meant that you deserve a fine lady. Someone to live your kind of life. All those... things, and places, and people. You must know so many fine people.”

He thought of the under-secretary of state who’d invited him to Belgium. The man had lost much of his hair, drank rum when he celebrated, and, Victor happened to know, had crooked feet. “I don’t think they are finer than other people.”

Now her eyes narrowed a little and he thought she might argue. Argument felt like safer ground.

She did argue a little. “They are, you know they are. They would look down on me like Mrs. Hopp looked down on you. For not keeping things correct. For being wrong.”

“And like Mrs. Hopp they would be vile and mistaken.”

“You must have such large estates, and ties to government, and so many things I know nothing about and cannot help with. You deserve someone born to that world, or at least educated in it. I am nothing you deserve.”

“If I deserve anything, it is only what you are. Justice and smiles.”

There. He’d found good words. He knew it by the way she looked at him, as if really seeing him. Him, not his suit or his house or his title.

And Victor breathed a little easier, because for the first time he thought he was going to win.

Justice and smiles? That was how he saw her?

Isabel wanted to cry and laugh all at once.

She could try to convince him to believe her mother. That Isabel was a dull, dumpy housewife for a curate, unable to catch one. That it was the most she could hope for, and having failed at it, she was hopeless. Placeless. Someone who had already wasted her life and was only waiting for death to come.

Or she could believe him .

If she believed him... then what?

She had come to London expecting nothing more than to live out her life in a little room watching others out the window.

For the past week her prospects had been no better, but there was an absence there, a hollow wound. Her future was empty and it ached.

She had missed him every minute, missed his arms around her as she mourned her chance at his child, missed his frown and his crisp words and the length of his warm, hard body.

Now he was offering her the chance not to miss him for the rest of her life.

What if she took it?

Wouldn’t it be worth sour looks from a few rigid people? Those minutes against hours, years, a lifetime with him? Wasn’t the right answer clear?

It would only be fair to offer him the chance to reconsider, and Isabel always wanted whatever was right. “A marriage lasts for a very long time. You ought to be sensible, sir. What if this feeling fades and you repent of your offer a year from now, or five, or ten?”

“Why would I repent?” His knee must be getting cold in the icy snow.

Isabel waved her hands up, urging him to stand back up, but he wouldn’t budge. She gave in.

She could not have imagined having this conversation in a private sitting room, much less in public, but if this was where they must have it, she would.

“My lord Hartwick.” She met his eyes levelly with her own. “You must know there will be days when you must dine with ministers from Parliament. Or—or rich men who require your work. Perhaps landlords!” That was the grandest thing she could think of. “Your wife should be a Lady Hartwick. Like your mother. Someone who knows how to laugh at the right moments without sounding like a wheezing cow. Someone pretty and smart who can, I don’t know, arrange her hair properly.”

Something had eased in his face and he no longer looked so desperate and hard. Standing, finally, he paid no heed to the wet stain on his black trousers, only drew her up from the stool and tucked her hand into the crook of his arm.

Isabel tried to ignore how good it felt but couldn’t remember why.

“I don’t care about styles for ladies’ hair. I would prefer a wife to talk as plainly as I do. And my wife will be Lady Hartwick. Did someone tell you your laugh sounded like a wheezing cow?”

In fact, her mother had. She remembered that now, as Lord Hartwick maneuvered her through the low door back into the warm dark cave of books.

“Yes,” she admitted, “they did. A long time ago. It doesn’t matter.” Everything before the moment they met seemed a very long time ago.

That dear sharp frown drew his face to an angry point. “It matters. It causes me to wish to commit violence. Odd that only happens in this shop. Here, my man.”

He waved to the shopkeeper who, released from the sense that he was not wanted, darted forward again. “I left your chair just outside. My apologies. My wife would like her novels, please.”

“Of course, sir. Very good, sir.” The man dashed away again.

Isabel ought to let go of Lord Hartwick’s hard, steady arm. The urge to keep it reminded her of her urge the week before to find some pleasure for herself. A book all her own. Something to occupy her mind and her days.

What if I did?

Life with this man could occupy her mind and all her days to come.

He could come to regret it ten years hence, but was that not true of every marriage? Were they not all leaps of adventure, like a single woman finding her way to a bookshop alone?

“We barely know one another.” She said it quietly while the bookseller’s back was turned, ruffling among his volumes. The fellow brought forth a handsomely bound set of one novel then another, piling them upon his table to wrap in rough paper.

“We should repair that.” Victor said it so simply. There was not another man in Britain whose mind worked so similarly to hers, however little they knew each other. “My thought was that I would pay proper court. Visit you at home. Speak to your father, of course.”

“I live alone.”

That made him pause. “Untenable.”

“I was—my sister had a better chance of the few eligible bachelors in our village if I was not in view, so my family sent me here.”

“Appalling.”

“I had my chances at marriage; I simply failed.” There, he knew how bad at this she was.

“Excellent.” Victor—she must not slip in public, she must call him Lord Hartwick—nodded to the shopkeeper, who tied the twine about their large parcel. “I too have been a social failure. Another way in which we are a good match.”

She couldn’t bear the thought of him seeing her plain bare room, but it was nothing compared to the idea that she would never see him again.

She drew him away from the seller’s table, deeper into the shop. “You should visit. See how simple is my life. And if you change your mind regarding marriage, please still consider me as a possible...lady friend.”

“ What? ”

“As long as you do not marry. I admit I could not bear it. Not much good as a mistress, though having met you I was... willing to try. Marriage between two such different people seemed unseemly.”

They had just come in; they couldn’t go outside so quickly. She saw him think it, marveled that she already knew his expressions so well.

Instead he escorted her behind one of the taller shelves and for once, mercifully, the shopkeeper left them alone.

“Isabel.” His voice was low and urgent and pulled at things inside her that thrummed with excitement at how near he was. “You do not deserve to be a mistress, and I do not deserve to spend days and nights without the woman I love in my house, my bed, my arms.”

It still felt difficult to believe. “You are serious.”

Slight confusion drew his brows together, those dark hawkish brows. “Am I not always serious?”

His truth was a cliff over which Isabel felt she might fall. “I have just learned to dream. A dream like this is surely dangerous.”

He bent his dark head closer to hers. He did not belittle her fears, but he made clear he did not share them. “I never dreamed before either, but now all my dreams are of you.”

And as he spoke, his hands slid down her arms, cradling her without cradling her, and wrapped her tensely clasped hands in his. One covering hers, one supporting hers from below.

With him holding her hand, she could take the leap.

She closed her eyes. Could she imagine herself the lady of that Hartwick house, in a dress nearly as fine as the one in his mother’s portrait? Directing his housekeeper? Arranging the food on his table, the linens on his bed?

A little voice inside her whispered why not?

Had she not been prepared to take care of Mr. Bell’s little cottage? Mr. Wheelock’s house? Lord Hartwick’s house would be larger, but there were also more servants. Even footmen to carry water.

She stopped imagining all the fine lords and ladies who might be there and just imagined him and her. Not as Lord and Lady Hartwick, but as a woman and this man. The man who said he loved her.

That was bracing. She wasn’t sure she could be Lady Hartwick.

But being his wife? That would be easy.

His words were already engraved on her heart. Justice and smiles. She could do that for him, be that for him, because it was already who she was.

And for Isabel, that settled the question. He wanted her. Just as she was. Exactly the person no one else had ever wanted.

Starting to feel like this might be real, Isabel opened her eyes again and found his watching her. Intently. Waiting.

She did not whisper. “I won’t embarrass you?”

She felt as much as saw him settle, no longer stretched so taut. He had been awaiting her answer.

With the utmost calm he drew her even closer. “I believe I will give up being embarrassed. After all, I have done nothing wrong. All that embarasses me now is that I let that evil harridan think she could mistreat me a day longer than she had the right.”

“She never had the right.” If he liked the way she talked, she was ready to do so.

“As you say. I needed the viewpoint of a different pair of eyes to see it clearly. Beautiful eyes like the sun and moon all at once.” Offering her his elbow again with a nonchalance she thought he might be feigning, he turned with her to the shelf near them as if perusing the volumes. “And someday if you come to feel a similar affection for me?—”

“Oh, I do love you,” Isabel interrupted him with unshakeable certainty.

“You do?”

He looked boyish as he turned back to her, heedless of the shop around them or anything else.

“Of course I do. How else?”

“But why?” The Earl of Hartwick looked as confused as she had felt for the last twenty minutes.

That was easy to answer. “Kindness and honesty, of course.”

He stared agape at her, astonished, then bent closer. “I would like to seal this bargain with a kiss.”

“A bargain? Where you get what?”

“A wife. It is all I require. A wife is a gift, after all, and you the ultimate example.”

She thought she saw a small smile cross his lips, the escape of irrepressible joy and unabashed satisfaction, before they came down upon hers and she had to close her eyes again.

His kiss was riveting, taking all her attention, all of her swaying toward him till he stepped as close as it was possible to be and surrounded her in his arms, holding her against him, reminding her that they could yet be closer and promising the pleasure of that again one day.

So this was what dreams tasted like.

And his eyes twinkled at her as he released her, promising her those future joys even as he put her beside him again, her arm looped through hers, and began to speak as if about walks in Wales. “I have contemplated the marriage contract, but had no time this week to draw up any arrangements.”

Isabel felt very sure on her feet now. “Why no time?”

“I had to watch the street.” He said this as if it were a matter of simple fact.

“Not every day, surely.”

He looked at her with his dark, serious eyes. “I have been here every open hour of the shop, looking for you.”

Such devotion was unimaginable.

She would not throw such a gift away. Only marvel at it later. Making that much effort, he needed to eat accordingly. She drifted in happy contemplation of planning his meals for the rest of their lives. Dry and simple food, clearly, but much more of it. “You must be hungry.”

“Usually,” said Lord Hartwick, his finger running down the spine of a book and making Isabel shiver in anticipation, “but at the moment I am quite satisfied.”