Chapter 28

CHAPTER 28

" N o," Frances said as the room erupted around her. Her mother wailed; her father roared. The chaos was instantaneous and deafening and Frances wondered how she'd gotten here.

Well, she allowed, part of it was obvious. She'd done the most scandalous thing of her life and then neglected to even attempt to cover it up. But that had been yesterday, and this was today, and today and promised to be at least marginally less outrageous than the day prior.

Frances had woken that morning to find her family in varying degrees of comfort with this prediction. Peter and George had gone home the night prior—Peter because he had a wife and parishioners to tend to, George because he said that staying at the family home made him itchy.

But Cordelia had stayed, claiming she'd been too exhausted to travel across Mayfair the previous evening, and now that she was here, she might as well enjoy an afternoon with her sister, shouldn't she? She'd shot Frances a wink that had warmed the youngest Johnson.

Harry had been somewhat less subtle, claiming he wouldn't be budging from Frances' side until "this mess gets resolved and Mother and Father stop acting like Bedlamites."

All told, it had left Frances feeling quite afloat on a tide of fraternal support.

Her parents, by contrast, had persisted in behaving absurdly.

"Harry," Laura had insisted, either to her eldest son or to her husband—it was unclear. "Go call out the Marquess of Oackley this instant."

"No," said Harry (the younger), calmly buttering his toast.

"He can't make good if he's dead, and I'm a crack shot," boasted Harry (the elder), spearing a kipper with his knife in apparent illustration of this deadly prowess. "We wait."

Laura had let out an earsplitting shriek of outrage that her family proved so relentlessly disappointing.

"Cordelia," she demanded, "tell your sister she'll be ruined."

"I'm sure she heard you, Mother," Cordelia said politely, even as she prodded delicately at one of her ears. "They heard you in Hampshire. Frances, you haven't grown hard of hearing, have you?"

"I haven't," Frances answered. "Thank you for asking, Cordy."

Cordelia threw her napkin at Frances. Harry snorted into his teacup.

Frances had never felt so much a part of the family.

This somewhat more favorable opinion of her siblings had opened Frances' eyes to the ways in which they, too, had been forced to manage their parents' ridiculousness over the years. Much of Harry's imperiousness, for example, seemed designed to override their father's more outlandish notions, while Cordelia's primness and propriety often distracted their mother from her histrionics.

Which was not to say that they were perfect. Cordelia, at one point, looked up from the horrendous little gown she was making for her unborn child and said, with a happy sigh, "I do love tatting lace. Don't you, Frances?"

Frances had stared at her for several seconds, uncertain if Cordelia was teasing her.

"No," she said, faintly surprised to realize that her sister was being entirely serious.

Cordelia, for her own part, had seemed equally surprised. "Really? But it's so restful."

Frances had been struck speechless by this, truth be told. As it was far from her first instance of speechlessness, Cordelia had shrugged, unconcerned, and gone back to tatting. She'd even hummed contentedly while she'd worked.

The day had not been without its trials, of course. Shortly before luncheon, Frances had taken a circuitous route to her bedchamber (to avoid her mother, who was pacing irritably and shrieking at anyone she encountered, annoying her children and terrorizing the staff) to write to Diana and Emily who, she assumed, did not yet know about Grace's survival.

When she'd taken the letters downstairs and deposited them in with the rest of the outgoing post, her mother had swept in behind her, snatched up the letters, and promptly tossed them into the fire.

"Why?" Frances had cried, aghast.

"I don't need you informing anyone about your scandalous behavior," Laura replied, dusting her hands with an air of satisfaction.

"I wasn't," Frances insisted. "I was telling Diana and Emily that Grace is alive."

"Oh." Her mother paused slightly at that. "Well. I did not know that."

"You could have asked ," Frances suggested.

This was apparently a bit too much willfulness for her mother, who promptly adopted an air of wounded superiority.

"Perhaps I'd be more inclined to listen to you, Frances, if you hadn't lied about your whereabouts and gone off with a man, only to come back still unmarried ."

This was a reasonable description of recent events, even if Laura's attitude about it seemed overblown, given that she had, only shortly before the described incidents, been threatening Frances with life in a convent. Frances decided that not responding was her best choice.

Much as she hated to agree with her father about anything, Frances resigned herself to waiting until things calmed down. The morning's gossip pages hadn't uttered a word about Frances, Evan, or Grace, and so long as that continued, this whole matter might simply fade away, no matter how much Harry had grumbled, once more, that this "really was not the point."

By noon, she felt certain that she and the rest of her family were, however, waiting for different things. They seemed to be waiting for Evan to arrive on their doorstep. Frances was waiting for everyone to forget about her adventure—herself included.

It was bittersweet, that thought. The last few weeks had been so wildly full of adventure—and occasionally misadventure. And it felt strange, to simply return to her quiet life as the shy spinster of the Johnson siblings. Yet she could not be sorry that it had happened. Not one moment of it.

She would be fine. She would be. She would be .

She was starting to believe it, even, when one of the footmen arrived at the door of the front parlor, where Frances was trying to read while trying even harder to pretend her family was not all staring at her.

"The Marquess of Oackley is here, requesting an audience with Your Lordship, Your Ladyship, and Lady Frances," he said, the latter half of his sentence drowned out by Lady Reed's cry of delight.

"Good Lord, Mother," muttered Harry, who had been sitting nearest to her.

Laura ignored him. "I knew it," she crowed. "I knew it would be well. Finally, finally. Goodness, Frances, why are you still just sitting there? Up, up, up ."

She flapped her hands until Frances, who was experiencing a buzzing in her ears that had nothing to do with her mother's screaming, rose numbly to her feet.

"We shall meet Lord Oackley in the library," Lord Reed intoned, clearly practicing his imperious voice.

Harry gave Frances a questioning look that was clearly an offer of support, but she shook her head. This whole thing would be messy enough without adding another voice to the chorus.

The noise in her head, after all, was growing louder and louder.

She should be happy, shouldn't she, that Evan had come? She knew what his visit was about, of course; she could scarcely not recognize its significance.

And marriage to him would be better than life in a silent nunnery or marriage to whatever man her parents managed to trap her with in front of witnesses. Of course it would be. She liked Evan. And she'd be Grace's sister. That would be nice.

So why, then, did she feel like a scream was trying to claw its way out of her throat?

Lord and Lady Reed were looking haughty and imperious as they entered Lord Reed's study, where Evan sat waiting for them. He rose politely to his feet, his eyes on Frances.

She felt panicked as she tried to read his face. What was he thinking? What had brought him here? She couldn't tell, and the longer she remained uncertain, the more unsteady she felt.

They'd always been at their best when it was just the two of them, once they'd gotten past all the initial sparring, of course. Frances had never known how to behave with Evan in front of people—had never known how to behave at all in front of people, as a matter of fact.

This was no different. She stood, miserable, a statue.

Eventually, Evan had no choice but to look to her parents.

"Lord Reed, Lady Reed. Thank you for meeting with me."

"Hmm," said Frances' father in an apparent gesture of masculine dominance.

As with Lord Reed's attempted assault the previous day, Evan was unmoved.

"And Fra—Lady Frances," he amended, clearly trying to catch her eye. Frances remained frozen. "Thank you for joining us."

Frances' mother, as unsubtle as ever, spoke on her daughter's behalf.

"Yes, well, she would have to be here, wouldn't she, assuming you've come here to discuss the important issue at hand."

Evan waited a moment longer, his gaze upon her like a brand, before he spoke again. Frances desperately willed herself to do something—anything—but all she could manage to do was withstand the shrieking in her head that this was wrong, all wrong, without flinching.

"Very well," Evan said softly.

Was that a touch of disappointment in his voice? Evan had never been soft with any disappointment he'd felt in her before, and hearing it now made Frances want to weep. She didn't want him to be sneering and sniping at her, as he had during those first days at the party, which now seemed so long ago. But she would have preferred such an attitude to that gentle, sorry note.

He squared his shoulders as he turned to face her father.

"I understand that you must have been shocked yesterday to see Lady Frances return home in the company of a gentleman to whom she was not related. I genuinely apologize for my indelicate handling of that situation. As you may have gathered, I was rather shaken by the news that my sister, whom we all assumed to have been killed by Theodore Dowling, was in fact alive and well."

"Yes, quite, and my best wishes for her return," said the Marquess of Reed, who sounded as though he neither understood nor particularly cared if Grace's return was pleasant or dismal. "But you did not, as I understand it, know any of this when you absconded with my daughter."

Evan shot another look at Frances, and she found herself, again, unable to move. Wrong, wrong, wrong . It rang in her ears like a gong, disrupting any chance at grasping another thought.

Why did she feel like this? Why did it seem as though the world was ending? She should be grateful—this was as neat a solution as she was likely to encounter of the entire hideous mess her life had become.

"No, I did not," Evan admitted, turning back to Frances' father. "And I have no excuse. I can only offer the explanation that your daughter is a good and devoted friend to my sister, one who wished most sincerely to know the truth about what had happened three years ago."

The Marquess of Reed opened his mouth, and Evan held up a hand to forestall whatever comment came next.

"As I said, I understand this is not an excuse. I merely wish to express my heartfelt admiration for Lady Frances' character and loyalty."

Frances' breath hitched and tears pricked at the back of her eyes. There was a perfectly suitable excuse, after all—she'd all but forced him to let her accompany him. And yet he'd not even hinted at such a thing, had not laid an ounce of blame at her feet.

"Yes, well." Frances' father sounded like he had never intended for the conversation to go this direction and found himself not at all comfortable with it. "Frances' character is not the subject of our discussion. We are here to determine what is to be done about the perilous position you've put my daughter in. Her reputation will be shredded, sir, should any whisper of your antics reach the ears of the ton ."

And those whispers would spread, Frances suddenly realized, because Lady Reed would ensure it so. She would not pass up the chance to have her daughter become a duchess, no matter how such a marriage came about.

And Evan, who had only just freed himself from the yoke of worrying about Grace, would be trapped anew.

Frances found she could not abide that, not even to preserve her own future.

"I understand," Evan said evenly, his voice that of a man who was not watching his freedom go up in smoke. "And I have no wish to allow any harm to come to Lady Frances."

She had seen the difference in Evan after they'd discovered Grace. He'd been lighter, freer, and it had made her realize how heavily he'd labored under the burden of his pain, and for how long. She didn't want him to go back to that.

She wouldn't be able to bear it if she became the new burden.

She couldn't stand to see the heat in his gaze when he looked at her go lukewarm, couldn't imagine relations between them icing over, becoming an agonizing farce of the way they'd first quarreled. She'd seen marriages go wrong; her mother, after all, had once been brighter and more romantic, softer and kinder. But years of marriage to Frances' father, a man she was stuck with but did not love, not truly, had soured her.

How much worse would it be for Frances to watch Evan suffer the same fate?

Because, she realized with an intake of breath that felt as though it approached hysteria, she loved him.

She loved him. She loved him.

And she could not be the source of his unhappiness.

"And that is why," Evan continued, "I have come here to ask for Lady Frances' hand. I hope you—and she—will give me the honor of accepting my proposal."

Frances' father smiled in smug satisfaction, and Frances, with a jolt of horror, saw the future laid out before her. She'd not expected love, not really. But now she could imagine how half a love was worse than none at all. She would continue to love Evan, she knew, and he would grow to resent her.

The Marquess of Reed showed all his teeth. "Of course she'll marry you, Lord Oa?—"

"No." Frances finally, finally managed to speak, and the word was at once her salvation and the thing that shattered her heart into pieces.

"No," she repeated, a bittersweet smile coming to her face. "No, I won't marry him."

Her mother let out a wordless shriek of horror. Her father surged to his feet, nearly knocking over his chair. But Evan just looked at her, his eyes wide and surprised, his lips parted slightly.

She made herself hold that gaze, no matter how much it hurt. She refused to let her heartbreak show on her face. She had to remain strong, had to be brave just this once.

"I cannot," she said. And then, because she could not help it, she added, "I'm sorry."

She turned on her heel before her resolve could break and swept from the room.