Chapter 36

CHAPTER 36

L avinia spent the next hour in her room waiting for her father to decide that he wanted to talk to her.

A part of her knew that the wait should have made her feel nervous. When her father came, there was sure to be a dramatic argument.

But Lavinia felt detached from what was going on around her. What did it matter if her father was angry with her? What difference did it make if they argued, really? It wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t change the fact that she knew she had done the right thing by being honest with Lord Hennington, and it wouldn’t change the fact that she grieved for what she had lost with the duke.

When the knock came at her door, she didn’t even feel the pinch of nervousness she might have expected. “Come in,” she called.

The door opened and he entered like a thundercloud. Lavinia looked up at him. There was a time when that demeanor would have upset or intimidated her.

“I certainly hope you’re happy with yourself,” her father stormed.

“I did what I had to do,” Lavinia murmured.

“What you had to do ? Lavinia, you had a suitor and you drove him away. He was going to ask to marry you.”

“He did ask to marry me. And it’s not as if I told him no.”

“Oh, no, you didn’t tell him no,” her father said. “You only told him what a mistake he was making by asking you in the first place.”

“You know that wasn’t what I said to him.”

“You might as well have, Lavinia. What were you thinking, telling the viscount you could never love him? No gentleman wants to hear that. No one wants a wife who would say such a thing.”

“If he doesn’t want to marry me under those circumstances, I think he has a right to know that that’s the way I feel,” Lavinia insisted. “I’m not trying to trick him, Father.”

“No one said anything about trying to trick anybody, but you must understand that a gentleman doesn’t want to hear what you said spoken aloud! Lavinia, Lord Hennington is not a fool. He knew there was a chance you didn’t feel true love for him. How long have the two of you known one another, after all?

“You’re a lady. A part of your responsibility in marriage is to allow your husband to tell himself whatever he wants to about your feelings for him.”

“I should have encouraged him to lie to himself?”

“You should have let him believe you loved him, even if you didn’t truly feel that way. It’s not so much for him to ask of you.”

“He was glad I was honest,” Lavinia said. She kept her chin up. Her father could say whatever he liked, but she knew her choice had been the right one. “I’m not going to question what I did, Father.”

“I just don’t know how to express my disappointment in you. After everything I did for you. Giving you extra time to find your own arrangement. Allowing you to choose who you wanted to marry instead of making the choice myself—you’ve ruined that possibility, by the way. No one is going to have you now.

“I had a match in mind for you before Lord Hennington came to me, but now that I’ve told that gentleman no once, I don’t think there’s a chance of bringing him back. And when word gets out about the way you treated Lord Hennington, you can be sure that no one will ever want you again. You’re doomed to spinsterhood now.”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t care ?”

“I wanted to fall in love, Father.”

“If I have to hear you talk about how you wanted to fall in love again, I may be ill. You’ve thrown your life away because of that silly dream.

“I haven’t thrown my life away,” Lavinia said. “I have made my life my own. It would have been throwing my life away to enter into a marriage I didn’t want just for your sake.”

“For my sake?” her father exploded. “Are you so eager to defy me that you’re willing to embrace spinsterhood, Lavinia? Truly, is that what you want? Is that going to suit you better than a marriage to that nice young gentleman would have?”

“It isn’t about defying you, Father. But if you’d like to see it that way, I won’t try to stop you. The truth is that you’ve always been more interested in what you think I ought to be doing than you have in my happiness. I didn’t understand that for a very long time. I thought there was something wrong with me .

“Even at Harbeck Manor, during the party—I thought that if I could just fix what was the matter with me, I could find someone who would love me. Then I could make you happy. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. I was never trying to defy you.”

Her father stared at her. It was clear that she had left him speechless.

“But you don’t care about that,” Lavinia went on. “Because for you, it’s never been about my happiness. You don’t care that I thought I was too flawed for any gentleman to ever choose me. And if you think I didn’t put in any effort, you haven’t been paying attention. I did everything I could to try to make myself appealing to the gentlemen at that party. I wore the most flattering gowns I could.”

She hesitated, on the verge of telling him how she had obtained those gowns, but then she held back. No doubt he would try to make her pursue a courtship with the duke if he knew about their connection—he was obviously desperate to see her married to anyone at all at this point—and Lavinia couldn’t bear that. She wouldn’t be able to take it if she had to witness her father scrambling for the duke’s attention and the duke rejecting them.

She continued what she had been saying instead. “I danced with anyone who asked me,” she said. “I practiced my conversational skills until I knew I would be a pleasure for them to talk to, so that people would no longer consider me odd and talk about me behind my back. And I was successful at all of that.

“I did win the attention of a gentleman. You can’t say that I didn’t give it my best effort. If it was true that I was just trying to rebel against you, Father, I wouldn’t have done any of those things.”

“But if you were willing to fall in line with my expectations for you, you would have accepted this proposal without making so much trouble about it,” her father pointed out. “I don’t know why you couldn’t just do that. You told me you liked him!”

“I do like him! Don’t you see that that’s the reason I couldn’t bear to lie to him, Father? Didn’t you see the look on his face? He wants to marry someone who loves him. He deserves that. Would you want to be lied to if you were in his shoes? Would you really want a lady to simply go along, as you said, and allow you to believe whatever you wanted, even if it wasn’t the truth?”

“Perhaps I would want that,” her father said stubbornly.

“Well, perhaps you would, then. But I know that I wouldn’t, and based on what we saw today, I don’t believe Lord Hennington would have wanted that either. I believe I did the right thing for both myself and him.”

“I hope you still feel that way in twenty years when you’re all alone in the world,” her father glowered.

“I don’t want to be alone,” Lavinia admitted quietly. “But I would rather be on my own than to be shackled to a gentleman for whom I feel nothing, Father. I would rather be a spinster than the wife of a man I don’t love.”

“That’s the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I think you’re just worried that people will think less of our family if I don’t marry.”

“Of course I’m worried about that,” her father snapped. “I don’t suppose you’ve given any thought to how this is going to affect your sister.”

For the first time, Lavinia did feel a touch of regret. “Edwina will be all right,” she murmured. “She’s so lovely and charming. Having an eccentric sister will do her no irreparable harm.”

“You had certainly better hope it doesn’t. If it does, you’ll be the one who will have to live with the guilt of it, Lavinia. You’ll be the one who will spend the rest of your life knowing that you damaged her prospects with your own stubbornness.”

Lavinia shook her head. “I don’t believe that will happen,” she said. “But I also don’t believe it’s something you really care about, Father.”

“What do you mean?”

“You want us married because it will reflect well on you if it happens, that’s all. You’re not concerned with what’s best for Edwina. You’re certainly not concerned with what’s best for me. You never have been. I can see that.”

“I don’t know how you can claim I don’t care about what’s best for you. I care more about it than you do, Lavinia. You are the one who has never taken your future seriously. I’m the one who has always pushed you to make decisions that would set you up for success.”

“You knew all along that what I wanted was to find love, and you never took that desire seriously,” Lavinia told him. “You pressured me constantly to accept a match to anyone at all. I see how it must make you furious to know that I’m unlikely to marry now. I see you can’t understand how it would be a relief to me to know that I’m not going to find myself stuck with someone for whom I feel nothing.”

“You’re going to regret this,” her father growled. “And when that day comes, when you find yourself alone and wish you had married while you were young enough to catch the eye of a gentleman—well, I won’t tell you that you should have listened to me. I don’t think I’ll need to tell you. I think you’ll know.”

“Perhaps I will,” Lavinia agreed. “But I tell you now, Father, that I don’t believe I’m going to regret any of my choices.”

“And I know you will,” her father scolded her. “But I’m done trying to help you, Lavinia. I’ve done all I can do. If you’re determined to throw away all your prospects and destroy your life, it’s yours to ruin.”

“Father?”

They both turned and looked at the doorway. Matthew was standing there. He had a shocked expression on his face, and for a moment Lavinia wondered if he was also here to scold her for having turned the viscount away.

“Not now, Matthew,” Lord Feverton said. “This isn’t a good time.”

“I know, Father, but it has to be now,” Matthew said. “We have a guest.”

Lord Feverton turned quickly. “Has Lord Hennington returned? Has he thought better of withdrawing his proposal?”

“No,” Matthew said. “It’s not him. It’s…it’s the Duke of Loxburgh.”

He glanced briefly at Lavinia, who felt her heart miss a beat.

The duke was here?

What could he possibly want?

A thousand ideas chased each other through her mind, each as unlikely as the next. She wished he hadn’t come. Seeing him again was only going to make all this harder than it already was.

“I suppose I’d better go and see what he wants,” Lavinia’s father said. “Lavinia—this isn’t over.”

“No, Father,” Matthew interrupted. “The duke wants to speak to Lavinia.”

“To Lavinia! Why?”

“I don’t know why,” Matthew said, though the look on his face made it clear that he had a guess. “But that’s what he said, so I think she had better go down there and see what he wants.”

Lavinia’s father looked at her. “You heard your brother,” he said. “Go downstairs and see to the duke. And for heaven’s sake, do try not to bring any further embarrassment upon this household.”