Chapter Seven

Blythe

I didn’t sleep last night. Couldn’t. There was too much occupying my thoughts for me to try and seek out sufficient rest. There was, of course, the way Mr. Goswick demeaned my bees, my life’s work, at a table full of his wealthy peers. Or the way Mr. Goswick took far too much liberty in the garden and destroyed my reputation. Mama will be particularly thrilled about that last part.

And then there was the way Mr. Goswick felt when his lips were on mine.

When his eyes looked as though he was about to devour me.

When his hand found the small of my back and pressed me against his—

“Blythe?”

I blink. Charlotte and her easel are across the garden from me, situated so that she can easily paint the statue of a nymph pouring water out of a jug and into the fountain. She watches me, her brows knitted in concern.

“Are you well?”

“Fine,” I assure her. “Perfectly so.”

Behind me, Amy sits beside Julian at a small round table, just big enough so that she can scribble in her journal, adding the latest details to her current work in progress. Julian reads whatever pages she’s completed. She’s even allowed me to read a page or two, and this duke who is her main character sounds slightly too much like Briggs Goswick for my taste.

“I find it particularly distressing that on our last day at Wrexford Park, everyone is in a tizzy because of something Blythe did in the garden with Mr. Goswick,” says Amy to Julian.

“Yes, typical of them to steal the show with their antics,” Julian agrees.

“Julian,” I say, tossing him a look over my shoulder.

“Come now,” he replies, flipping a page of Amy’s manuscript. “Every time you and Mr. Goswick are in one another’s company, something rather scandalous happens. Perhaps you should both just admit that what you did in the gardens made you rather happy and be done with it.”

“I didn’t do anything in the garden with Mr. Goswick,” I snap.

Amy tilts her head to one side knowingly. “Oh, of course. Everyone is just prattling on about the way you were admiring the foliage together.”

Julian snickers while Charlotte clears her throat and adds, “I am sure that Mr. Goswick is going to make this right.”

“How?” Amy and I both ask at the same time.

She dabs a little yellow into the sky of her painting and smiles at the result. “He’ll propose, naturally.”

Amy gasps in delight, but it’s all I can manage not to retch. “I have no desire to marry Briggs Goswick,” I reply.

“Then why did you kiss him?” Julian asks, leaning forward and squinting in the sunshine.

“I did not kiss him. He kissed me .”

“Then why did he kiss you?”

I straighten my shoulders, returning to my painting of the rose bush in front of me. “Because I asked him to.”

Charlotte strangles a snort of laughter but then regains her composure.

“It’s not what it sounds like, I assure you. I was trying to make it seem as though Mr. Goswick was interested in me in order to avoid the advances of Mr. Dormer.”

“Well, that I can’t blame you for,” Amy agrees, lifting her pencil and returning to her writing. “Who could think of any other man, let alone Mr. Dormer, when Mr. Goswick is around?”

“Maybe you should marry him,” I suggest.

“I don’t see why it’s so unappealing to you,” says Julian, crossing one leg over the other. “Are you still holding a grudge against him for that terrible prank he played on you?”

“Oh!” cries Charlotte. “The one with the pig. That really was terrible.”

“Yes,” I say, cutting everyone off. “It was. Can we just paint now?”

My companions quietly grumble but return to their own business.

We work in silence for a little while, and I’m grateful for the room to paint rather than replay every sordid moment of last night’s dinner. If I could just go the entire morning without having to think of Briggs Goswick’s pompous, sanctimonious face. Or the way his jaw clenches when he’s contemplating what to do. Or that stupid lock of hair falling across his forehead all the time.

“Oh, Blythe, look,” says Amy suddenly, standing and pointing across Wrexford’s lawns. “I think that’s Mr. Goswick and Mr. Parker now.”

A pair of well-dressed gentlemen, one atop a bay mare, and the other on a dappled gray gelding, trot down the lane at a comfortable pace, and their very presence causes my cousins and sister to lose all sense of decorum. They scatter, gathering up their supplies and shooting me meaningful looks like they need to make it appear they were never present at all.

“Blythe, come here, let me see how you look,” says Charlotte.

“How I look? For what?”

“Mr. Goswick is clearly coming to propose. He kissed you in the gardens, and there were witnesses.”

“One!” I cry. “There was one witness, and no one cares what Mr. Dormer thinks!”

Regardless, Charlotte reaches out, twirling my hair so that it curls appropriately, and then pinches my cheeks. “Men love a little color on the cheeks.”

“I don’t care what Mr. Goswick loves, Charlotte.”

“All right, that’s the best I can do with the time that I have,” says Charlotte on a huff. “We’ll be right in the drawing room if you need us.”

“Need you for what? What is even happening right now?”

Wordlessly, she spins me around so that I’m facing the path where Mr. Parker and Mr. Goswick stride toward me.

“Miss Rowley,” says Mr. Parker, taking his hat off and running a hand through his wavy blond hair. He bows and then smiles. “You look well this morning. Is Miss Barlow at home? I must get that pudding recipe from her cook. Truly a culinary delight.” He eases past me and into the drawing room.

Slowly, I turn back to my remaining companion. He has a lot of nerve showing up here this morning looking the way he does. All polished and ridiculously handsome and capable of making me produce the most mortifying noises with just the faintest brush of his mouth. I’m still blushing at the memory.

“Miss Rowley,” Briggs says quietly, removing his hat and bowing.

I curtsy, but it’s difficult to even meet his eyes. “Mr. Goswick.”

“You look very healthy this morning. Your cheeks are particularly pink.”

I swipe at my face. “Please, Mr. Goswick, enough with the pleasantries. Tell me why you’re here.” My hands fist up at my sides, and I wait for his inevitable question. The question everyone was certain he was coming to ask. The question I’ve been dreading, but the longer we stand here in silence, the more I wonder if perhaps I wouldn’t mind hearing it. I’d still refuse him, naturally, but to hear him ask it? It might be rather pleasant.

“Miss Rowley, I come to you this morning knowing full well that what happened last night hurt you more than it could ever hurt me.”

True , I think, and I’m satisfyingly surprised that he’s willing to admit this.

“And knowing you like I do, I’m certain you will not like what I have to say. What I must say.”

I’m perplexed, truly. I suppose he knows me better than I imagined if he’s so keenly aware of my distaste for marriage.

“Miss Rowley?” He lifts his gaze to mine, taking a step forward.

I match his movement, my pulse thundering in my ears. “Yes?”

Taking my hand, he lowers his voice. “I cannot marry you.”

I allow my thoughts to realign, become logical once more, and I snatch my hand from his grip. “Excuse me?”

Briggs huffs, stepping away. “I know this is upsetting.”

“Upsetting?” I ask evenly. “You think I’m upset?”

“Aren’t you? I kissed you last night, and it was witnessed by an onlooker. Surely you were anticipating a proposal of marriage from me this morning.”

Oh, this man. The gall of this man. “I’m sure many women would have been of that mind, but I’m afraid I’m not one of them.”

He seems absolutely flummoxed. “So you wouldn’t have said yes?”

“I would never marry you, Mr. Goswick.”

With an indignant huff, he lowers himself into the chair previously occupied by Amy. “Damn. I should have asked and appeared to do the gentlemanly thing, but now I just look like an ass.”

A small smile teases my lips. “No argument from me.”

Leaning an elbow on the table, he squints in the late morning sunshine. “So now what? Do I go home? Stay here and watch you paint?”

I lift my palette, returning to my canvas, trying to capture the vibrancy of the flowers before me, but my mind still races. “Oh, no. You owe me, Briggs Goswick.”

“When you say it like that, it makes me think I’d rather marry you and have it over with.”

I chuckle. “First, you’ll explain to me why you can’t marry me. Because it’s not entirely clear. You are a gentleman, I’m the daughter of a gentleman, and you kissed me when we were alone in a garden. If word gets out, people will think we’re in love, and if I don’t know the real reason why you’re not rescuing my supposed honor, then I can’t make up a fake one.”

Briggs rests both elbows on the table, rubbing at his eyes. “It’s complicated.”

“It can’t be that complicated.”

“Why can’t it be?”

I laugh, rolling my eyes. “I hate to be blunt, Mr. Goswick—”

“Do you, though?” He tilts his head to the side, his frustratingly elegant eyebrows pinching together.

I ignore him. “But you are painfully one-dimensional. It cannot be complicated because you are not complicated. You are simple.”

Briggs leans back in his chair, crossing one leg over the other knee so that his foot dangles in a careless way that makes him appear effortlessly self-possessed. “Ah, of course. Thank you, Miss Rowley. I’m always grateful for your precise insight.”

“You’re in love with Miss Dixon?” I guess.

“All right, I suppose I’m not that complicated. No. I’m not in love with Miss Dixon, but I would like to marry her, if at all possible.”

“For her sizable dowry, I assume.” I turn, staring down my nose at him.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that. I have a noble reason for wanting her sizable dowry, thank you very much.”

“Naturally. It’s always noble for a gentleman to pursue a girl for her money. I imagine you can be no different.”

“Miss Rowley, please, give me the benefit of the doubt.”

Shaking my head, I dip my brush into the smudge of blue on my palette and begin filling in the details of the fountain before me. “I did that once, and it was perhaps the worst decision I’ve ever made.”

He sighs then. “You see, Miss Rowley, you prove to me with every passing moment that our union would be a poor decision on many levels.”

“Those levels being?”

“You are unyielding in your opinion of me, formed when we were both young and prone to foolish mistakes.”

While studying the multitude of colors found in the rose bushes just beyond the fountain, I mutter under my breath, “And now we are older, though one of us is still prone to foolish mistakes.”

“My point exactly.” He shakes his head and rolls his eyes up at the sky. “And secondly, I cannot marry you because, forgive me for saying so, I must marry advantageously, and I’m afraid your dowry is rather…limited.”

“Excuse me?” I pretend to be mortally wounded by this, but there’s no way that Briggs would be ignorant of my father’s financial situation. While my father is a gentleman with land, he has never been, nor shall he ever be, as wealthy as Uncle Henry or the Goswicks.

“I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“So what you’re trying to tell me is that you find my company tiresome and that linking your name to my family’s lack of wealth would be beneath you. I see.”

“No, you don’t see at all, actually.” He ruffles his own hair as he stretches his legs out before him, and then quietly releases a breath. “Here’s the truth. If I don’t secure an influx of money soon, I’ll have to sell Mistlethrush Hall. By September, to be specific. My family and I will need to find a new place to live, and I’m not sure I could bear it if I were the Goswick who lost our family’s ancestral home.”

For a moment, I actually allow my heart to open a crack for him at the flash of sorrow on his face. “And that’s why you couldn’t have me build the apiary at Mistlethrush?” I ask quietly. “Because you have no means of paying me?”

“Exactly.” He watches a goldfinch flit overhead, then returns his attention back to me, his expression now bland.

Something here still doesn’t add up, though. This isn’t the Briggs I know. “Why are you suddenly out of money, Mr. Goswick?”

He squirms in his chair, then stands, unable to find a comfortable position. “I, um, I gambled it away.”

“All of it?” I don’t mean for it to come out as harshly as it does, but I wasn’t born yesterday. The Goswick family comes from a line of nobility centuries old, and their fortune must have been massive. “Why does this not surprise me?”

Briggs Goswick is so reckless, so selfish, so careless , that he has literally gambled away an entire fortune left to him only six months ago? What an absolute scoundrel. My ears ring with the injustice of it all, the unfairness to the rest of his family, to his tenants .

He shrugs. “Most of it.”

“I’m not at all hesitant to say that I’m glad we aren’t getting married.”

“Good for you, Miss Rowley.”

He saunters over to my easel, his arms crossed, standing just behind me so he can admire my work from over my shoulder. He smells like soap with just a hint of sweat and grass, and I allow myself as deep a breath as I can manage without appearing too obvious.

“I do have a plan, though,” he says quietly, his mouth rather too close. I catch myself mid-shiver as his breath curves along the shell of my ear.

“And what’s that?”

“Consider it my apology. For ruining your business and reputation all in one night. Though I’ll need your participation in order for this to work.”

I twirl to face him. “Are you being purposefully obtuse?”

“Hear me out, Miss Rowley.” He lifts his hat from the table, then twirls it on his finger. “You wish for your apiary business to succeed, correct?”

“Yes,” I reply warily.

“And I wish to marry Miss Dixon.”

“So you say.”

“I do say. If I agree to help you in your business endeavor, to introduce you to wealthy landed gentry who would take an interest in your bees, to use my name and family’s influence to promote you when I can, then…”

“Then…” I prompt.

“Then you will help me woo Miss Dixon.”

I take a deep breath. This could be the only way to keep my parents from taking my bees away permanently, to have someone like Briggs Goswick persuade wealthy landowners to invest. Then I could prove once and for all that my business is profitable. His plan is not as preposterous as I anticipated, but it is a big ask. “I don’t want to dash all your hopes, Mr. Goswick, but Miss Dixon doesn’t appear even remotely interested in you. She doesn’t appear interested in anyone.”

“Oh, trust me, I know—Mr. Parker has told me as much. But that’s where you come in. Women discuss things among themselves that they wouldn’t necessarily repeat in front of gentlemen, no? You could ascertain her likes and interests. Put in a good word for me here and there. I can’t get to know her better myself, but you could be my—”

“Spy? Infiltrator?”

“Something like that.” He’s at my side again, and he lifts my free hand, his eyes wide and pleading. “Please, Miss Rowley. I know I’m in no position to ask you a favor, but I must. I cannot let my family know the state of our finances. I cannot let Mistlethrush Hall go.”

I wish he wasn’t touching me. It’s so much easier not to take him seriously when he isn’t being so endearing. But then again, I suppose he must endear himself to me. He requires the benefit of my matchmaking skills in order to remedy the consequences of his immature and unseemly behavior. My breath hitches in my throat, and I snatch my hand away. “Fine. I’ll help you. But to prove to me how serious you are, the first thing you must do is deal with Mr. Dormer.”

Clearly, I’ve confused him by the way he cocks his head to one side. “Still with this Mr. Dormer business?”

“Yes, still.” I pick up my brush again and dab at my rose bush, adding some blushing pink blooms, though my fingers shake slightly. “My mother has apparently encouraged Mr. Dormer in his pursuit of me, and I wouldn’t want him to use what he witnessed between us last night as some kind of extortion.”

“Ah,” says Briggs with a nod. “Then don’t worry about Mr. Dormer. I’ll see to him.”

Not that I’d ever admit this to Briggs Goswick, for fear of inflating his already massive sense of self-importance, but it’s rather nice to have him on my side. I still wonder if I can trust that he will actually take care of Mr. Dormer, however, and I swallow a forming lump in my throat. “Thank you,” I say.

He places his hat back on his head and smiles. “Hm,” he considers. “A kind word. Was that really so hard?”