Someone to Care (Westcott #4)(77)
Lady Matilda, Marcel had observed, was the spinster daughter who had remained at home as a prop and stay to her mother, who needed neither.
The conservatory was full of greenery rather than flowers. It was rather cleverly done, large plants mingled with small, broad-leafed plants mingled with narrow, plants with light green leaves alongside those with dark leaves. And lots of glass—three walls of it as well as a roof. It was a sunny morning, and the conservatory was bright and really quite warm. It would make a wonderfully romantic setting for a tryst. There were window seats with soft cushions, but he seated the dowager on a firm-backed sofa before perching on the window seat across from her.
“You wish to interrogate me, ma’am.” There was no point in launching into a conversation about plants he could not even name. He looked very directly at the dowager without a glimmer of a smile, an expression he knew many people found intimidating on his face, though he was not expecting it to have that effect upon her. It was perhaps a defensive expression, as was his nonchalant posture.
“My son,” she said, “was the greatest disappointment of my life, Lord Dorchester. And that was while he lived. Afterward he was the greatest shame of my life. Because of his misdeeds one of my granddaughters grew up in an orphanage, without the comfort of any family at all. Two other granddaughters and a grandson grew up with a false idea of who they were and suffered the overturning of the world they had known when the truth came out. Because of his misdeeds my daughter-in-law endured unspeakable humiliation and was cut asunder from a whole family of people she had considered her own for almost a quarter of a century. In her own mind she was cut asunder. Not in ours. She is a Westcott as surely as any of the rest of us are, even though she took back her maiden name and has clung to it ever since.”
She stopped and glared at him as though to say—unnecessarily—that she did not find him in any way intimidating.
“Miss Kingsley is fortunate to have such a loving and loyal family, ma’am,” he said. His words sounded lame and fell quite flat.
“I want you to give me one good reason, Lord Dorchester,” she said, “why we should entrust one of our own into your keeping. One good reason why we should welcome you into the family, as we welcomed Joel Cunningham last year and Wren Heyden earlier this year.”
He looked steadily back at her. “I cannot, ma’am,” he said.
That certainly had its effect. She leaned farther back into the cushions, rather as though he had reached out a hand and shoved her.
“I do not doubt you are aware of my reputation,” he said. “I do not doubt all of you are. It has been hard-won, and I apologize for none of it. If I regret anything in my life, the regrets are mine. They are not the property of a disapproving ton or even of the disapproving family of the woman to whom I am betrothed. That I have the birth and rank and fortune to support your daughter-in-law for the rest of her life is beyond question. But that is not the question, I know. You want her to be happy at last because you love her.”
“And do you love her, Lord Dorchester?” she asked.
It was the inevitable question. He had been hoping even so to avoid it. He could not even answer it for himself. He knew he had been in love with her fourteen years ago, but fourteen years was a long time. He was not the same person now he had been then. Anyway, what did being in love mean? Anything at all? He knew that he had wanted her when he took the madcap risk of sending André away with his carriage, that he had enjoyed her more than he could remember enjoying any woman before her, that he had not been nearly done with her when she was done with him, that he was still not over her. But love? Love was a forever-after thing, was it not? An in-sickness-and-in-death thing—or was that in sickness and in health? It was a steadfast all-or-nothing thing, or rather an all-in-all thing. It was an amputation of everything he had been for almost twenty years and . . . But his mind would not take him further. It did not matter anyway. He was not going to marry her.
“Yes,” he said softly.
There was a lengthy silence.
“I have no control over what any member of my family does,” she said at last. “Least of all with Viola. And you know that, Lord Dorchester. You might have invited me to go to the devil rather than agree to bring me here. Instead, you have listened to me and answered my questions with what seems to me to be blunt honesty. I thank you for that. Whether you can bring Viola happiness remains to be seen, but no couple can ever know that for certain when they marry. I am going to trust you not to break an old lady’s heart as well as hers.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, getting to his feet.
But he was not free even after returning her to the morning room, where a number of other people were gathered to stay out of the way of the servants who were dashing about to prepare the house for the celebrations later. Before he could excuse himself, Mrs. Kingsley discovered an urgent desire to view his library, and her son, the Reverend Michael Kingsley, thought he would rather like to see it too since he had not brought more than one book with him from home.
It was much the same sort of interview as the last one. Mrs. Kingsley told him how delighted her late husband had been when the Earl of Riverdale, a slight acquaintance of his, had broached the possibility of a marriage between his son and Viola. The earl had made no secret of the fact that his son was sowing some wild oats and was impecunious to a fault, but both fathers had agreed that marriage—with a great infusion of money from the deep Kingsley coffers, of course—would be a steadying influence upon the young man. And the young man, she added rather bitterly, had doubtless been pressured into agreeing with the threat that there was no other way to settle his astronomical debts. He had agreed despite the fact that, unknown to his father or anyone else, he was already married to a woman who was dying of consumption and they had a daughter.