Unveiled (Turner #1)(73)
“I can imagine.” He set his hand on her shoulder behind her. “Easily. I’m remembering every word I said to you, every last unkind, unwarranted comment I made about Lady Anna. You must have thought me the cruelest man imaginable. These past months…your mother, the ecclesiastical suit. Your fiancé. Of course, your fiancé. Your dowry. Your place in society. My God. I had you declared a bastard. Margaret, what have I done to you?”
She buried her face in her hands, her eyes burning. She’d imagined this moment a thousand ways. In her mind, he’d scorned her. He’d cursed her. He’d walked away in a huff. She should have known that Ash would always find a way to outdo her imagination. “Ash. Please don’t.”
“Is Anna your name, then?”
“Anna Margaret. But Anna is my mother’s name. Everyone has always called me Margaret.”
“You were standing in the room when Parford said he didn’t give a damn about his children. My God, Margaret. How can you bear it?”
“I bear it just fine, thank you, so long as I don’t need to think of it.” Her chin wobbled.
Ash accepted this in relative silence. He strode to the window and looked away. “Have you any doubt in your mind that I wish to marry you because I want you, not for any more mercenary reason?”
She looked at him, her mind jumbled. “Even you, Ash, could not be so ruthless. No. I don’t believe it of you.”
He paced to his chest of drawers. “But I am that ruthless, Margaret.” He let out a breath. “I know that of me, even if you have not yet come to the realization. And your brother will try to steal that certainty from you. He’ll tell you I’m lying. I want you to know in a way that your brother cannot steal from you.”
“I’m certain.” But she wasn’t. Certainty had been a thing for last night. The more time passed, the more doubts encroached.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he sifted through a pile of garments on his chest of drawers, until he found his waistcoat. Then he strode back to her. Silently he held it out, an arm’s length between them. “Look in the right pocket.”
Margaret took it gingerly. The fabric was rough against her hands. Her fingers slipped into the pocket and found a crinkling piece of paper. She pulled it out. For a second, she wondered if she, too, had somehow lost the ability to decode symbols. Then she realized she was looking at the reverse side, where ink had seeped through the foolscap. She flipped the paper over, and stared at the characters written in a crabbed hand on the other side. But even reading those words, she could not truly comprehend them. It was almost as if her mind had forgotten how to function, as if the symbols on it were written in an alphabet so foreign and distinct from her world that she could not understand its import.
“What is this? Why…why does it say Margaret Lowell on its face?”
“It’s why I went to London last week. It’s why I’ve been in a terrible dudgeon these last days, waiting for an express that never arrived. It’s a receipt from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office in Doctor’s Commons, where I applied for a special license.”
“It’s dated nine days ago.”
“I know. And that is how you know that no matter what your brother tells you, no matter how he tries to make you doubt me, what I say is true. I wanted to marry you weeks ago. The great benefit I see to marrying you is that I would be married to you. I told you it didn’t matter who your parents were. I meant it. I want you. Nothing else matters.”
But everything else was pressing against her now. “Ash.” Margaret’s voice threatened to dissolve. She swallowed the lump in her throat, the incipient tears. “You are breaking my heart.”
That phrase had never made sense to her before, except in metaphor. But she was being pulled in two. Making love to Ash had been a little defiance—a statement that her body was hers, that her life and her virtue belonged to her. That she belonged to herself and nobody could ever take that away.
But he wasn’t asking for a little defiance any longer. He was asking for her allegiance. Her brother was right about one thing: if she married him, it would be a complete betrayal. Not of some unfortunate rules that society insisted upon, but of her brothers, her mother. If she married him, her brothers could lose their bid for legitimacy. They would be outcasts, sustained only by the tiny unentailed portions of the estate.
She had promised herself that she would be noble, even if she was no longer considered nobility. He was asking her to be selfish, to think only of her own future happiness. If she did that, she would be no better than her father.
He was asking for more than she could possibly deliver.
“I understand now,” he said, “why the license took so long to issue. The archbishop’s office wouldn’t send it out until they could verify that you were eligible to marry, and the parish here has no records of a Miss Margaret Lowell.”
“No. They wouldn’t.”
“Well, I’ll apply again.”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, when he uncovered the truth. It was supposed to be easy. Her revelation was supposed to have been the death knell of his desire. There shouldn’t have been any need for her to choose between a future with him and her brothers’ survival. Who was she, if she abandoned them?
Who was she, if she walked away from him?