Page 112 of The Marriage Method

Nell breathed in the familiar fragrance. With it came a barrage of memory. The little country house. The two aged servants. The fine, perfumed lady who pinched her cheek with such seeming affection.

Lady Belwood raised the handkerchief to her nose. “I cannot abide railway smoke,” she complained. But she wasn’t coughing or sniffing. She was studying Nell. “Your mother…She died, I presume?”

“It was a long time ago,” Nell said vaguely.

“After which you decided to become a teacher at a charity school? With your natural endowments, you could surely have embarked on a more auspicious path.”

“You will have noticed my limp, ma’am,” Nell said.

Lady Belwood dropped a look at Nell’s skirts as though she could see the injury beneath. She gave a faint moue of distaste. “I had thought it a temporary affliction.”

“It is a permanent one,” Nell informed her. “A fall when I was a girl was the cause of it. It damaged my prospects.”

“But your face—”

“Small compensation for my broken body.”

Lady Belwood flinched. “You are too severe, Mrs. Quincey.”

“Not at all,” Nell said. “I simply prefer facing unpleasant facts. To do otherwise is to live in a fantasy world. A dangerous course, don’t you agree?”

“I don’t quite—”

“Unpleasantness doesn’t disappear merely because we don’t acknowledge it. On the contrary, I find that it has a way of rearing its head at the most inconvenient times.”

Miles thrust the railway timetable in front of Nell. “Perhaps reading would be preferable to conversation, my dear?”

Nell took the timetable from him with a cool glare. Did he think her conversation ill-advised? Cruel, perhaps?

And perchance it was.

Nell hadn’t planned it to be. None of this had been planned. It was only now that Lady Belwood was seated across from her, looking so rich and superior, with her fine clothes and aristocratic airs, that Nell realized the ugly truth of her own feelings.

She wasn’t just hurt by her mother’s abandonment of her. She was angry.

Certainly, Miles could see it, even if Lady Belwood could not. He was coming to know Nell too well.

“Not very riveting reading, you’ll agree,” Nell said as she set aside the timetable. “I should have brought a book.” She was mortified to hear a catch in her voice.

Miles gently took hold of her hand.

Nell’s throat tightened.

It seemed he did know what she was feeling. And he was making an effort not to silence her, but to reassure her. To show her that, whatever she faced, she wasn’t facing it alone.

The anger in Nell’s heart dissipated. It was no match for the affection she felt for Miles Quincey in that moment.

Her fingers curled around his in reply. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t dare. Given her unruly emotions, she feared she’d burst into tears.

She stared out the window. She’d been a fool to believe she could endure Lady Belwood’s company unaffected. Even Miles had seen it. But it was too late now to rectify the mistake. They had the remainder of the journey to endure, and the whole of the shooting party, too. Three interminable days.

Nell wondered how on earth she was going to make it through.

• • • • •

The train rolled up to the platform halt at Moor Cross in Hertfordshire at a quarter to noon precisely. From there, a hired carriage conveyed them the remaining five miles, along an uneven muddy track, to the Fawn-Purvis family’s remote ancestral estate.

Gusts of wind buffeted the body of the coach, making it shudder and shake. Nell didn’t envy Lady Belwood’s maid and footman, who had been obliged to ride outside. Rain looked to start any moment. If the color of the sky didn’t tell her so, the bone-deep ache in her hip and leg certainly would. Her shoulder, too. It had lately seemed to pain her whenever the temperature dropped. She folded her right arm in front of her, bracing it as the wheels of the carriage struck every pothole.