Page 61
It came out plain and short, and it cost him nothing at all to say, which was the whole measure of how far he had come.
“I have loved you since I first could not make you out. I should have said it in the library. I was a coward about the one thing I had never risked, so I let you carry it alone.”
“You were no coward,” she whispered.
“I was, though I have been waiting for the right room in which to put it right, and this is the room. I love you, Rosalind. I am asking you to be my wife.”
For a long moment she said nothing at all. Had he said it well enough? Had he said everything she had waited so long to hear? The fire crackled on, and across the passage Lady Holt’s pen could be heard not scratching.
“Yes,” Rosalind said.
Joy broke over her whole face as she said it, with nothing held back and no condition anywhere beneath it.
“Yes. I want it for myself, and I am going to say so, for I have spent six-and-twenty years wanting things only for other people and calling that my place.” Her breath caught, and she laughed through it. “I am not standing here being useful to you, James. For the first time in my life, a man is asking me to come and be loved rather than to come and be of use, and I know exactly how to answer.”
She lifted her face to his, radiant.
“Yes. I love you, and I will marry you, and I should like to go to Shropshire and not be useful to anybody for a fortnight at least, only to learn whether I can manage it.”
“You can,” he promised. “I shall make certain of it.”
“Lady Dover.” She tried the name slowly, as though testing whether it would bear her weight. “They told me my whole life that I was the plain, useful one, the one nobody would ever have.”
She shook her head slowly, wonder plain upon her face.
“And now a viscount means to call me his wife, having seen me at my plainest and chosen me there.” Her voice caught, and she let it. “Lady Dover. I did not think that name could ever belong to me.”
“It will belong to you soon enough,” James replied. “But it is only the name that comes with me. I chose you before either of us was speaking of names at all.” He pressed her hands. “Grow used to the name if you like. I mean to spend much longer making certain you are used to being wanted.”
She laughed then, though tears stood in her eyes, and he closed the last of the distance and took her face in his hands and kissed her. The door stood open, the snow pressed soft at the glass, and there was no fear left in either one of them.
Across the passage, the pen took up its scratching again, with great and pointed industry.
* * *
They would be married in the new year, from the little house in Wimpole Street, but that was a matter for the new year. On the morning it was settled there was only Christmas, and the people who had loved her rightly gathered in one warm room to be glad of it.
Charlotte arrived first and loudest, having been sent for the moment the door across the passage opened. She came in already weeping and already talking, which James had learned was Charlotte’s whole condition beneath joy.
“I knew it!” she cried, embracing Rosalind hard enough to disarrange them both. “I have known since the second week of the Season, when you came home from the Ashcombes’ and told me nothing at all about the man you had stood with for an hour.” She drew back to look at her, cheeks wet with happy tears. “That is precisely how I knew there was everything to tell.”
“Charlotte,” Rosalind began, laughing, but there was no stopping her.
“You are to be Lady Dover! Oh, I shall be insufferable about this for the rest of my life, and you must both resign yourselves to it now.”
She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, laughing and weeping at once. “I saw her first, before the gowns, before the viscount, before any of you, and I knew! Is it not the most wonderful thing that has ever happened in this house? I am sure I shall weep at the wedding from the first word to the last.”
“You knew nothing of the kind,” said Lady Holt from her chair, her correspondence having gone entirely unwritten. “You knew you liked her, which is a smaller order of prophecy altogether. I knew.”
Her eyes rested upon her niece. “I knew at Marbury Hall, the morning she was told to stay at home and keep the house while her family went up to enjoy themselves. I watched her reach for a task rather than argue her own worth.”
“And you did something about it.” Rosalind crossed to her aunt’s chair.
“I did, and the something has turned out a viscount, which is rather more than I bargained for and exactly what you deserve.” The dryness held a moment longer, and then it did not. “I am very glad, child. I shall say it once and not repeat it, for I am wretched at the warm things and you all know it.”
“I am very glad,” she said again, softly, in defiance of her own ruling.
“Augusta,” Rosalind whispered.
