The Arrangement (15 page)

“I have no money,” she said, frowning. Her cup clattered back onto her saucer. “And I cannot ask you—”

“You did not,” he said. “But you are to be my wife, Sophie. I will care for all your needs. I will certainly clothe you in a manner befitting your station.”

She set her cup and saucer back on the tray and sat back in her chair. She bit down on one side of her forefinger.

“I would love to be able to whisk you off to London, send you shopping while I acquire a special license, and marry you all within one day,” he said. “But it will not be possible to do things quite so quickly. I am confident, though, that you will be welcomed in the home of my friend Hugo, Lord Trentham. I mentioned him earlier.”

The very thought of it all terrified her—and filled her with such excitement that she felt almost bilious and was glad she had not eaten a cake.

“Sophie?” he said. “I am dictating to you, after all, am I not? But I cannot think of any alternatives. Can you?”

Only getting on the stagecoach tomorrow and riding off alone into the unknown. But she knew she would not do that. Not now that she had an alternative that was all too tempting.

“No,” she said. “But are you sure—”

“Oh,” he said, “I am quite, quite sure. We will make this work. We will. Tell me you believe me.”

She closed her eyes. She wanted this marriage so very badly. She wanted
him
very badly—his sweetness, his sense of honor, his dreams and enthusiasms, even his vulnerability. She wanted someone of her own. Someone who called her by name and held her for comfort and laughed with her. Someone beautiful and achingly attractive.

Someone to give her back her shattered image of herself.

And someone who—

“You intend to support me even after I have left you?” she said.

“Even after you have—” He stared in her direction. “You will always be my wife and therefore my responsibility, Sophie. And I shall, of course, make adequate provision for you in my will. But—must we think of the distant future already? I would prefer to think of the immediate future. We are about to wed. Let us think about
marrying
and going home
,
and leave the rest to take care of itself. Shall we?”

He looked eager and anxious again.

And she was anxious too—not that her dream might not come true, but that it might.

“Yes,” she said, and he smiled.

“We will leave in the morning, then,” he said. “Will that suit you?”

So soon?

“Yes, my lord.”

He tipped his head to one side.

“Yes, Vincent.”

“Shall I play my violin for you?” he asked. “Which is another way of announcing that I will play it for you, for I am sure you are far too polite to voice a protest.”

“That is your violin?” she asked. “I would like it of all things if you will play for me.”

He laughed as he got to his feet and made his way across the room to the pianoforte, feeling his way there but not by any means groping.

He opened the violin case and removed the instrument. He positioned it beneath his chin, took the bow in his hand and tightened it, adjusted the tuning, and then played, half turned toward her. She thought it might be Mozart, but she was not sure. She had not encountered much music. It did not matter. She clasped her hands, held them to her mouth, and thought she had never heard anything even half as lovely in her life. His body moved slightly to the music, as though he was completely engrossed in it.

“They say at Penderris Hall,” he said when he had finished his piece and was putting the violin back into its case, “that when I play, I set all the household and neighborhood cats to howling. They must be wrong, do you not think? I do not hear a single cat howl here.”

He had told her during their walk about Penderris Hall in Cornwall, home of the Duke of Stanbrook. He had spent several years there after his return from the Peninsula, learning to cope with his blindness. And a group of seven—six men and one woman, including the duke—had formed a close friendship and called themselves the Survivors’ Club. They spent a few weeks of each year together at Penderris.

How very cruel of those friends, Sophia thought, to mock his playing. But he was smiling as if the memory of the insult was a fond one. They would have been joking, of course. They were his
friends
. He had told her how they all encouraged and teased one another out of the doldrums if any of them sank into a depression.

How lovely it must be to have friends. Friends who would even take the liberty of teasing.

“Perhaps,” she said, “that is because there
are
no cats here.”

Her heartbeat quickened.

“Ouch!” He winced theatrically and then laughed. “You are as bad as they are, Sophie. I am unappreciated, as all geniuses are, alas. I daresay the pianoforte is dreadfully out of tune. It cannot have been played for a number of years.”

She felt absurdly pleased. She had made a joke and he had laughed and accused her of being
as bad as his friends
.

“You play the pianoforte too?” she asked.

“I have taken lessons for both instruments in the last three years,” he said. “I am proficient at neither, alas, but I am improving. The harp is another matter. There are just too many strings, and I have been sorely tempted on more than one occasion to hurl the thing through the nearest window. But since the fault is mine, not the harp’s, and I would not particularly enjoy being hurled through a window myself, I usually conquer the urge. And I am determined that I
will
master the harp.”

“You did not learn to play the pianoforte as a boy?” she asked.

“No one ever thought of it,” he said, “including me. It was for the girls. On the whole, I am glad I did not learn then. I would have hated it.”

He sat down on the long pianoforte bench and raised the lid. Sophia watched as his fingers felt along the black keys until he found the middle white note with his right thumb.

He played something she had heard Henrietta play—a Bach fugue. He played it more slowly, more ploddingly than Henrietta, but with perfect accuracy. The instrument
was
out of tune, but only to a degree that made the melody sound rather melancholy.

“You may hold your thunderous applause until the recital is at an end,” he said when he lifted his hands.

She clapped her hands and smiled.

“Is that a hint that the recital is already ended?” he asked her.

“Not at all,” she said. “Applause usually calls for an encore.”

“And
polite
applause usually signals the end of a recital,” he said. “That applause was decidedly polite. Besides, I am about at the end of my repertoire. Do
you
want to try to coax music out of this sad instrument? Do you play?”

“I never learned,” she said.

“Ah.” He looked her way. “Was that a wistful note I heard in your voice? Soon, Sophie, you may do anything you please. Within reason.”

She closed her eyes briefly. It was too vast a notion to comprehend. She had always wanted to … oh, simply to
learn
.

“Do you sing?” he asked. “Do you know any folk songs? More specifically, do you know ‘Early One Morning’? It is the only song I can play with any degree of competency.”

He played the first few bars.

“I do know it,” she said, crossing the room toward him. “I can hold a tune, but I doubt I will ever be invited to sing at any of the world’s great opera houses.”

“But how devoid of music our lives would be,” he said, “if we allowed the making of it only to those of outstanding talent. Sing while I play.”

His hands—those hands that had touched her face—were slender and well-shaped with short, neatly manicured nails.

He replayed the opening bars, and she sang.

“Early one morning, just as the sun was rising, I heard a maiden sing, in the valley below.”

His head was bowed over the keys, his eyelids lowered over his eyes.

Why were almost all folk songs sad? Was it because sadness tugged far more strongly upon the heartstrings than happiness did?

“Oh, don’t deceive me, oh, never leave me. How could you use a poor maiden so?”

She sang the song from beginning to end, and when she was finished, his hands rested on the keys and his head remained bowed.

There was a soreness in her throat again. Life was so often a sad business, full of deceptions and departures.

And then he played again, a different tune, more haltingly, missing several of the notes. And he sang.

“On Richmond Hill there lives a lass, more bright than May-day morn…”

He had a light, pleasant tenor voice, though he would surely never sing on the stage of any opera house either. She smiled at the thought.

“…I’d crowns resign to call thee mine, sweet lass of Richmond Hill.”

He was smiling when he finished.

“The language of love can be marvelously extravagant, can it not?” he said. “And yet it can smite one here.” He patted his abdomen with the outside of a lightly closed fist. “Would you believe a man who told you he would resign crowns for your sake, Sophie?”

“I doubt any man would,” she said. “He would have to be a king, would he not, and they tend to be in short supply. But I might believe the sentiment if I were sure he loved me above all else. And if I loved him with an everlasting kind of love in return. Do you believe in that kind of love, my lord?”

She could have bitten out her tongue when it was too late to recall the words.

“I do,” he said, playing a scale softly with his right hand. “It does not happen to everyone, or even perhaps to most, but it does happen. And it must be wonderful when it does. Most people settle for comfort instead. And there is nothing wrong with comfort.”

She was feeling decidedly
un
comfortable.

He looked up at her then and smiled.

“I had better return you to the vicarage,” he said. “I suppose it was not quite proper to bring you here, was it? But we are betrothed and will be married very soon.”

“You do not need to walk back with me,” she said.

“Ah, but I do,” he told her, getting to his feet. “When my lady needs to go somewhere beyond my home or hers, I will escort her whenever I am able.”

It sounded a little excessively possessive, but she understood his need not to be handicapped by his disability.

My lady.

Was that what she was now—his
lady
?

Most people settle for comfort instead,
she remembered as they left the house together.
And there is nothing wrong with comfort.

Oh, there was not.

But … comfort instead of the everlasting kind of romantic love about which he had sung?

And even the comfort might not last.

T
hey were on their way to London, in the middle of the second day of their journey. It had been tedious, as all journeys were. They had scarcely talked.

Vincent tried not to regret everything he had done in the past few days, starting with his acceptance of Sir Clarence March’s invitation to spend an evening at Barton Hall. Or perhaps starting with his decision to go to Barton Coombs instead of returning home.

He had offered marriage to a stranger—and not even a normal marriage. It was that last part that weighed most heavily upon him. He was going to have the doom of a possible separation hanging over his head from the first moment. Impulsive behavior had always been his besetting sin. And he had often lived to regret it. He had once impulsively stepped forward to see why a large cannon had not fired.

He had, though, felt a desperate need to persuade Sophia Fry to marry him, and there had seemed no other way to get her to say yes. She had
needed
to say yes.

The near silence in which they had traveled for a day and a half was as much his fault as hers. More so. He believed she was a little intimidated by him and his grand carriage and the grandeur of the life she was facing. And by the fact that she was stepping into the unknown.

Last night could have done nothing to help her relax. They had stopped at one of the more obscure posting inns, chosen by Martin and Handry between them, and had taken two rooms, one for Martin and one for Mr. and Mrs. Hunt. He had slept in Martin’s room, but all night he had worried about the impropriety and possible danger of Sophia’s having to huddle all alone in her room, without even a maid to lend her countenance.

He tried to think of something to say, some conversational opener that would elicit a response, perhaps even a laugh. She had a pretty laugh, though he had been given the distinct impression the day before yesterday that laughing was something she rarely did. She had led a brutally lonely life, judging by the little she had told him of it.

Before he could speak, she did.

“Just look at that church spire,” she said, her voice bright and eager. “I have noticed it before, and it always amazes me that something so very tall and slender can remain standing in a strong wind.”

He waited for realization to hit her, as it did very quickly. He heard her draw a sharp inward breath.

“I am so sorry,” she said, her voice far more subdued.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

“It belongs to a church in the little village we are approaching,” she told him. “It is a remarkably pretty village. But that tells you absolutely nothing of any significance, does it? Let me see. There are some old whitewashed, thatched cottages along the sides of the road here. Oh, one of them is bright pink. How cheerful it looks. I wonder who lives in it. The church is farther in. There, now I can see the whole of it. It is on one side of the village green and is really quite unremarkable except for the spire. I daresay the villagers were so dissatisfied with the church and so ashamed in the company of people from other, more fortunate villages that they decided to build the spire to restore their pride. There are some children playing cricket on the green. You used to play cricket. I have heard people talk about it.”

He listened with interest. She had a sharp eye and the imagination with which to embellish details in an amusing way. And there was warmth and animation in her voice.