Authors: Jane Feather
“Reparations, Con?” Prudence queried.
“Max and I do perhaps have things to discuss,” Constance said without turning back to the room.
“Then we'll leave you to it.” Chastity tapped Prudence's arm imperatively. “I think we're once again surplus to requirements, Prue.”
“Oh . . . yes . . . yes, I suppose we are.” Prudence followed her sister somewhat reluctantly to the door just as Jenkins entered with a tray and a large towel draped over one arm.
“I took the liberty of bringing you a glass of sherry, Miss Con, since you don't care for whisky.” He set the tray on a console table and handed Max the towel. He cast an impassive glance around the room, his gaze coming to rest on the flower-strewn wet carpet. “Should I clear this up, Miss Con?”
“Not just for the minute, Jenkins. The carpet's seen worse.”
Jenkins offered a half bow in acknowledgment and left the drawing room. In the hall he encountered Prudence and Chastity, who were hovering a few feet from the door. He coughed pointedly before making his stately progress to the kitchen regions.
“He's right, we shouldn't listen,” Prudence said. “Con will tell us everything later.”
“I read somewhere about a trick with a glass,” Chastity said rather wistfully. “If you put it upside down against an adjoining wall you can hear what's going on on the other side.”
“No,” Prudence declared. “We're going upstairs to the parlor.” She took her sister's arm and bore her off.
In the drawing room there was silence while Max rubbed his hair dry with the towel and blotted as much water as he could from his trousers. He rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, combed his now unruly hair with his fingers, and then filled a glass from the whisky decanter.
“Would you like sherry, Constance?”
“Yes, please.” She turned finally from the window and drew in a quick breath.
“What is it?” The question was sharp.
She shook her head. “It's nothing . . . just that when you look like that . . . all disordered and casual and careless . . .” She stopped. She wanted to say,
as you look when you've been making love
, but now didn't seem quite the moment to invoke such an image.
He waited, eyebrows raised, but she shook her head again. She wasn't going to tell him she found him irresistible, that he turned her knees to butter, and her loins to molten lava. He handed her a glass of sherry and she took it with a murmur of thanks.
The doorbell rang and they both paused, listening, both assuming it would be Lord Duncan. Jenkins's step crossed the hall, there was a soft murmur of voices, feet moving to the stairs. Constance breathed again. Her father would not be a welcome intrusion at this point.
“So, how are you going to put this right, Constance?” He gave the broadsheet at his feet a disdainful nudge with the toe of his shoe.
“If it's untrue, why don't you write a denial? We'll publish it in the next edition.”
“No, I'm not going to dignify the accusation with a denial. I intend to ignore it. You will retract it.”
Constance set down her sherry glass. She folded her arms and surveyed him. “I am willing to apologize to you for the personal nature of the attack, but I will not retract the statement that you intended to spy on us. I was not mistaken. I heard what I heard.”
“Those meetings are public. Anyone, supporter or opponent, can gain entrance.”
“But not anyone can listen to the private deliberations of the leaders of the Union. That was what you intended doing, and you intended to prepare the government for any action we decided to take.”
Max sighed. “Maybe I did. But I never pretended to you that I was a supporter of your cause. Quite the opposite. I said I was willing to listen to your point of view, that was all. You had absolutely no excuse to go off the deep end like that.” He held up a hand as her mouth opened in protest. “No, just hear me out. I did not lie to you about any of my feelings. I did not use you, or trick you, or pretend to feel something for you that I did . . .
do
. . . not. Is that clear?”
Constance still stood with her arms folded, frowning at him. “What did . . .
do
. . . you feel for me?” she asked slowly.
He tossed back the contents of his glass before speaking. Then he said, sounding more exasperated than anything, “Let me put it this way. I was perfectly serious about the statement when I capped your Shakespearean quote a few minutes ago.”
“You mean
The Taming of the Shrew
?”
“Precisely.”
“
Come, kiss me, Kate,
” she murmured, then her eyes opened wide as she recalled how the quote had finished.
“Married?” she demanded in utter bewilderment. “You want me to marry you?”
A look almost of pain crossed his face. “God knows why. I must have done something unspeakable in a past life to be condemned to such a fate in this one.”
Constance did not take the declaration amiss in the least. Her heart seemed to be turning somersaults. “I won't stop putting words into your mouth,” she said, wondering at the absurdity of such a response at such a moment.
“I don't doubt it. However, I have discovered a full-proof way of silencing you.” A smile lingered now in the depths of his eyes, tugged at the corners of his mouth. “So, Miss Duncan, will you marry me?”
“I wonder what
I
did in a past life,” she mused, tapping her mouth with her fingertips.
“Is that my answer?”
She nodded. There was no other response possible. They were made for each other, on the battlefield or in the bedroom. She loved him, even when she was cursing at him for an arrogant, opinionated louse. And how perverse was that? But she knew it was the same for Max. That edge they shared was what made them perfect partners. She could never consider marrying anyone else. No one else could come close to Max. The younger Constance would have lived in loving harmony with Douglas, she knew that. But she also knew that the person who had been forged by his death and her mother's would not have suited the gentle Douglas at all. What strange twists fate took. Constance had known without articulating it to herself for weeks now that she could never be happy with anyone but Max. She hadn't believed it could happen, because the one issue on which they could not agree was totally divisive. There was no room for compromise.
She said with some difficulty, feeling as if she was killing a fledgling that had not felt its wings, “What about your career? I can't compromise my work with the suffragists.”
“Can't or won't?” He watched her closely over his shoulder as he took his glass to the decanter on the console table.
“Both,” she said simply. “You can't marry me, Max. It'll ruin you.”
He had thought that himself once. Now it seemed merely something that had to be worked around. He filled his glass and turned back to her. “We'll just have to find a way to accommodate the driving force of your existence and the driving force of mine. In fact at this juncture marriage will repair what damage you've managed to do to my reputation in the pages of that paper of yours. It seems like a very elegant solution to me.”
Puzzled, she frowned at him. “I don't understand how . . . Oh, yes I do.” She laughed, shaking her head. “Of all the devious tricks, Max. Is that the only reason you want to marry me?”
“Absolutely,” he said blithely. “I make it a habit to use you, if you recall, to manipulate you for my own ends.”
The laughter died in her eyes. “I'm willing to bury that if you are.”
He set down his glass again and opened his arms. “Come here, you.”
She crossed the carpet and reached her own arms up to encircle his neck. Her head fell back, exposing the column of her throat as she looked into his eyes. She read there love, desire, hungry need, and she felt the surge of all three flowing swiftly in her blood.
“I love you,” he said, holding her waist between his hands. “And I will stand by you always. Even when I don't agree with you in private I will support you in public. You will never have cause to doubt my loyalty to you . . . my wife. That is a promise I make to you now, every bit as binding and solemn as the promises I will make at the altar.”
“I love you,” Constance said. “And I will support you in public. You will always know what I am doing or am about to do if it will have an impact on your career. That is the promise I make to you now, as binding and solemn as the promises I will make at the altar.”
He kissed her then, still holding her lightly, his lips tender this time, gently exploring the corners of her mouth, the tip of her nose, the edge of her chin in a playful caress. He kissed the fast-beating pulse in her throat, and Constance pressed herself against him, feeling light as air, thistledown in the wind, as if some massive burden had been lifted.
“So,” he said softly, palming the curve of her cheek, “we have dealt with that little matter once and for all.”
“Once and for all. And once the engagement is made public—Max Ensor to wed an outspoken suffragist—no one would dare give credence to that article.”
“I'll get Henry to send the notice of the engagement to the
Times
for tomorrow's edition,” he said. “The sooner it's public, the sooner this will die down.” Then he frowned. “Of course, I must talk to your father first.”
“Oh, there's no need for that. I'll tell him myself when he comes in,” Constance said airily. “He already told me he'd find you a perfectly acceptable son-in-law, so he won't make any objections.”
“You've had this conversation?”
“No, it wasn't a conversation,” Constance corrected. “It was one of Father's little declarations that follow his laments. He makes them at frequent intervals in the hopes that one of us will make it to the altar.”
Max decided not to pursue that line of discourse. “Be that as it may, I should talk to Lord Duncan.”
“You're not marrying into a conventional family, Max.”
He scratched his head and yielded the issue. “I suppose I knew that.” He bent and picked up the discarded copy of
The Mayfair Lady.
“I imagine you'll be continuing with this.” He sounded resigned.
“I must. It's our only means of support.”
“What?” He stared at her. “I don't find that amusing.”
“No,” she agreed. “Neither do we. But it's the plain truth nevertheless. And now you're going to be one of us, I suppose we should let you into all our shady secrets.”
Dear God!
Max thought.
Now he was going to be one of them.
Somehow her calmly matter-of-fact statement brought it home to him with vivid reality. He was marrying Constance, but she came in a trio. Take one, take all, when it came to the Duncan sisters. He would never have a minute's peace again.
Constance read his thoughts with remarkable accuracy, but then, they were fairly transparent. “It's not as bad as you think,” she said, laying a comforting hand on his arm. “We're really quite harmless.”
“You are not in the least harmless,” he stated with some vehemence.
Constance laughed. “Come upstairs with me now. We have to tell Chas and Prue and then we'll try to put you in the picture about our finances. You ought to know I come with no fortune, merely a load of debt. But it won't concern you in the least. The three of us are working it off nicely now and I'm quite self-supporting.” She took his hand and led him to the door. “Come and be welcomed to the family.”
Max went willy-nilly, still trying to comprehend what she had said about being self-supporting. A man took a wife, he supported her. That was the way it was. The way it
had
to be.
Didn't it?
He decided not to pursue that line of discourse either for the moment.
As they entered the hall, voices came from beyond the curve of the staircase. Prudence, Chastity, and Amelia came into view, talking intently as they descended. Prudence saw Max and Constance first. Her step faltered as she wondered whether to bundle Amelia back upstairs before she encountered Max, but Amelia took the decision out of her hands. She came down to the hall.
“Constance, I was talking with your sisters,” she said with a fair assumption of ease. “Good afternoon, Mr. Ensor.”
Max was wondering what on earth his sister's governess was doing paying an afternoon call in Manchester Square when she was supposed to be in charge of his niece.
“Miss Westcott,” he said politely, managing just a hint of question in the greeting.
“Not Miss Westcott,” Constance said, wishing that this revelation could have come at a more suitable moment. There'd been all too many revelations thus far today. “This is Mrs. Henry Franklin, Max.”
Max looked at her. He looked at her blandly smiling sisters. He looked at the serious yet determined countenance of Amelia Westcott. “Henry?” he inquired on a note of incredulity. “My secretary, Henry Franklin?”
“Well, yes, as it happens,” Constance said, regarding him rather warily. “Secretaries are permitted to marry, I believe.”
“It's hardly my business,” he said, raising his hands in disclaimer. “My sister, however . . .”
“I have left Lady Graham's employ, Mr. Ensor,” Amelia informed him. She was rather pale, but utterly determined.
“I see. Is this recent?”
“As of one hour ago,” Prudence said. “Your sister, Max, saw fit to accuse Amelia of neglecting her duties by attending WSPU meetings during her hours of liberty.”
“Which were few and far between,” Chastity put in.
Amelia broke in softly, “Lady Graham leveled her accusations when I happened to discover her going through my private correspondence. I felt I had no choice but to resign immediately.”
“And how long have you and Mr. Franklin been married?”
“Just over a week, sir.”
Constance had persuaded him to employ Henry. He had seen no need for a secretary, but she had said she wanted to do a favor for an acquaintance who wanted to get married and needed a situation so that he could support a wife. No wonder Henry wanted to take off early on Thursdays, Max reflected somewhat dourly. As he recalled that was the governess's afternoon off.
Max looked at the three sisters, who returned his look with a mixture of defiance, bravado, and confidence. He turned a somewhat sardonic gaze on his bride-to-be. “More matchmaking, Constance?”