our mother will not accept any excuses that will muddle her plans.”
“I suppose I must go.”
“You must,” he said gently. “But when you converse with him, be very mindful of your tongue.”
“Crispin!”
“Come now, poppet, in the early days of your come out you were too free and decided with your opinions, and what did that lead to? A rumor that you will not be a biddable sort of wife but one who believes herself equal to her lord. A lady who is too uncompromising with her tongue is considered a shrew.”
He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand and had the grace to flush. “I do not believe it to be so, you know that. I simply urge you to be mindful with Stamford.”
Maryann folded her arms below her bosom, unable to sort out the emotions tumbling through her. At her come out she had been so thrilled and eager to meet the young lords who had also seemed eager for her attention. After all, she was the daughter of an earl and possessed a handsome dowry.
The first time she had given her opinion on the misery of orphaned children and widows of war, ladies had tittered, and men had acted as if she committed a faux pas. The gentlemen had been discussing it freely, but she had learned that was not an invitation for the ladies to join their conversation.
She’d come to realize her disconcertingly direct manner of speaking was an affront to the gentlemen’s arrogance and conceit at their supposed innate superiority. This knowledge had really been driven home when at a picnic at Kensington Gardens, she’d given an opinion of a farming technique she had read about in an Agricultural report on her father’s desk some months prior. It hadn’t been an expert opinion, but it had not been valued.
With distress, Maryann had realized the indulgent ear her father granted her whenever she spoke on diverse subjects was because he loved her. He valued her. He had cherished the time they spent walking in the gardens in Hampshire chatting and laughing, or when they rowed on the lake and she read to him. And in that moment, when other debutantes had tittered, the gentlemen had looked suitably irritated.
That very night, the honourable Nigel Huntington, who had been paying her attention for the season, informed her that a lady did not own the intellectual capacity to understand politics and matters men discussed. Maryann still recalled the shock and discomfort she had felt upon overhearing a gentleman she found amiable and charming referring to her as “too plain to inspire any true attachment, too mouthy to be marriageable, but her dowry was tempting.”
She had only been eighteen at the time, but Maryann had known she could not marry a gentleman of wealth and connections if he, too, did not treasure her. For what would such a marriage be like? One without genuine affections and a willingness to laugh and speak on any matter that came to the heart?
She closed her eyes against the memories, and the reasons society had contrived to stack against her in order to render her unfit to marry in the opinion of their best and brightest.
But Lord Stamford is interested.
Her heart ached, and she leaned forward to press her forehead to the window. The coolness of the glass centered her. “There was a time I dreamed of marrying a handsome gentleman, being courted with poetry, long walks, and perhaps stolen kisses,” she whispered.
“And do you not have those dreams anymore, poppet?”
“I see something hovering beyond those earlier hopes. I close my eyes to sleep and I feel it…a presence at the edges of the shadows…waiting for me….to maybe leap.”
“That’s it, I am taking those bloody books away,” Crispin muttered.
Maryann laughed lightly, masking the tumultuous feelings rioting inside. “I will dance with Stamford tonight.”
At that moment, the man lingering in the shadows of her dreams rose in her thoughts, and she inhaled sharply.
Nicolas St. Ives, the Marquess of Rothbury. Her heart fluttered like wild birds were in her stomach as some undefinable sensation hooked inside her chest. The marquess had only to be in the same room with Maryann, or she only had to think of the wretched man, and the response came unbidden.
I must not think of him, she reminded herself fiercely. The marquess had no notion of her existence, and he was nothing but a speck that crossed her path occasionally, even if he had always done so with such enigmatic