At Last Comes Love (24 page)

“We had better sit down,” she said, and she took a chair beside the fireplace.

He sat on a love seat adjacent to it.

“I would not be attempting to contract such a hasty marriage,” he said, “just for the sake of retainingWoodbinePark , much as I love it.

It will, in the normal course of things, be mine eventually anyway.

Neither would the simple prospect of losing all my funds propel me into marriage with a virtual stranger. I will be wealthy enough eventually, I daresay, and in the meanwhile I am perfectly capable of earning enough money to keep body and soul together, unaccustomed though I am to earning my living. To be honest, I would not even be
thinking
of marriage yet—or perhaps ever.”

He paused long enough for her to speak.

“You have realized since last evening,” she said, “that you really do not wish to marry me or anyone else, Lord Sheringford, that you would prefer to take employment until such time as you inherit from the Marquess of Claverbrook. I can understand why the reality of being betrothed has awoken you to what you really want to do with your life until then. I can even respect you for it—and for coming here this morning to be honest with me before any announcement has been made. Better that than be abandoned at the altar.” She smiled fleetingly. “You must not feel badly. I am not in love with you, and I do not
need
to marry. After a few days I do not doubt I will realize that I have had a fortunate escape. It is
not
comfortable to be notorious.”

Perhaps he should leave it at that. Perhaps she really would be thankful in a few days’ time to have been released from all this madness. Perhaps he should simply get to his feet, make her a heartfelt apology, and take his leave.

“Miss Huxtable,” he said instead, “there is a
child
. Toby—Tobias. I love him, and I have promised him a home atWoodbinePark . A safe haven after all he has known in his life so far. Laura was constantly terrified of being found. We were constantly on the move, settling into one home only to be uprooted and having to start all over again—with new names, new identities each time. I have promised Toby Woodbine as a home.”

She was staring at him, her face expressionless.

“A child,” she said. “You and Mrs. Turner had a child.”

She bit her upper lip.

“There is a couple looking after him,” he said. “The Harrises.

InHarrogate . They at least have been a constant in his life.

Woodbine needs a new head gardener, and I offered the position to Harris before I heard from my grandfather and understood that the position was not mine to offer. Mrs. Harris has always been Toby's nurse. He was to pass as their orphaned grandson so that the neighborhood need not be scandalized and outraged at the presence of an illegitimate child in the nursery. Since learning that I must marry in order to retain Woodbine, I have toyed with the idea of putting the three of them in one of the cottages on the estate, but I could not push Toby out of the house merely so that my wife could live there. I hoped somehow to keep you all under the one roof and hide the truth from you. But Toby has been accustomed to calling me
Papa
even though we have been trying to train him to address me as
sir
before the move to Woodbine. You would have found out soon enough, I do not doubt, but it would be too late then for you to refuse to marry me. And even if the secret could be kept from you forever, I realized last night, I could not do it. I cannot put you in the position of having to share your home with a—with a bastard child.”

Good Lord, he had never
ever
used that word of Toby before now.

“Thousands of fathers,” he said, “
most
fathers, in fact, house and feed and clothe their children on their earnings. I will do it too for as long as I must. Forgive me, Miss Huxtable. I ought not even to have come toLondon to plead with my grandfather. I certainly ought not to have been tempted by his ultimatum, which I goaded him into making. I ought to have apologized to you at the Tindell ball for colliding with you and let you go on your way. I ought not even to have
been
at the ball.”

“You did not collide with me, Lord Sheringford,” she said. “It was the other way around.”

He laughed—totally without humor.

“How old is he?” she asked.

“Four.”

“Does he look like you?” she asked.

“Like Laura.” He closed his eyes and then opened them to look down at his hands draped over his knees. “Blond and blue-eyed and delicately built—and the very devil. He suffers from anxiety and insecurities, but he has all the makings of a happy, mischievous hellion. He will be a perfectly normal little boy, given the chance. I have promised myself that he will have that chance. I am sorry, Miss Huxtable. He must come first in my life. He did not ask to be born.

He did not ask for the difficulties of the first four years of his life. For better or worse, he is in my care, and care for him I will. I hope I have not caused undue embarrassment to you with your family. Though dash it, of course I have.”

“Lord Sheringford,” she said softly, “will you marry me? Please?”

He looked up at her, startled.

“I understand,” she said, “that you do not really want to marry at all.

I understand too that if you did want to and had the time to look about you at some leisure, you would very probably not choose me.

But your child does need the home and the life you have promised him. He needs a father who is always close by to soothe his insecurities and anxieties. And I daresay he needs a mother, though no one will ever be able to replace his real mother, of course.”

“Laura,” he was startled enough to say, “had very little to do with him. She was depressed after his birth. She never got over her depression. Or her fears. She spent most of her time alone.”

In a darkened room. Usually in bed. She could not bear to look at Toby.

“Poor lady.” She frowned. “And poor little boy. Then he needs a mother, Lord Sheringford. Let me be a mother to him.”

“You cannot mean it,” he said. “Just think, Maggie. The very thought of it should scandalize you. You would be sharing your home with m-my bastard.”

She looked steadily at him.

“I notice your hesitation,” she said. “Is that a word with which you are accustomed to describe your son, Lord Sheringford?”

“No,” he said. “I have never used it before today.”

“Then never use it again,” she said, “either in my hearing or out of it.

As you said a short while ago, your son did not choose to be born of a married lady and her rescuer and lover. He is a child, as valuable as a king's child. In the future when you refer to him, call him your son.”

He was surprised into smiling at her.

“The neighbors would be scandalized,” he said. “It would have to be our secret.”

She clucked her tongue.

“Will you never learn your lesson?” she asked him. “Your neighbors doubtless know of the scandal. And so they will be very suspicious of you when you return, perhaps even hostile for a while. You might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, then. We will make open reference to the fact that the child who is coming toWoodbinePark to live with us is your son. We will both show without any artifice at all that we love him as if he were ours. Your neighbors may react as they wish, but if I know anything about neighbors in a country setting—and I
do
—I can feel perfectly confident that almost everyone will soon forgive you and accept your son and get on with their lives.”

He sat back in his seat and regarded her in silence for a while.

She was formidable indeed. He wondered if after all he would come to dislike her intensely after he had lived with her for a while. Or if he would come to love her.

If the latter were the case, he suspected that he might love her with a passion to end passions.

Though where
that
thought had come from he did not know.

“Are you quite sure?” he asked.

She stared back at him.

“I think,” she said, “I must believe in fate. I have never thought much about it before now, but I think I must believe in it. The last few days have been bizarre. Ten days ago I was still at Warren Hall—

I left there late in the morning to come to town. Four days ago I was planning to attend Lady Tindell's ball and hoping to meet the Marquess of Allingham there and rekindle our friendship. Four days ago I had not even met you. And then a whole series of strange things happened at the ball that led up to my colliding with you—and a string of events had happened to you that had brought you there in search of a bride. So much has happened since then that sometimes I think I have crammed a whole year's worth of living into a few days.

All this cannot possibly have happened just by chance or for nothing.

If I send you on your way this morning and return to my former life, I will forever suspect that I missed the whole point of my life. This
has
to be the point, or why has it all happened? There have been so many coincidences that I cannot escape the conclusion that it has not been coincidence at all. Perhaps fate intends that I be a mother to your little boy, Lord Sheringford.”

“And a wife to me?” he said.

She hesitated and then nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “Strange, is it not? I hope I am not wrong. I hope we do not all end up living unhappily ever after.”

He got to his feet and extended a hand for hers. She set her own in it and rose to stand before him.

“I will do my very best,” he said, “to see that you do not regret your decision but that rather you will rejoice in it. I said that Toby must come first in my life. But you will not be second, Maggie. I do not believe life and relationships work that way.”

He raised her hand to his lips and turned it to kiss her palm.

His heart was aching. She had persuaded him to bring the secret out into the open when they returned to Woodbine—and he had capitulated because he knew she was right. Toby had been hidden in the shadows for too long. But he was well aware that what he had really agreed to was the opening of a Pandora's box. It had started last evening, in fact, when he had told her about some of the events surrounding his elopement with Laura Turner. It would not end at Woodbine, though. Woodbine was not a world unto itself. Word of its doings sometimes spread beyond its boundaries—especially if they were unusual and interesting doings.

Toby needed freedom. But what might be the cost of that freedom?

“I had better take my leave,” he said. “I may return this afternoon as planned, then, may I, and we will go to face the lion in his den?”

“We will,” she said. “I look forward to meeting the Marquess of Claverbrook. No one ought to be allowed to inspire as much fear as he appears to do.”

“I worshipped him as a child,” he said. “He used to frown and harrumph and look ferocious whenever I saw him, and then he would invariably feel around in his pockets until he came out with a shilling.

He would always look surprised and comment that
that
was what had been digging into him before tossing it my way and telling me to spend it wisely on sweets.”

She laughed.

He bowed to her and took his leave.

And wondered if she was right.

Was this all fate?

Had the whole of his life been leading him to that strange meeting with Maggie Huxtable?

It was a dizzying thought.

He had a
son
. Margaret did not know why she had been taken so much by surprise. He and Mrs. Turner had been together for almost five years before her death, after all. In a sense, it was surprising there had not been more than one child.

He had told her on a previous occasion that he had never loved Mrs.

Turner—not in any romantic sense. All this was very reminiscent of Crispin. Was love impossible for men? Or
romantic
love, anyway? It was a depressing thought.

It was a good thing she was no longer looking for romantic love.

Vanessa arrived soon after Lord Sheringford had left. She had come to rejoice with her sister over the fact that he was not after all the villain everyone thought him to be. But she did not stay long. She had promised the children an outing—indeed they were outside with their nurse in the carriage waiting for her—and would not disappoint them.

Half an hour after Margaret had waved them on their way, Katherine came. She had been at the library when Margaret's note had been delivered, but she had read it with such delight even before taking off her bonnet that she had come without delay to hug her sister and even shed a few tears over her. But Jasper was expected home at any moment, and she wanted to be there to share the good news with him.

“Oh, Meg,” she said when she was leaving, her eyes shining with tears, “your marriage is going to turn into a love match. Just wait and see.”

Margaret did not say a word to either of them about the child.

Tobias—Toby. She wondered what last name he bore.

They would know soon enough, though, she supposed. She was determined that the little boy would not be hidden away in some dark corner with an assumed identity, as if there were something shameful about him. Everyone in the neighborhood ofWoodbinePark would know who he was. There were scores of gentlemen, she was well aware, who had illegitimate children, most of them hidden discreetly from the view of wives and polite society with their mothers or at some private orphanage or school.

It was not going to happen with the Earl of Sheringford's son. And let anyone try to sympathize with her at having to endure such an indignity. She would give that person an earful!

Margaret dressed with care for the visit to the Marquess of Claverbrook. It was important that he approve of her, though he would surely have no reason
not
to unless he was playing games with his grandson and intended to disapprove of anyone who was presented to him. Well, she would give
him
an earful too if that were the case.

She left her room as soon as she heard the door knocker. She was feeling quite martial, perhaps because inside she was quaking with nervousness. She paused at the top of the stairs when she saw that Stephen was in the hall with her betrothed. He was shaking his hand.