Marriage? He hadn’t said anything about marriage before.
‘Only a gesture as dramatic as invading her bedroom and kissing her was going to convince her that I am in earnest, given the rift that had developed between us.’
‘Marriage?’ Stepmama shook her head. ‘But Georgiana swore it was no such thing. That you were merely friends.’
‘Nevertheless—’
‘No! You cannot marry her. Otherwise...’
She shut her mouth with a snap. Georgie looked over her shoulder to see Betsy and Wiggins jostling each other in the doorway to get a glimpse of what could possibly have occurred to make Stepmama shriek so.
‘Otherwise?’ Edmund was eyeing Stepmama coldly.
‘I only meant to say, I’m sure you cannot really wish to marry a girl like Georgiana.’
‘Not only do I wish it, but, should you attempt to oppose me in this, you will regret it.’
‘I...’ Stepmama swallowed. Wrung her hands. Turned to look over her shoulder at the servants.
‘Precisely,’ said Edmund, rather grimly. ‘There will be no way to keep my presence in Georgie’s room a secret.’
He was right. These were London servants. Hired along with the house. They had no particular loyalty to the tenants. And she could hardly expect them to keep such a juicy morsel of gossip to themselves. Oh, no—poor Edmund.
At this point, he let go of her hand, rose to his feet and went to the door.
‘You may be the first to congratulate me,’ he said to the servants in a determined voice. ‘Miss Wickford has just done me the honour of accepting my proposal of marriage.’
Wiggins’s left eyebrow rose in patent disbelief. But Betsy clasped her hands together and beamed at him.
‘Congratulations, your lordship,’ she said, bouncing on the tips of her toes.
‘Just so,’ said Edmund, reaching into his pocket and producing some coins, which he pressed into the hands of both servants.
Judging from the maid’s gasp, and the way the butler’s eyebrow immediately resumed its correct position, the bribe had been sufficiently generous to remove any malicious inference from the way they would relate the incident to anyone willing to listen. Which would probably be half of London.
Having ensured the servants’ goodwill, if not their silence, Edmund closed the door firmly on them and turned to Stepmama, his expression set.
‘Have you come to your senses yet?’ Edmund gave Stepmama one of those looks. The kind that put her in mind of his mother when she was depressing someone’s pretensions. Though Stepmama didn’t look as though she was about to meekly surrender. There was a martial light in her eyes that made Georgie suspect a battle royal was about to commence.
‘And do not attempt to hamper me by reminding me that Georgie is technically your ward and refusing to grant your permission for the match—’
‘Technically? There is no technically about it!’
‘Because,’ he continued as though she hadn’t interrupted, ‘if you should do anything so foolish you will find yourself presiding over a scandal that is bound to reflect very badly upon your guardianship. And that will not only adversely affect Georgie, in the short term, but also hamper your own daughter’s chances of ever making a good match.’
Stepmama’s eyes flashed fury. She clenched her fists.
‘Very well,’ she said, tossing her head. ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t you marry her? It isn’t as if she kept her word to me, is it? All that talk of advancement and doing Sukey whatever favours she could, it never came to anything, did it?’
‘Ah,’ said Edmund as though he understood perfectly what Stepmama was talking about, when Georgie felt as though she’d dozed off in the middle of a play and had woken up again only at the end to discover she’d missed too much of the plot to be able to make sense of anything anyone was doing. ‘Is that how you became her puppet?’
Puppet? Why was Edmund calling Stepmama a puppet? Just whose puppet Stepmama was supposed to be, Georgie couldn’t tell.
Stepmama flung up her chin. ‘For all the good it did either of us,’ she said bitterly. ‘Sukey never met anyone higher ranking than tradesmen’s sons in Bartlesham, for all that her stepfather was the local squire. I waited and waited, but she did nothing.’
She? What she?
‘Not until we had no choice but to leave Bartlesham,’ Stepmama was continuing, without appearing to draw breath, ‘and I reminded her of the bargain we’d struck, did she finally agree to arrange a court presentation for both girls. And how did she arrange it? Not by presenting them herself—oh, no! She just sent me an introduction to Lady Ackroyd, who is so deep under the hatches she’ll do just about anything legal for cash. And not only did that bit of business cost me the best part of her inheritance,’ she said, waving in Georgie’s direction, ‘but it didn’t do any good. It was vouchers for Almack’s I should have got, if my girls were going to be accepted, not an expensive day out at the palace which everyone knew was a put-up job the minute they heard Lady Ackroyd’s name in connection with it. Which they always do, somehow. And the end result was that not one of those stuffy patronesses was willing to give vouchers to girls whose mother had to pay to have them presented at court.’
‘As my wife,’ Edmund pointed out, ‘Georgie will most certainly obtain vouchers. As will her stepsister. I will make sure of it.’
Stepmama sat down, rather suddenly. It was fortunate that she happened to be sideways on to Georgie’s bedside chair as she’d squared up to Edmund, otherwise she would have ended on the floor.
‘I will also make sure Sukey has a respectable dowry,’ he said. ‘As my stepsister by marriage, it will be my duty to provide for her.’
Stepmama’s mouth opened and shut a few times. For which Georgie was immensely grateful. The volume of the bargaining—for that, she saw, was what had been going on between these two even if she hadn’t fully understood the nuances—had been drilling holes in her skull.
‘Edmund,’ she whispered, since there was a lull into which she could at last interject her own opinion, ‘you don’t have to marry me.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Of course I do,’ said Edmund, and Stepmama, at the same moment. And as Stepmama got to her feet, Edmund nudged her aside and took her place on the chair.
‘But there must be a way out,’ said Georgie plaintively. She couldn’t bear to think of Edmund trapped into a marriage he’d been so determined to avoid. Just because he’d come in here, in a spirit of friendship. Oh, he’d come up with a wonderful reason to explain his presence, and swiftly, but then he had a brilliant mind. Of course he was going to say the only thing that would make everything appear acceptable to everyone.
The only trouble was she knew it wasn’t really acceptable to him.
‘Don’t be so stupid,’ hissed Stepmama from over Edmund’s shoulder. ‘There is no keeping the two of you apart. There never has been and she should just have made the best of it. And then none of this would have happened.’
‘None of what?’ If Georgie hadn’t already had a headache, this conversation would have been enough to give her one.
‘Yes, Mrs Wickford,’ said Edmund, taking hold of Georgie’s hand again and patting it soothingly. ‘Why don’t you explain just how you came into it? I should love to hear how my mother persuaded you to do her dirty work.’
His mother?
‘Come, come,’ said Edmund firmly. ‘There is no point in prevarication at this stage. I have worked out much of what has happened. All that has so far eluded me