Her stomach roiled as she recalled the look on Lord Havelock’s face when she’d told him, that fateful night at the Crimmers’, that she’d just lost her mother. She’d thought he couldn’t possibly have looked pleased to hear she was all alone in the world, that surely she must have been mistaken.
But she hadn’t been.
She tottered back to the tea table and sank on to the chair the waiter had so helpfully drawn up to it. And carried on reading.
Not completely hen-witted, the sloppier of the two writers had added. And she suddenly understood that cryptic comment he’d made about finding a wife with brains. Suggested by someone called...Ashe, that was it. How she could remember a name tossed out just the once, in such an offhand way, she could not think.
Unless it was because she felt as though the beautiful little dainties set out on their fine china plates might as well have been so many piles of ash, for all the desire she had now to put one in her mouth.
Good with children, Not selfish, the darker hand had scrawled. Then it was back to the neater hand again. It had written, Modest, Honest and Not looking for affection from matrimony. And then the untidier, what she’d come to think of as the more sarcastic, compiler of wifely qualities had written the word Mouse again, and this time underlined it twice.
But what made a small whimper of distress finally escape her lips was the last item on the list.
Need not be pretty.
Need not be pretty. Well, that was her, all right! Plain, dowdy, mouse that she was. No wonder he’d looked at her as though—what was it Aunt Pargetter had said—as though his ship had come in?
But which of the men who’d compiled that list had harped on about the need to find a mouse, that was the question that now burned in her brain like a fever. Had Havelock’s been the hand to scrawl that word, not once, but three times?
Getting to her feet, she strode to his bedroom door and flung it open. Somehow she had to find a sample of his handwriting to see if he’d been the one to...to mock her this way, before he’d even met her. And then she would... She came to an abrupt halt by his desk, across the surface of which was scattered a veritable raft of papers. What would she do? She’d already married him.
With shaking hands she began to sift through what looked like a heap of bills, some of them on the hotel’s headed notepaper. Until she came to what was unmistakably a letter. Dear Lady Peverell, it began. There was another underneath, in the same bold scrawl, which started, Dear Chepstow. She flipped to the bottom of the page. The one to Lady Peverell was signed Havelock. And she couldn’t help noticing, on her way to the end of the sheet, that he was informing her of his marriage. He hadn’t got very far with the other letter, so there was no signature, but it began in the same vein. Except...
Oh! He’d informed his friend that She meets all the requirements we fixed on, bar one.
The room seemed to swim as several facts all jostled rudely into her mind at once. This Chepstow person had taken part in compiling the wife list. Ashe was another. Were theirs the two sets of handwriting? And then there was Morgan. She’d wondered why Lord Havelock had come to such an unfashionable place as the Crimmers’, but now she understood perfectly. He had been looking for a wife who didn’t come from the upper ten thousand and Mr Morgan had made it possible to meet one, by taking him there.
So, Mr Morgan, too, must know about the infamous list.
And how many others?
She had a sickening vision of half a dozen drunken bucks sitting round a table in some crowded tavern, suggesting what Lord Havelock should look for in a wife who would be so grateful to receive a proposal at all, that she’d never dare lift her voice in complaint about any treatment he might decide to mete out.
With an expression of disgust, she dropped the list on to the rest of his papers and hurried from his room.
Which didn’t look like a palace out of a fairy tale any longer, but a gilded cage.
A cage she’d walked into with her eyes wide open.
Or so she’d thought. But that was before she’d discovered he’d made out a list of what he wanted from a wife. Just as though he was going shopping for groceries!
She stood quite still, eyes closed, head bowed against the tide of humiliation that washed over her.
She was such a fool.
He’d been honest with her from the start. He’d told her he was looking for a convenient wife. That he’d been in a hurry to get one, so that he could get on with the far more important business of rescuing Julia.
At what point had she forgotten that? When had she started hoping there might be a glimmer of truth in what Aunt Pargetter said about him falling for her? Men didn’t need to even like a woman to want to get her naked and in a bed. She knew that. She’d been brought up in a coastal town swarming with lusty sailors, for heaven’s sake!
She clasped her hands to her waist as her middle lurched almost painfully. How on earth could she possibly have thought that such a handsome, wealthy, titled man would suddenly become enamoured of a penniless, plain little...mouse of a creature like her? She’d mistaken his relief at finding a compliant, orphaned, modest woman to be his convenient wife so quickly for delight in her.
She shook her head. It had been useless flinging the list back amongst his other papers. The words of it were scored into her brain as though carved with a knife.
The sound of footsteps striding along the corridor had her opening her eyes and gazing in horror at the door. She couldn’t face him, in all his good humour, not now, not while she felt so...wounded!
To her relief, the feet kept on walking. It must just have been another guest returning to his room, or one of the hotel staff bustling about their business.
Still, it had been a warning. With fingers that shook, she poured some tea into her cup, selected a pastry at random and put it on to a plate. If he walked in now, he would simply see a woman taking tea. She would make her face show nothing of what she felt.
And she would not weep.
* * *
When Lord Havelock eventually returned, she was still doggedly dry-eyed. Sitting stock-still at the table with her cup of tea, untouched, in front of her.
‘Sitting in the dark?’ He frowned at her as she started, then stared at him as though she wasn’t quite sure who he was.
‘You should have rung for candles.’ He strode across and tugged on the bell pull. ‘And the fire has almost gone out, too.’
She turned, slowly, to look at it.
‘At least you’ve had something to eat...’ He frowned as he noted that nothing appeared to have been touched. Even her teacup was full.
Though her eyes were empty.
‘I’ve been a perfect beast, haven’t I,’ he said, pulling up the other chair to the table and grasping her hands. ‘To leave you alone for such a long time.’ He raised each hand in turn, kissing it penitently.
She looked at him in confusion. No wonder she’d started to think he was developing some real affection for her. But this was just...gallantry. If she’d had any experience of suitors, in the past, she would have known that this was how men behaved with women. That it meant nothing.
He should have picked either Dotty or Lotty. Either of them would have coped with him far, far better than she was doing.
‘Well,’ he said, starting to chafe her hands between his own. ‘I’ve achieved everything I needed to get done today, so now I’m all yours.’ He gave an uneasy laugh. ‘Though from the look you’re giving me that information doesn’t exactly please you. Dash it, where’s that waiter? Your hands are like ice. Your feet, too, I dare say.’
She thought she’d kept her face impassive,