‘I understand.’ He’d married her for necessity, not inclination. And if she took offence every time he reminded her of that fact, she was going to end up being badly hurt a dozen times a day. ‘Go. Do what you have to do. I shall be quite content here, in this beautiful room.’
In a way it would be good practice for her. She was going to have to get used to spending large amounts of time on her own while he went off doing whatever it was he spent his days doing.
‘Thank you,’ he said, his look of relief being the only indication that, up till that point, he had been concerned about her reaction.
‘I will return as soon as possible, I promise you.’ With a heartbreakingly compelling smile, he leaned forward and gave her a peck on the cheek. Then he turned and left her, and she pressed one palm to her face as though to cling on to it, on to him, as long as she could.
For a few moments after the door closed behind him, Mary just stood there, in the stately isolation of the sitting room, marooned on her desert island of Axminster.
But there was no point in moping. Better to keep herself busy. She might as well use the spare time to unpack. Only...they would be setting off for his country estate the next morning, so it hardly seemed worthwhile. She’d only have to pack all over again.
She wandered over to the window, from where she had a good view over Blackheath, if she’d wanted to look at it. She shook her head reproachfully over her spurt of pique. Lord Havelock had warned her that he didn’t want them to live in each other’s pockets and she’d agreed it sounded much better than having a jealous, vengeful sort of husband who’d be breathing down her neck the whole time. She was going to have to cultivate the habit of finding things to do, when she was on her own. And not dwell on what it had made her feel like when he had been breathing on her neck, brushing that kiss on it...
She shook herself. What did married ladies do when their husbands were out on business, that was what she should be thinking about. Drank tea, probably. There. That was something she could do. She would definitely feel better for a cup.
She rang for a servant, and before much longer she had not only tea, but also a selection of cakes and sandwiches brought up. As the waiter set them out on one of the many small tables scattered about the sitting room, she had to suppress a wild urge to giggle. It was like being a little girl, play-acting at being a princess, clapping her hands only to have invisible servants magic up food and drink out of thin air.
She couldn’t look at him as he bowed himself out of the room, lest she really did burst out laughing. And so, when the door slammed, she was looking in exactly the right direction to see a sheet of paper, lodged under her husband’s bedroom door, flutter in the draught.
Even from where she was sitting she could see it was some kind of list. And the moment she registered what it was, she recalled him saying how many things he had to remember, how he’d frowningly pulled not just one, but two lists out of his coat pocket the day he’d called to discuss arrangements.
Oh, dear, she hoped this one wasn’t important. But if it was, perhaps she could summon up one of the hotel genies to whisk it to the meeting he was having. That would prove what a good and useful wife he’d married.
She bent down and pulled it out from under the door, her eyes snagging on the first item.
Compliant, it said, in an elegant copperplate script. And then next to it, in heavier, darker letters, another hand had added, A Mouse.
What kind of list was this?
Needn’t have any dowry.
Oh. Oh! She clapped one hand to her mouth as she read the next item: Won’t demand a society wedding.
This wasn’t a list of things he needed to remember at all, but a list of what he was looking for in a wife.
A Mouse, the heavier hand had scrawled next to the bit about the ceremony, and underlined it.
Not of the upper ten thousand, her shocked eyes discovered next.
Orphan.
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