People like them. Illegitimacy tainted in different ways. For Stuart, it had been a deep-seated, constant fear that one wrong step, and it would all be taken from him. For Michael Robbins, it was a rage beneath the apparent blitheness.
“Tell me, young man,” said Stuart, “what do you see as your place in this ugly world?”
As much as Lizzy detested Mr. Marsden, she couldn’t quite keep her eyes off him.
While regiments of grim-faced angels mass-manufactured most of humanity in some industrial division of Heaven—how could it be otherwise, given the relentless rise in population in England and everywhere else—Mr. Marsden could justifiably claim to have been created as a one-of-a-kind specimen, a pleasant afternoon’s diversion for the Good Lord Himself.
He was, if anything, even more gorgeous upon closer inspection. In the tilt of his head and the carriage of his spine was beauty by the bushel and grace in ridiculously abundant spades.
After the second time he caught her looking at him, she turned her face and looked outside instead, into rain plastered against the streaked window, while the men talked politics, breaking down the likely Irish Home Rule votes constituency by constituency.
Somewhere north of Peterborough she realized that the compartment had gone quiet: Her father had drifted off to sleep. Mr. Marsden watched her, his lips curved into that hated smile that made her feel as if she had under her skirts a drunken lover who was liable at any moment to burst into a loudly slurred rendition of “God Save the Queen.”
“Do you mind if I ask a personal question, Miss Bessler?” said Mr. Marsden.
She didn’t bother to conceal her frown. “That quite depends on the question.”
“You’ve beauty, poise, wit, and connections—everything a woman needs. Why haven’t you married?”
It was a question that no one else had dared ask to her face. Beneath her carefully cultivated insouciance, her lack of a ring had chafed and incensed. To ask the question was to declare his intention to be a thorn at her side.
“You forgot to mention charm,” she said coldly. “I’m generally acknowledged to have the charm of at least a Madame de Pompadour, if not outright that of a Josephine Bonaparte.”
“Charm too, of course,” he said, accompanied by a smile of irony. She’d never used her charm on him. “Which boggles the mind even more that so many ordinary girls of your particular vintage of debutantes are comfortably settled in matrimony, while you remain unattached.”
He was trying to get her to admit something. What did he want her to say? That she’d aimed too high in her youthful pride? That she’d believed that there was no one more qualified to be the wife of the country’s richest peer or its leading intellectual? That she’d been sincerely convinced that anything less would be an insult to herself—to her beauty, poise, wit, connections, and charm?
“There is such a thing as luck in matters of matrimony, as in anything else,” she said. “Those who admire me and those whom I admire have not coincided—until recently.”
She wasn’t supposed to refer to her three-day-old engagement until the announcement was in the papers, but she couldn’t help it. Besides, as the person in charge of Stuart’s calendar, Mr. Marsden had to know that she and his employer had been seeing a great deal of each other in recent months.
His reaction—a flicker of mordancy tangled with something she couldn’t read—told her he quite understood. “I see,” he said.
“My turn to ask a personal question,” she said, though she, like he, was less interested in the answer than in the bloodletting of the questioning itself. “You come from one of our best families, sir. Why have you chosen a career as a lowly secretary?”
Everyone knew, of course, that he had been disowned and disinherited by his late father. That he didn’t even have the dignity of a choice. He was forced to work.
“The life of idleness is not for me,” he said, looking down at his hands, which were well-kept, except for what appeared to be a permanent smudge of ink at the edge of his right palm.
She twisted the knife she’d already stuck in him. “But surely, there are so many productive ways of passing time without becoming someone else’s employee. You could have devoted yourself to the arts, the letters, the sciences. You could have helmed any number of charitable endeavors that would benefit from your skills of organization. You could have become a Member of Parliament.”
“Alas, none of those noble pursuits pays a farthing,” he said. “And it pains me, as I’m sure it pains you, to contemplate life without enough farthings in it.”
Oh, had it ever pained and distressed her.