The Debutante's Daring Proposal

‘Shouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t do very well,’ Mr Wickford was saying. ‘A taking little thing, is Sukey.’

‘Sukey?’

‘Ah, should more properly refer to her as Miss Mead, I suppose, but then she’s such a friendly sort of girl, it’s hard to stand upon form with her. Not a bit like Miss Wickford,’ he said with a shake of his head.

‘What,’ said Edmund, his hackles rising, ‘precisely, do you mean by that?’

‘Oh, well, you know,’ said Mr Wickford, waving his hands.

‘No, I am afraid I don’t.’

‘Of course, you will hardly know her, will you? Well, let us just say that she is a strange, awkward girl. Not that she can help it, I don’t suppose, given the way she was brought up. The mother died in childbirth,’ said Wickford, which was something Edmund already knew. But the reminder jolted him. Was that why Georgiana didn’t want a normal marriage? Could she be afraid of having children? ‘Disappointed my cousin immensely,’ Wickford was droning on. ‘Wanted a boy, d’you see? Well, that’s natural enough, ain’t it? Trouble is, he went and treated the girl as if she was the boy he wanted, instead of facing facts.’

That was not how it had been. Georgie’s father had simply allowed her to act exactly as she wished. Well, Edmund amended, he might have encouraged her love of horse-riding and outdoor pursuits by praising her skills. But he had definitely not attempted to mould her preferences beyond that. If she had shown an interest in...say...dolls and dresses, he was pretty sure the man would have bought her bolts of satin and lace back from the market, rather than new riding boots or a crop.

‘It was only when she got to the age where she really needed a mother,’ said Mr Wickford, leaning forward in a conspiratorial sort of way, and winking, ‘that he saw his mistake. Which was why he married again. Needed a woman to knock the rough edges off. Make her behave like a lady. And, of course, providing her with a sister like Sukey, who could set her a shining example of femininity, was an added bonus.’

Was that what people hereabouts thought had happened?

Was that, in fact, what had happened?

But—why would a man who’d allowed Georgie to run wild for so many years suddenly try to change her? If that even was his motive for remarrying.

‘And Mrs Wickford is the sort of woman who enjoys knocking the rough edges off, I take it,’ said Edmund, feeling his way forward tentatively.

Mr Wickford chuckled. ‘Do you know, whenever anyone says Mrs Wickford, I still think they mean my mother. But there’s my cousin’s widow now, as well as my own wife. Though that is taking some getting used to. Only been married a fortnight.’

‘My felicitations,’ he responded automatically and without enthusiasm.

Mr Wickford beamed at him. ‘Thank you, my lord. I do consider myself most fortunate. Couldn’t think of marriage at all before I came into this property, let alone to a woman like Sylvia Dean. Took some persuading, none the less...’

‘Indeed?’ He leaned back and raised one eyebrow, inviting further confidences. Not that he had the slightest interest in this fellow. But he’d already learned far more about what had gone wrong in Georgiana’s life in five minutes with the loquacious fool, than he’d done in ten years.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Wickford, smiling fatuously. ‘Courting her took up pretty near all my time. If it wasn’t for Mrs Wickford senior being so willing to stay on here and keep the place running smoothly, I’m not at all sure I’d have taken the trick.’

Edmund didn’t think he’d reacted, but he was not all that surprised when Lion emitted a low growl. The man had admitted that permitting Georgiana and her stepmother to remain in what was, after all, their own home had not been an act of compassion at all. Instead, it had been very much to his advantage. And as soon as their usefulness had come to an end, he had promptly evicted them. In Georgiana’s case, from the only home she’d ever known. He glanced round the room as Wickford continued to enthuse about his new bride, noting, everywhere, traces of her heritage. Her father might very well have chosen the hunting prints on the walls and most of the furniture looked as though it had been handed down through several generations.

At which point, he saw another reason for the distress which had prompted her to run to him with her outrageous proposal. Not only was she being forced into taking a step which she found abhorrent, she was also losing everything she’d ever called her own. He must have seemed like her last chance to salvage something—a sort of metaphorical clinging to the wreckage of her life in the faint hope of finding a refuge that was at least familiar, if not what she really wanted.

But instead of being man enough to listen to her, really listen with a view to understanding, he’d rubbed salt into what he could now see were very deep and grievous wounds by getting angry with her. Shouting at her. Rebuffing her.

She hadn’t deserved such treatment. Even though she’d hurt him in the past, she’d been scarcely more than a child at the time. The worst she’d been guilty of was thoughtlessness. She had not deliberately set out to hurt him, he would swear to it.

His antagonism for her promptly abated. And as it did so, he could scarcely credit that he’d carried it into his adult life, or nursed it with such devotion. To repay her, as an adult, by standing back and watching her suffer, or even adding to her woes, was out of all proportion to the initial offence.

Sickened at himself, he got to his feet.

‘You will excuse me,’ he said, as a chill swept up his spine and lodged in the region of his stomach. ‘I cannot stay longer.’

‘What? Oh, dear,’ said Mr Wickford, leaping to his feet as well. ‘Mrs Wickford will be desolate to have missed you. The moment she saw your carriage stop at the foot of our drive she ran upstairs to make herself presentable. I’m sure she won’t be but a minute longer...’

‘What a pity,’ he replied mendaciously. He had no wish to meet the cuckoo who’d thrust the true chicks out of this nest. ‘I have urgent business which takes me back to London tomorrow,’ he added truthfully. Because he had to see Georgiana again. Apologise. Tell her he meant to make it up to her, somehow. And London was where she had gone. ‘So I have much to accomplish today.’

Mr Wickford wrung his hands, swallowing and looking nervously in the direction of the stairs as Edmund made his way to the front door. But he didn’t care. He didn’t even wait for the man, or his maid, to open it for him. He just needed to get away from here, so that he could think things through.

Georgiana’s past was looking very different from the way he’d imagined it. He wouldn’t have believed that her father, a man who’d always laughed at her antics, had married a woman specifically to knock her into shape. Or worse, brought another girl into the house to show her how she ought to behave. She must have been devastated.

He frowned as he stalked down the path, Lion lumbering at his heels. Surely, she would have needed to write to him more than ever? But it had been from his mother that he’d learned of her widowed father’s remarriage. His mother, who, in spite of all her flaws, had written faithfully. Back then, it had been one more sin to lay at Georgie’s door. But now...

She must have been crushed. And since he had no longer been there, she would not have had anybody to turn to. Because, now he came to consider it, not only was she his only friend, but she spent so much time with him that she hadn’t had any other friends either.

So why hadn’t she?

And why hadn’t she run to him, on the few occasions he’d returned to Bartlesham, instead of flouncing out of the shop when he’d walked in, her purchases abandoned?

It had puzzled him from the moment he’d returned, still hurt by her decision not to write to him, but determined to make the best of things, and at least attempt to treat her with courtesy. But then, on his first Sunday in Bartlesham, she’d refused to return his greeting when he’d been magnanimous enough to accord her a nod across the aisle of St. Bartholomew’s. And stalked out with her nose in the air when the tedious service had at length ground to its conclusion.

And so he’d washed his hands of her. He’d really and truly left her behind when he’d gone up to university.

And then, as he was lifting a wheezing Lion into the carriage, he recalled her accusation, that out of sight meant out of mind, for him. As if she was the one who hadn’t received any letters.

Good Lord...could it be...if the stepmother had seen it as her duty to knock Georgie into shape—in other words, to turn her into the proper young lady she appeared to be nowadays—then she would not have approved of them corresponding. Single females were not, strictly speaking, supposed to write to single men to whom they were not related.

Yes, that would explain why he hadn’t received any letters from her, in spite of her promise to write.

But...he shook his head. It didn’t explain why she’d been so angry with him when he’d returned for a visit, briefly, before going up to Oxford.

Unless...

What must she have felt, when he’d given up writing to her? Had she felt as betrayed as he had, when he hadn’t heard at all?

She might have done.

It was certainly the first hypothesis to explain her behaviour over the past ten years that made any kind of sense.

He sat bolt upright as a frisson of insight flickered in the depths of his brain.

The stepmother.

Could she have been the one to fill Georgiana’s head with the kind of stories that resulted in her now regarding the act of conceiving children as nasty and brutish?

Who else could it possibly have been?

Georgiana definitely hadn’t known anything about that side of life when he’d left Bartlesham. And he couldn’t imagine her father describing marital relations to her in such a way that...actually, not in any way at all. It wasn’t within a father’s remit to educate his daughters about that sort of thing.

But...he blinked, taking in his surroundings for the first time since he’d left Six Chimneys and saw that he was almost halfway home.

‘Dear God, what a fool,’ he groaned. He’d been in such a hurry to get away from Georgiana’s repulsive cousin that he hadn’t ascertained where exactly, in London, she was staying. And there was no way he was going to turn back now and ask him.