She Fed the Workhouse Children in Secret for Three Winters, Then an Earl Chose Her Over Every Lad...
Chapter 9
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A beat. Cecilia considered lying and discarded it. "A permanent endowment for the children's school," she said. "The workhouse has six children old enough to learn letters, and they have no one to teach them properly and no funds to hire anyone who would. If someone were to establish even a small and consistent fund—""How much?"Cecilia named a number.Lady Constance considered it. "I'll double it," she said. "You'll set up the school. My nephew will endow it. He has already told me he intends to, only he was going to do it quietly, and I intend to make it public, because the only way to protect a good thing in this town is to make it impossible to quietly remove.""My lady—""Also," said Lady Constance, "he is going to ask you to marry him next Thursday, because I told him he had been patient long enough and he ought to get on with it. And James, whatever his other qualities, does listen to me." She took a small cake from the passing tray. "I wanted you to know in advance, because you seem like the kind of woman who makes better decisions when she has had time to think, and I approve of that kind of woman." She looked across the tearoom. "There are not enough of them."Then, she went back to her corner and ate her cake.Cecilia stood very still in the middle of the room and felt the whole of her careful, invisible, three-months-at-a-time life shift on its axis.Lady Forthwell was watching her. Mrs. Ouldgate was watching her. Every woman at the charitable tea was watching her with a range of expressions that ran from curiosity to calculation to something that looked, in a few of the faces, like a recognition she had not expected: the look of women who understood the particular tiredness of being capable and invisible, and who had not expected to see a door open for someone who had accepted the condition so quietly.She did not say anything. She turned and walked to the window where the snow was coming down on the square outside, and she thought about what Lady Constance had said, and she thought about the Earl, and she thought about Pip, who was learning his letters from her on Wednesday afternoons and had already decided that P was his favorite, and that this was obviously because it was the first letter of his name. And she thought about what it would mean to do this work not alone, and not in the dark.She thought about it for the rest of that tea, and the whole of the walk home, and the evening by herself in her small kitchen. She had spent three years deciding what she would and would not allow herself to want. She had been very disciplined about it. She had told herself so many times that a woman in her position could not afford to want large things that she had come to believe the not-wanting was a virtue. She was beginning to think it was something else: not virtue, just a long habit of protecting herself against a disappointment that had, this time, not come.On Thursday, James Aldrich Carew, fifth Earl of Dunross, came to her sitting room at four in the afternoon and asked her to marry him.He did it without theater or excessive speech, the way he did everything: directly, and with the full weight of his attention. And he told her that he was asking her, and not the image of her, and not the idea of her, but the actual woman who argued with him about estate law, and kept accounts for merchants, and woke before dawn to feed other people's children—because that was the woman he had found, and he did not want a different one.She said yes. She said it simply, as she did most things, and she did not cry—or not much, which she thought was rather good of her, given the circumstances.