Marianne's father, when Julian finally called on him properly, took a long time studying the man across from him before he said gruffly, "She told me about the carriage, you know, months ago, before any of this. Said she met a man who seemed more honest in twenty minutes than most men manage in a lifetime. I told her she was being fanciful." He paused. "I don't suppose I was wrong to worry, given what you are, but I don't suppose I was right either, given how she looks at you."
"I intend to spend a great deal of effort making certain you're not wrong to trust her judgment," Julian said.
And her father, after a long moment, extended his hand.
There was, of course, a wider society to contend with: the whispers when it became known that the Duke of Ashwick, having broken one engagement under mysterious circumstances, was now courting a merchant's daughter from Chandler's Row, with no fortune and no particular pedigree to speak of. There were cool receptions at parties they attended together, pointed remarks from relatives who had hoped for a more advantageous match—a cousin of Julian's, Lady Henrietta, who made no secret of her disapproval at family gatherings, once remarking within Marianne's clear hearing that she supposed the Duke had developed a taste for novelty over good sense.
Marianne bore it all with the same plain, unflinching honesty that had first caught Julian's attention in the carriage, refusing to shrink herself smaller to be more palatable to people who had never once had the courage to ask for what they actually wanted.
But there was one evening—a ball held at the Dowager Duchess's insistence, ostensibly to smooth over the family's remaining reservations, in truth a gauntlet dressed up as a celebration—when even Marianne's composure wavered.
She had gone to find Julian after a particularly barbed exchange with Lady Henrietta, who had cornered her near the refreshment table to ask, with the false sweetness of a woman who knew precisely how much damage a smile could do, whether Marianne intended to learn to curtsy properly before the wedding, or whether the Duke found her charm precisely in her lack of polish. Marianne had answered evenly, had not let her face show the sting of it. But by the time she found Julian across the ballroom, deep in conversation with two gentlemen from his club, laughing at something one of them had said, she felt suddenly, sharply, like an intruder in a world that had never asked for her and never would.
She did not interrupt him. She slipped out onto the terrace instead, into air considerably colder than the ballroom, and stood at the balustrade watching the garden below, wondering, not for the first time that month, whether love was truly enough to outweigh a lifetime of rooms like the one behind her: rooms where she would always be the woman who climbed into the wrong carriage, the subject of a story told at her expense long after the romance of it had worn thin for everyone but her.
It was perhaps twenty minutes before Julian found her, his face creased with the particular worry of a man who has just realized belatedly that he has left someone alone too long in a room full of people determined to make her feel unwelcome.
"Henrietta told me what she said," he said, coming to stand beside her at the balustrade. "I am sorry. I should have been paying closer attention."