"It isn't your fault."
"It is, rather. I asked you to stand in rooms like that one for my sake, and I have not always made certain you weren't standing in them alone." He was quiet a moment, watching her profile in the dim light spilling from the ballroom windows. "Marianne, if this... if all of this is more than you want to carry, I would understand. I would not think less of you for it. I have already asked a great deal of you, and I have no right to ask for more."
She turned to look at him then, and whatever he saw in her face made him go very still, waiting. The noise of the ballroom behind them felt suddenly distant, as though the two of them stood in a small, private pocket of quiet carved out of the cold night air.
"Do you know what frightens me?" she said. "It isn't Henrietta, or the whispers, or the thought of spending forty years being talked about at parties I didn't ask to attend. It's the thought of walking away from you because I was afraid of all of that, and spending the rest of my life wondering if I'd been a coward." She shook her head. "I climbed into the wrong carriage once, Julian, and it turned out to be the best mistake of my life. I don't intend to start making the safe choice now just because it's easier."
Something in his shoulders eased—a tension she hadn't fully registered until it left him.
"Then let them talk," he said. "Let Henrietta say whatever she likes. I would rather spend my life defending you at parties than spend it without you at all."
"They'll come around," Julian added a little wryly, "or they won't. And either way, I find I mind considerably less than I once might have."
"I don't need them to come around," Marianne said, some of her old steadiness returning to her voice, the cold night air no longer feeling quite so sharp against her skin now that he stood beside her. "I only need you to keep saying my name the way you do now. Everything else I find I can bear."
"Marianne," he said softly, deliberately, the way he had learned to say it in the months since that first startled testing of the word in a moving carriage—not as a fact, not as an obligation, but as something closer to reverence. "I intend to keep saying it for the rest of my life, if you'll let me."
The proposal itself, when it came, was not staged with any great ceremony. It happened on an ordinary evening, nearly a year to the day after the rainstorm, in a carriage—the same carriage, in fact. Julian had specifically requested his driver take the same route past Greenfield Square that he'd taken that first night, though he said nothing of the reason until they were well underway.