It was not a grand, theatrical declaration. It was quiet, and certain, and entirely without artifice—exactly the way he had spoken to her that first night on the terrace.
"Not because society has decided you have run out of time, and not because I require an heir, though I will not pretend that consideration does not exist. Marry me because I have spent thirty-eight years waiting, without knowing I was waiting, for a woman who would want the truth of me rather than the crest on my carriage. I found her. I am not willing to let a wager at three gentlemen's clubs, or Priscilla Denham's fan, talk me out of what I already know."
Margaret sat very still for a long moment, her hand warm inside his, twenty years of careful, hard-won armor settling quietly around her shoulders like a coat she no longer needed to wear.
"You understand," she said finally, "that they will never stop talking. They will say you were desperate, or that I trapped you, or that you have taken leave of your senses. It will not end simply because we are married."
"Let them talk," Sebastian said. "I have spent a decade listening to what society wants from me. I find I am considerably more interested from this point forward in what you want."
"I want," Margaret said slowly, feeling the words settle into place with the same steady certainty with which she had once decided to save a crumbling hospital no one believed was worth saving, "a husband who will still ask me questions about my own life after twenty years of marriage. I want a man who does not flinch at gray hair or sharp opinions. I do not particularly require a fashionable rose garden."
"You may have all of it," Sebastian said. "Including the rose garden, which I promise you is entirely unfashionable, and I would not have it any other way."
Margaret laughed then, properly—the same startled, unguarded sound from the terrace. And Sebastian leaned across the small space between their chairs and kissed her gently, as though she was something precious rather than something overlooked, as though forty years had not diminished her, but had instead sharpened her into precisely the woman worth waiting a decade for.
They were married six weeks later in a small, quiet ceremony that scandalized half of London by its sheer lack of spectacle. There was no towering wedding breakfast, no procession of a thousand guests. Margaret wore a gown of deep green silk, not white, because she said plainly that she saw no reason to pretend to an innocence she did not possess and had no use for.
Sebastian stood at the altar and watched her walk toward him with an expression so openly undone that even the vicar, a man who had presided over a hundred aristocratic weddings, found himself faintly moved.
Priscilla Denham attended out of an obligation she could not quite bring herself to decline, and stood near the back of the small church, watching the Duke of Ravensmere look at a woman twenty years her senior as though she had personally hung every star currently visible over England. She left before the wedding breakfast, and she never mentioned Margaret's age again in Margaret's hearing or otherwise.