Guilford’s eyes moved over his face, and then a long beleaguered sigh escaped him. “I do not care for that look in your eyes. As your friend, I need to say that this is a horrendous idea. You don’t allow a lady to offer marriage and wed her on a matter of convenience. Yes, a dreadful idea. Horrible. Bloody awful. All around madness.”
Jasper gritted his teeth hard enough that they clicked together noisily. “Will you serve as a witness?”
“Of course, I will.” Guilford strode over, and slammed his hand against Jasper’s back. “Congratulations, friend. And good luck.”
As Jasper took his leave he suspected he was going to need a good deal more than luck.
~14~
Yes the realities of life so cold,
So cowardly, so ready to betray,
So stinted in the measure of their grace
As we pronounce them, doing them much wrong,
Have been to me more bountiful than hope,
Less timid than desire—but that is past…
Katherine’s gaze remained fixed on the words before her. She shifted the heavy leather volume given her by Jasper; the words dark, the message bleak.
And she’d always before preferred the poems that recognized the flaws in love and the world around one, because she knew the flaws of love and the world around her.
So why was she ruminating over six lines, despairing over their bleakness? What great shift had occurred in the universe that she instead wanted to escape into the gentle joy and optimism to be found in Byron’s sonnets?
“You have been staring at that same page for nearly an hour,” Anne called from the seat she occupied at the pianoforte.
Katherine started, and the book slipped from her fingers onto her lap. “Surely it’s not been an hour.” She snapped it closed with a decided click.
Anne continued to play the haunting strains of Dibdin’s famous “Tom Bowling”. She waggled her brows. “Oh, it most certainly has been. Why, I’ve played pieces by Handel and Corelli and Gluck—”
Katherine set her book down beside her on the sofa. “Your point is quite clear, Anne.”
Anne grinned and continued to play flawlessly. Her quick fingers moved expertly over the keys.
Katherine thought of the rather pathetic list she’d given to Jasper and winced. There’d been nary a ladylike quality to recommend her as a wife. Anne could fill several sheets of parchment with all her ladylike attributes. It had never mattered to Katherine the vast differences in them—until now. Now, she wished she didn’t possess the tight brown ringlets and a remarkable lack of skills on the pianoforte, and embroidering, and watercolors, and…#p#分页标题#e#
“You’ve gone all serious again.”
Katherine trailed the tip of her finger over the bruised leather spine of Wordsworth’s volume. Several tumbles into the thick blanket of snow when she’d last met Jasper had resulted in a hopelessly ruined leather cover. “Have I?” she murmured, distractedly. It had been three days since they’d last met.
Three days since she’d given him that silly list.
Three days since he’d accepted her offer of marriage.
And since then, she’d not heard a word from him. Not a letter. Not a visit.
Katherine jumped to her feet and began to pace.
She’d surely shocked him with her request at Hyde Park. Perhaps he’d merely come to his senses and merely intended to carry on as though that particular exchange had never occurred. Katherine would then have to go on to marry that horrid Mr. Ekstrom. Her stomach tightened into pained, twisted knots, and she wanted to blame them upon that horrid Mr. Ekstrom, but knew it was the thought of Jasper altering his decision that caused those pained, twisted knots.
“You seem rather upset.”
Katherine glanced over at her sister. “I’m not upset.” Only filled with panic at the prospect of wedding Mr. Ekstrom.
“It is that Mr. Ekstrom, isn’t it?” Anne stopped playing. She shoved back the bench at her pianoforte and it scraped along the wood floor. “We merely have to find that pendant…”
“The pendant will do nothing, Anne. It is a foolish, childlike, wishful dream.”
Anne’s brow wrinkled. “But Aldora and Michael’s…”
“Aldora and Michael’s marriage had nothing to do with that silly trinket,” her cry filled the cavernous space of the parlor. Her throat worked reflexively. Oh, how she envied Anne her innocence. Anne believed in dreams and wishes and magical pendants given to hopeful ladies by greedy gypsies.
A flash of hurt filled Anne’s pale blue eyes. She tipped her chin up a notch. “I know what you believe of me, Katherine. You and Aldora. You believe I’m fanciful and that I don’t possess a brain in my head.”