“Actually,” Abigail said, “I moved when I should have stayed still. It was my fault. Is my arm raised high enough?”
The girl smiled quickly at her and resumed her work.
Abigail had hoped for a couple of muslins and a riding habit. Laura had hoped that a ball gown might be added to that list. In all the wild dreamings of a largely sleepless night Abigail had not expected the dizzying number and variety of garments that were judged to be the very barest of necessities for a countess. It would take her a month to wear all the garments she was to be sent, she decided, if she did nothing all day long but change clothes.
Ten ball gowns. Ten! Were there to be that many balls to attend? And would not one garment suffice for them all, or at the most two? It seemed not.
She was beginning to feel very much like Cinderella, except that Cinderella had had only one new ball gown. Certainly she had her own Prince Charming awaiting her somewhere on the premises. She had succeeded in persuading herself during the night that he could not possibly be as handsome as she remembered. It was just that she had seen a tolerably well-looking man and reacted like a besotted schoolgirl, she had told herself. But she had not been mistaken. Not at all. He looked quite, quite magnificent wearing a tall beaver hat and carrying a gold-tipped cane.
And she was beginning to believe in her own good fortune. Though common sense told her that she was foolish in the extreme to have agreed to spend the rest of her life as the possession of a total stranger, even if there was a vague tie of blood between them, common sense had a number of rivals. There were his eyes for one thing. But far more important than that was the knowledge that however unhappy she might prove to be, she would at least always be secure. She would never be poor again. And she would be able to reunite her family.
It was true that her conscience smote her. For apart from the fact that she was not as she had appeared to be the morning before or as she appeared to be today either, there were other facts that she should tell him, facts that even Laura did not know about. She was not respectable, and neither was her family. That was the truth of the matter.
But the temptation to remain quiet until after the wedding was proving to be just too overwhelming.
So much for her own motives. But what about his? It would be better not to ask, Laura had advised, and Abigail agreed. She would ask him after their wedding, perhaps. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she would not want to know.
Their business on Bond Street was not by any means over when she was finally dressed and back in the front parlor with his lordship again. There were shoes and fans and reticules and feathers and handkerchiefs and a whole lot of faradiddle to be added to the purchases. But finally she was taken to a confectioner’s and fed a meat pie and cakes and tea. She felt half-starved.
“Why?” she could not resist asking when conversation did not flow freely between them.
“Why?” He raised his eyebrows and fixed her with those blue eyes, which she wished for her own comfort he would direct at some other patron of the shop.
“Why are you marrying me?” she asked.
He looked at her assessingly and his expression gradually softened so that he did not look nearly as haughty as he usually did.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This must all be very bewildering for you. I realize that marriage is far in excess of the kind of help you hoped for when you called on me yesterday.”
He spoke to her gently, as if he were speaking to a child. He smiled, and Abigail’s eyes strayed to his dimple.
“I have had my title and everything that comes with it for fifteen months,” he said. “For twelve of those I was in mourning. Now it seems that it is time for me to marry. I am thirty years old and a peer of the realm. I have female relatives about to descend on me. They should be here before the week is out. They would like nothing better than to take the choosing of a bride out of my hands, and yet I feel a strange whim to make my own choice.”
“And so the hasty marriage,” she said. “You are afraid that they will persuade you to change your mind if we are still unmarried when they arrive?”
He smiled again. And looking deliberately away from his dimple, she saw that he had attractive creases at the corners of his eyes. He would have wrinkles there when he was a little older. She would have to advise him to rub cream around his eyes at night—not that the wrinkles would look unattractive.
“Let me just say,” he said, “that I would prefer to present them with a fait accompli.”
“But why me?” she asked, looking meekly down at her plate. This must be the very last question, she decided. She was not supposed to ask any, but to speak only when spoken to. Was it just that she had walked into his house at the right moment? Or the wrong moment, depending on how this marriage would turn out. It certainly was not her beauty or her charm or her dowry.