She had grimaced. “I think my parents must have had a grudge against me when they called me Abigail,” she had said. “It is a quite dreadful name, is it not?”
“I like Abby,” he had said.
“You are a skilled diplomat,” she had said, laughing and turning to look at him, and sobering again.
She had spoken to him since only when she could not avoid doing so.
“Good night, my lord,” Miss Seymour was saying now, curtsying low in front of him. “Thank you for inviting me to spend the day with Abby.”
“It has been my pleasure, ma’am,” he said, bowing and extending a hand for hers. “And I know that you have made the day very pleasurable for my wife.”
My wife. He had scarcely had a chance to comprehend the reality of their new relationship. Just three days before, he had not known that Abigail existed. Now she was his wife.
And how was he to explain to his mother and the girls when they arrived within the next few days that he had met her two days before and married her today, knowing very well that they were to arrive within the week?
A violent case of love at first sight?
He would think of his explanation when the time came.
He took Abigail on his arm to accompany their friends to the top of the staircase, and they watched them descend, raising their hands in farewell when the pair turned at the bottom before leaving the house.
The landing suddenly seemed very quiet indeed.
“I have not told you,” he said, turning to her and taking both her hands in his, “how very lovely you look today, my dear. But I have thought it all day long.”#p#分页标题#e#
“Why, what a bouncer,” she said briskly. “Lovely I am not, my lord. But this dress you bought for me is very splendid.”
“My name is Miles,” he said. “You are not going to ‘my lord’ me for the next forty or fifty years, are you?”
“No,” she said, flushing. “I did not even know what your name was until we were at the church this morning. I kept waking up last night with possible names running through my head.”
“Did you?” he said. “I hope you approve. Unlike yours, my name cannot be shortened to a more attractive form, can it?”
She was trying to withdraw her hands from his without actually pulling at them, he could feel. Her eyes were on his neckcloth. She was clearly quite as aware as he that it was bedtime. The thought rather excited him.
“Mrs. Williams showed you your rooms earlier,” he said, “and introduced you to the maid she has chosen for you. Alice, is it? She is doubtless waiting for you. Did Mrs. Williams explain that my dressing room adjoins yours? Go on up. I shall come to you in a short while. Will half an hour be long enough?”
“Yes, my lord,” she told his neckcloth, and she turned and walked sedately halfway up the stairs to the upper floor before breaking into a run up the remainder of the flight.
The earl watched her go and wished there were some way to save a shy young bride from the terror of an approaching wedding night.
ABIGAIL EYED THE BED, which Alice had turned down for the night before leaving, and continued to stand at the foot, holding to one of the carved posts.
She could have been in bed and fast asleep long before—she was tired enough after two disturbed nights and a day of nervous emotion. And a great deal longer than half an hour must have passed. Though perhaps not. Time had a strange tendency to expand or contract at whim.
One thing she knew, at least. She would stand there all night rather than lie down on the bed to be caught there by him. There would be something quite demeaning and definitely terrifying about watching him come through that door from a supine position on her bed. Better to face him on her feet.
She felt rather like vomiting, if the truth were known. It was foolish, really, when she had never felt fear in her life, or never admitted to such a feeling, at least—even when Papa was at his worst. But then, she had had very little to do with men outside her own family.
Until her father’s death a little more than two years before, she had had the full care of him—he had been an invalid after years of uncontrolled drinking and rioting—and of the younger children. Boris was only two years her junior, but men were such little boys. Some of them—most of them—never really grew up at all. Bea and Clara were years younger, products of their father’s second marriage and left behind when his second wife ran off and left him.
Abigail had had no time for courting and no patience with the few local gentlemen who had been foolish enough to stammer out the beginnings of an admiration for her. How could she have contemplated marriage when she had lived with such a poor example of the institution? And how could she have married and left the children helpless?