Yes, he thought, he could just imagine it. Miss Abigail Gardiner was young and not totally unattractive. She was impoverished and dependent upon what she could earn from genteel employment. She was quiet and unassuming—the perfect prey for a lecherous husband bored with his wife.
He felt sorry for her. She had not moved from the spot on which she had been standing when he entered the room. She waited with quiet patience for his decision. If he gave her money, she could survive for a week or two. And then what?
But could he give her the letter she asked for? When all was said and done, he did not know the woman. He did not even know for sure that she was related to him, though he guessed that she must be. Such a matter was too easily checked for her to risk the lie. He might take a chance on her himself if he had a suitable position to offer her. But could he in all fairness recommend her to an unsuspecting stranger?
But he did have a suitable position to offer her. The thought came unbidden, causing him to frown quite unintentionally at Miss Abigail Gardiner. Was he taking leave of his senses?
She was looking directly at him, her fine gray eyes gazing steadily into his.
“Will you help me, my lord?” she asked.
In three or four days’ time the peace of his bachelor existence was to be shattered and siege was to be laid to his single state. Frances was to be foisted on him.
Frances! He could see himself now down the years fetching and carrying for her, murmuring “Yes, dear” and “No, dear” a hundred times a day, listening to the envious opinions of his friends and acquaintances that he was a lucky dog to have won for himself such a beautiful and charming wife.
His voice was speaking, he became aware suddenly.
“Yes, ma’am,” he was saying. “I have a position to offer you in my own home.”
Her eyes widened, and for a moment she looked considerably more than ordinary. “Here?” she said. “A position?”
He listened to himself, appalled, almost as if his brain and his voice had been divorced from each other.
“Yes,” he said. “I have a somewhat pressing need to fill the position of wife.”
She stared at him as he stared mutely back.
“Wife,” she said, the word falling like a stone into the silence between them, not a question.
His hands gripped themselves very tightly behind his back. “I need a wife, ma’am,” he said. “Men in my position generally do. I would judge that you might be the kind of woman who would suit me. The position is yours if you wish for it.”
He was not, he realized in some surprise as his brain caught up to his mouth, sorry that he had spoken those words. If the choice were between Frances and Miss Abigail Gardiner—and it seemed that it probably was—he would settle for Miss Gardiner without any hesitation at all. He waited anxiously for her reply.
• • •
ABIGAIL STARED AT HIM. She had been feeling acutely embarrassed and had been finding it far easier to follow Laura’s advice to be demure than she had expected. Her cousin—or relative, to use a vaguer and more accurate term—was so very young and fashionable. And there she was, trapped in a room in his house, dressed in her drabbest brown, her hair in its most unbecoming coiled braid beneath her bonnet, begging a favor of him.
She would not have come if she had known that the old earl was dead, she thought. She definitely would not have. She would have taken her chances with Vicar Grimes.
Not only was this earl young and fashionable. He also had disconcertingly blue eyes, the sort of eyes that had a tendency to do strange things to one’s knees.
It was not just the eyes, either. He was alarmingly handsome—tall and athletic-looking, with thick dark hair, several shades darker and several degrees glossier than her own. She felt mortified in the extreme.
And what had he just said? Under almost any other circumstances she would have thrown back her head and given in to peals of laughter. The encounter had taken a bizarre turn. Her hearing must be defective. She must be so nervous and so strained from acting out of character that she had allowed some of his words to pass her by.
“You are to be married, my lord?” she said. “You wish me to be companion to your wife? I have had some experience, though Mrs. Gill is an older lady. I believe I am capable of offering companionship to someone closer to my own age.”
“I am asking you to be my wife, ma’am,” the Earl of Severn said.
The words and the meaning were quite unmistakable.
“I have taken you by surprise,” he said when she did not immediately reply. “You would like time to consider? I am afraid I cannot help you in any other way, Miss Gardiner, except to offer you a sum of money with which to keep yourself for a few weeks. I cannot recommend for employment a young woman whom I do not know.”