He sank to his knees on the grass, a gentle, knowing smile in his eye. “Poppy. Do me the honor of being my wife.”
She keenly wished he would get up.
“You flatter me. But you, above anyone, know that I have no wish to marry.”
He grinned up at her, expectant. “You feign that you don’t wish to marry to save people thinking no one will have you. You don’t have to do that anymore. Don’t you see? You aren’t what most men want, but you are what I want. All that rig about you being a mad old spinster—I’ll turn it on its head.”
She bristled. “You will do nothing of the sort. Please—”
“Poppy, don’t be foolish. You can’t stay here alone. You can leave all these shrubs behind,” he said, gesturing at the plants she had so carefully nurtured since girlhood. “I’ll buy you new gowns. We’ll take private rooms, bring in a cook and a maid. In a few years I’ll have enough for a horse. Sooner if I can find a better place. Come to London with me. As my wife.”
“No,” she said firmly, her sympathy for the disappointment she was causing him having eroded with every sentence of his speech. “And do please get up.”
His face fell. The light behind his eyes went dull, then dark. She looked away.
“I’m sorry, Tom. Truly. And I am grateful for your friendship. But my life is here.”
He went bright at the cheeks. “Friendship. That’s what you’d call it? Because I might call it something else. Or do you spread your favors around to all your friends?”
She closed her eyes. It had been a single moment in the woods. One very brief moment, nearly five years before, when he had come to help her gather moss and she had laughed at something he had said, and he had pushed her against a tree and kissed her. And for about one half second, she had permitted it—if to permit was to freeze—before she pulled away in shock.
They had never spoken of it. But ever since that day, he had looked at her like he knew something about her that she did not.
Like he had some claim on her.
And because he was a favorite of her uncle, because he helped her in the nursery, because he sent her plants from London, she’d gone on smiling and pretending not to see it, pretending it did not seep inside her skin and rankle her from within her very bones.
She was deathly, deathly tired of it.
She inhaled, and met his aggrieved look calmly. “Tom, you have always been a friend. I hope you will remain one. But I have no wish to marry you, or anyone else. If that is why you came here, I must ask you to take your leave.”
His mouth fell open. His face clouded over with some mix of bemusement and hurt.
Her anger melted as the man took on the old, pained expression of the boy he’d once been. Poor Tom. He was full of bluster, but he was no worse than other men, and he’d been kind to her, for all his unbearable presumption.
“I know you’ll find a lovely wife. No doubt someone far more suitable than me.”
His eyes went dark and flat as glass, like those of a dog that might attack. “But you’ll not do better, Miss Cavendish. That’s a promise.” He turned and quickly walked away, his thick neck and arms huddled over his ribs as though to protect a smarting heart. She watched him go until she couldn’t bear the sight of it.
How could he so mistake her intentions? He, who had listened to all her grand plans for years? To think she would give up her life’s work—the passion into which she had poured all her efforts and every last shilling—for a flat in London and a maid? She’d more likely sail to India, or cut off her own arm and present it to Tom Raridan’s London cook to serve for supper.
What she wanted in this life was not a husband. It was freedom, finally, from dependence on men. Her entire life had been dictated by their fortunes: their deaths, plunging her from crisis to crisis; their charity, allowing her to survive, to scrape by, to make her tenuous foothold in business; their half-truths, sabotaging her ambitions. She was tired of needing permission, dispensation, kindness. She intended to be the mistress of her own fate. And there was one thing she knew with absolute certainty from observing the ways of the world: one did not get that kind of power by marrying it.
She sank back against the warm glass wall of the greenhouse and stood there for a moment, letting its heat soothe the goose bumps that had risen on her forearms despite the glare of the sun. Tom was correct about one thing. She was utterly alone now. Breathing in the loamy, balmy hothouse air, she felt it keenly. If she was to have any chance of securing her independence, she would need to find in herself the ferocious iron will that so many had accused her, not fondly, of possessing.
She waited until her hands stopped trembling and set about pruning her rows of potted plumeria—a repetitive, physical task that always helped clear her mind. The perfume of the flowers drifted around her as she worked, and she welcomed it into her lungs. She strained on her tiptoes to reach the branches of the plants on the highest shelf, humming to herself.
“Miss Cavendish, I presume?” a man’s voice said, startling her.
She lost her grip, and a plant came careening down toward her head.
The man leapt in its way, just barely blocking the pot’s impact with her nose by diverting it to land with a thump against his own shoulder. In so saving her face from the blow, he pinned her body between his larger person and the shelves in front of her. Bits of fragrant foliage stabbed at her cheek and throat. Something brushed across the back of her neck—the starched linen of the man’s cravat.
Oh, this blasted day. Had she not enough to face without uninvited gentlemen showing themselves into every last room of her nursery? Unsettling her with unwelcome suits of marriage? Assaulting her with plants?
She craned her neck to get a better look at this latest intruder, who had steadied the pot back on the shelf and was now attempting to unravel the buttons of his waistcoat from the lacings of her sturdy leather work stays.
And then she blushed, overtaken by a sudden rush of mad desire to be wearing anything—anything—other than a straw hat and a faded old gardening dress.
He was not precisely a pretty fellow, whoever he was. His nose was crooked, as though once broken, and his eyes were dark and heavy browed. But his hawkish profile, taken with his immaculate clothing, great height, and slim build, nearly stole her breath away. Had he not barged in on her and wreaked havoc on her last shred of peace on the most upsetting day of her life, she might have even been inclined to like him.
Instead, she narrowed her eyes. “Who are you, sir?”
“Archer!” a woman’s throaty, cultivated voice trilled from the doorway. “Please tell me that woman you are accosting is not our Miss Cavendish.”
The man freed his final button and stepped away, turning to the young woman with a mordant smile. “I couldn’t say. I’m afraid we haven’t had a chance for introductions.”
“I am indeed Miss Cavendish. And this is my nursery. May I be of some assistance, or have you merely come to overturn my plants?”
The petite woman sailed inside with a gracious chuckle, her hooped skirts flouncing perilously close to the fragile tendrils of Poppy’s passiflora as she walked.
“Forgive us, Miss Cavendish. My brother has such a curious approach to making introductions. I am Lady Constance Stonewell and this poorly mannered fellow is the Duke of Westmead.”