Read Chapter 37: The Proposal

The morning light was still grey when Evelyn heard the knock at her door. She had been standing at the window, watching the mist lift from the lawns, her travelling cloak still folded over the chair where she had laid it the night before. In the chaos of their near-departure, she had not yet changed out of her travelling dress.

The knock came again, softer this time, and then Lord Blackwood’s voice, low through the wood. “Evelyn. May I come in?”

She crossed the room and opened the door. He stood in the corridor, still in his riding boots, his coat unbuttoned. His hair was disordered in a way she had never seen it—not from wind, but from restless hands. He looked at her for a long moment, and she realised that he was nervous.

“I thought you would be preparing to leave,” she said.

“I am,” he said. “But there is something I must ask you first. Something I should have asked before I spoke of partners and futures, before I asked you to remain in any capacity at all.”

He stepped inside when she moved aside, and she closed the door behind him. The room was small—the governess’s quarters, she reminded herself, though it had ceased to feel like that—and he seemed too large for it, too full of presence. He turned to face her, and she saw that he was holding a small box in his hand, the sort a jeweller might use, though simpler, worn at the edges.

“I am not a man who does things by halves,” he said. “You know that. You have seen me at my worst—my coldest. You have seen me make decisions that I believed were just and watched them crumble. You have seen me grieve, and you have seen me act with less courage than I should have, many times over.”

“Richard,” she said softly, and he flinched, as though the sound of his own name startled him.

“I have asked you to stay. I have told you that I see you as my equal. But I have not told you what that means, fully, and I will not let us ride to Kent with that unsaid.” He opened the box. Inside, on a bed of faded velvet, lay a ring—a thin gold band set with a small garnet, warm and dark as dried blood. It was not new. It was not grand. It looked as though it had been worn for many years before being set aside.

“This was my mother’s,” he said. “She wore it every day of her life until she died. She gave it to me when I was twelve years old, the summer before her illness took her, and she told me to keep it until I found the woman I would build a life beside. I have carried it through two failed arrangements and years of solitude. I believed, for a long time, that I would never have occasion to give it to anyone.”

He looked at her then, and his eyes were clear and steady, though his hand trembled slightly around the box.

“Evelyn Hartley,” he said. “I am asking you to marry me. Not because I need a governess for my daughter—though she loves you as she has loved no one since her mother. Not because I need a partner to manage my estates—though you have proven yourself more capable than any steward I have employed. I am asking you because I have spent eleven months watching you, and I have spent eleven months finding reasons to speak with you, to walk beside you, to invent tasks that would bring you into my study. I am asking you because when I imagine the rest of my life, I cannot picture it without you in it, and that has never been true of anyone before.”

He closed the box and held it out to her, but did not open it again. He let her take it from his hand.

“I will understand if you refuse,” he said. “I know the cost of the life I am offering. I know that people will talk. I know that Lady Beatrice’s family will use it against us in their fight for Annabel’s inheritance. I know that you are younger than me, and brighter than me, and that you could have any future you wished without the weight of my name dragging at your ankles. But I am not the kind of man who can watch something precious slip away without at least asking.”

Evelyn held the box in both hands. It was warm from his grip. She did not open it. She did not need to. She had seen the ring. She had seen the way he looked at it, and the way he looked at her.

“I have spent my whole life being useful,” she said slowly. “First to my father, then to whatever household would employ me. I have been grateful for every position I have held, and I have never once been sorry to leave them. I thought that was the shape of my life—that I would always be passing through, always lending my hands to someone else’s home, someone else’s children, someone else’s grief.”

She looked down at the box. The garnet glowed faintly in the morning light, like a coal not yet gone cold.

“When you asked me to stay, I said yes because I believed I could do more good here than anywhere else. I meant it. But I did not tell you the whole truth, either.” She lifted her eyes to his. “I said yes because I could not imagine leaving you. I have been telling myself for weeks that my feelings were professional, or that they were gratitude, or that they were simply fear of the unknown. But they are not any of those things. They are simpler, and they are stronger.”

She opened the box. The ring lay against its worn velvet, and she thought of Miss Reeves, who had never been allowed to love openly, who had spent her life holding secrets close to her chest. She thought of Margaret Reeves in Kent, alone, waiting for news of a sister who would never write again. She thought of the life she had imagined for herself—small rooms, borrowed children, a quiet exit at the end of each term.

“I will marry you,” she said.

The words were quiet, but they filled the room. Richard let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for a very long time. He stepped forward, and she thought he might embrace her, but instead he took the box from her hands, removed the ring, and held it between his thumb and forefinger.

“May I?” he asked.

She held out her left hand. It was steady. She had not expected it to be steady.

He slid the ring onto her finger. It was slightly too large, and she turned it so the garnet faced the window, where the light caught it and set it burning.

“It will need to be sized,” he said.

“It is perfect,” she said.

He laughed then—a short, surprised sound, as though he had not expected to make it. He took her hand, the one with the ring, and raised it to his lips. His kiss was light, barely a brush of warmth, but she felt it in her chest, a flutter like a bird testing its wings.

“We have a journey to make,” he said. “And a testament to secure. And a funeral to arrange. And a daughter to tell.”

“Annabel,” Evelyn said, and the name brought her back to herself. She looked at the ring on her hand, and then at him. “We have not told her. We left without even saying goodbye properly.”

“I know,” he said. “I was a coward about that. I thought it would be easier to slip away in the dark than to watch her face when we left.” He shook his head. “We will write to her from the road. And when we return—if we return with the testament—I will tell her everything. About her mother. About Miss Reeves. About us.”

“You will tell her about us,” Evelyn said.

“We will tell her about us,” he corrected. “If I have learned anything from watching you with her, it is that she is not a child to be protected from truth. She is a young woman who has been lied to her whole life, and she deserves honesty from the people who love her.”

Evelyn looked down at the ring again. She thought of her father, who had died believing she would marry some vicar’s son and live a quiet life within sight of a church steeple. She thought of every door that had been closed to her, every position that had ended when the mistress decided she was too clever, too plain, too noticeable. She thought of the ledger in the library, filled with Miss Reeves’s neat, desperate handwriting, recording a crime that no one had been willing to see.

“I can do more as your wife than I ever could as your governess,” she said.

“You can do more as my wife than I ever could as your husband,” he said. “I have told you before that you are the better half of this partnership. I meant it then, and I mean it now. Any good that comes from Blackwood from this day forward will be because of you.”

She smiled, and she felt the smile reach her eyes in a way that had not happened in months. “Then we had better begin.”

He looked toward the window, where the mist was beginning to burn off. “We should go. The horses are ready. Magistrate Hollings will be waiting for us at the crossroads.”

“There is one thing,” she said. She pulled her hand gently from his and crossed to the writing desk. She had been composing a letter to Annabel the night before, but she had not finished it. She took up her pen and wrote two lines on a fresh sheet, folded it, and sealed it with the Blackwood seal that Richard had left on the desk for her use the previous evening.

“What does it say?” he asked.

“It says that I am coming back,” she said. “And that when I do, I will not be leaving again.”

He nodded slowly. He did not ask her to read it aloud. He simply took the folded paper from her hand, slipped it into his coat pocket, and offered her his arm.

“Shall we, Lady Blackwood?” he asked, and the title was a question, a hope, a promise.

“Not yet,” she said, taking his arm. “But soon.”

They walked out of the room together, down the corridor, past the closed door of Annabel’s bedroom, where they stopped for just a moment. Evelyn pressed her palm against the wood, as though she could say goodbye through the grain of it, and then they continued down the stairs, out through the great front door, and into the morning light that was breaking, clean and gold, over the Blackwood lawns.

The carriage was waiting. The horses stamped and snorted into the cold air. The footman held the door open, and Richard handed her up with a formality that made her want to laugh. She sat back against the worn leather seat, and he climbed in after her, taking the seat opposite—not beside her, she noticed, as though he were giving her room to breathe, to change her mind.

She did not change her mind. She turned the ring on her finger, feeling its weight, and she watched the house grow smaller through the window as they rolled down the long drive and turned toward the road to Kent.