Free The Proposal by Mary Balogh Page B

said.
    “You have never wished to marry again?” he asked.
    “Never,” she said—and thought of that strange, crashing loneliness she had felt down on the beach.
    “You loved him, then?” he asked.
    “Yes.” It was true. Despite everything, she had loved Vernon. “Yes, I loved him.”
    “How did he die?” he asked.
    A gentleman would not have asked such a question.
    “He fell,” she told him, “over the balustrade of the gallery above the marble hall in our home. He landed on his head and died instantly.”
    Too late it occurred to her that she might have answered with some truth, as he had done a short while ago— I do not talk about it. Ever.
    He swallowed the food that was in his mouth. But she knew what he was about to ask even before he spoke again.
    “How long was this,” he asked, “after you fell off your horse and lost your unborn child?”
    Well, she was committed now.
    “A year,” she said. “A little less.”
    “You had a marriage unusually punctuated with violence,” he said.
    Her answer had not needed comment. Or, rather, not such a comment. She set her knife and fork down across her half-empty plate with a little clatter.
    “You are impertinent, Lord Trentham,” she said.
    Oh, but this was her own fault. His very first question had been impertinent. She ought to have told him so then.
    “I am,” he said. “It is not how a gentleman behaves, is it? Or a man who is not a gentleman when he is talking to a lady . I have never freed myself of the habit, when I wish to know something, of simply asking. It is not always the polite thing to do, I have learned.”
    She finished the food on her plate, moved the plate to the back of the tray, and drew forward her pudding dish. She picked up her wineglass and sipped from it. She set it down and sighed.
    “My closest family members,” she said, “have always chosen to believe quite steadfastly that Vernon and I had a blissful love relationship that was blighted by accident and tragedy. Other people are notably silent upon the subject of my marriage and my husband’s death, but I can often almost hear them thinking and assuming that it was a marriage filled with violence and abuse.”
    “And was it?” he asked.
    She closed her eyes briefly.
    “Sometimes,” she said, “life is too complicated for there to be a simple answer to a simple question. I did indeed love him, and he loved me. Often our love was blissful. But … Well, sometimes it seemed to me that Vernon was two different people. Often—most of the time, in fact—he was cheerful and charming and witty and intelligent and affectionate and a whole host of other things that made him very dear to me. But occasionally, although he remained in many ways much the same, there was something almost … oh, desperate about his high spirits. And I always felt at such times that there was the finest of fine lines between happiness and despair, and he trod that line. The trouble was that he never came out of it on the side of happiness. He always tumbled the other way. And then for days, occasionally even for a few weeks, he was plunged into the blackest of black moods and nothing I could say or do would pull him free—until one day, without any warning at all, he would be back to his usual self. I learned to recognize the moment when his mood was turning to the overe-xuberant. I learned to dread such moments because there was no coaxing him back from the brink. Though for the last year his moods hovered most of the time between black and blacker. And you are the only person, Lord Trentham, to whom I have spoken of such things. I have no idea why I have broken my silence with a near stranger.”
    She was partly horrified, partly relieved that she had revealed so much to a man she did not even particularly like. Though there was much, of course, that she had not said.
    “It is this place,” he said. “It has been the scene of much unburdening over the years, some of it all but unspeakable