TWO HOURS LATER, AN EMOTIONALLY drained Margaret was waylaid before she could reach the sanctity of her bedroom. “What on earth is going on?” Julia demanded, guiding her into her sitting room. “First Lochiel turns up completely out of the blue, and the pair of you go off together before I have the opportunity to ask if he intends to spend the night. Then he returns alone and informs me he is going straight back to Dublin and not even staying for your birthday dinner. He was very abrupt, almost rude, and I thought—”
“Donald proposed,” Margaret said baldly, sitting down wearily on one of the chairs by the window. “And I turned him down.” A lump rose in her throat as she recalled the stricken look on his face when he left, but she swallowed hard. “He said he loves me, and I think I might love him, too, but I cannot, Julia. I can’t marry him.”
“Good heavens, whyever not? Admittedly he is not the man your father chose for you, but he is eminently respectable and an excellent catch. You surely cannot be worried that the duke would object to the match?”
“I don’t want or need my father’s approval,” Margaret snapped. “Sorry,” she added, immediately contrite, “I am, as you will have surmised, a little overwrought. I was not expecting . . .” She spread her hands helplessly.
“Has there been no hint in his letters of Lochiel’s intentions?”
“If there were, I missed them.”
“You need time to adjust, that is all. I am sure he thought it a wildly romantic gesture to come here unannounced and propose on your birthday, but it would have been far better if he had adopted a more conventional approach. Doubtless that is what he will do, when his pride has recovered a little.”
“It is not his pride but his heart I have wounded. If you are imagining that he will enlist my father’s help in persuading me to accept his suit, you are much mistaken. Donald knows me far better than that.” Margaret’s lip trembled. “His coming here today, his wildly romantic gesture, as you put it, was exactly the kind of proposal I would have wanted. If only I could have accepted it.” A stray tear escaped, but she scrubbed it away. “But I could not.”
Julia frowned. “I don’t understand. If he really does understand you so well . . .”
“He does! He knows me better than I do myself at times.”
“Do you know how rare a quality that is in a man? And yet you have refused him?”
“Yes!”
“Is it that you don’t return his feelings?”
“No. I didn’t know that I had those sort of feelings for him until today but . . .” Margaret dropped her head into her hands. Julia was making her doubt herself. Ought she to have agreed? But no, no, no, it still felt completely wrong. She lifted her head. “I am simply not ready to be married, Julia, and I told him so. What’s more, thanks to my father, I don’t need to marry. I had a letter from him today. Wait here, I will get it.”
Thinking that it would explain far better than she could, Margaret quickly retrieved the letter from her bedroom, then handed it over, watching anxiously as Julia perused it. But when she reached the end, there was no clearing of her brow, only a deepening of her frown. “I find this shocking in its calculated coldness.”
“The point is I’m free. I am now of independent means.”
“The duke is paying you off. This is the equivalent of a—a divorce settlement between you and your family,” Julia said, her hands shaking as she folded the letter back up and handed it over. “Your father is disowning you. If you accept his terms, you will never see your mother or any of your sisters and brothers again.”
Which of course Margaret understood, though having Julia articulate it made it sickeningly real. “But if I do not accept, I must remain here in limbo, quite powerless.”
“I would be happy for you to remain here, but Lochiel has offered you an alternative.”
“I won’t marry Donald simply to escape my father’s clutches.”
“You have admitted that you love him. He has declared his love for you. Even more importantly, Margaret, you are true friends,” Julia said earnestly. “Do you have any notion how unusual that is, between a husband and wife? Lochiel has everything you could want in a husband. As his wife, you would be re-established in society, accepted back into the family fold, and you’d have the chance to create your own family, too. That is so much more than most women can dream of, yet you . . .” She stared at her, shaking her head. “What more can you possibly want?”
“I don’t know,” Margaret replied wretchedly, knowing that she had already been offered a great deal more than Julia herself had. “I don’t want more. I want—I want something different. I know how fortunate I am to have received such an offer. When Donald proposed I was sorely tempted, of course I was, but I knew it would be a mistake.”
“A mistake! To do what every woman aspires to, to marry and hopefully raise a family? I simply don’t understand you. Do you realise what you are throwing away?”
“I know it must seem perverse to you. I can’t explain it, I simply know that it would be wrong for me.”
“And what of Lochiel?” There were spots of colour in Julia’s cheeks. “How did you explain your rejection to the poor man who has come all this way to lay his heart at your feet?”
“Don’t! I pray you, don’t make me feel any worse than I already do. I told him that I was not ready to be a wife.”
“And so he is to wait patiently until you are ready, then?”
“No! I don’t know if I will ever be ready. I made that clear. I would never be so cruel as to hold out the prospect of false hope, and especially not to Donald. I told him that I must learn to be myself, and now I have the means . . .”
“So you are accepting your father’s thirty pieces of silver?”
Margaret jumped to her feet, leaning her forehead against the cool windowpane as the raindrops rolled down the outside. “That’s unfair! I am already estranged from my family, Julia. I am already forced to accept that I may never see Mama—” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat. “I have had no expectations of seeing my family again since I arrived here. The settlement my father offers doesn’t make that situation any worse, but it does offer me the freedom to live my own life, without being dependent upon anyone or, more importantly, responsible to anyone. I can be myself. Whatever that means.” She smiled grimly. “I intend to find out.”
“How?”
“I’m going to America.”
Julia’s jaw dropped. “Please tell me you are jesting.”
Margaret resumed her seat. “I’m deadly serious, actually.”
“Is this Lewis’s doing? Did he put this ridiculous notion into your head?”
“No, not really. Well, I suppose he sowed the seed with his talk of his own travels.”
“For the love of God, Margaret, if you must travel, why not do what everyone else does, and tour round Europe?”
“That is what Donald suggested.”
“Lochiel is a very sensible man.”
“But I don’t want to be sensible.” Despite all she had been through, the hurt she had caused Donald, a bubble of excitement began to form, quelling her doubts. She had been right to refuse him. And America—yes, that, too, was the right choice of destination. “I need to be somewhere no-one knows me. A place where I can be myself, without the weight of expectation my life entails. Do you see?”
“No, I don’t,” Julia said tartly, looking quite baffled. “Who will protect you from danger? Who will introduce you to society? Where will you live? Dear heavens, even the journey—those transatlantic liners sink all the time. It is also so far away. Half a world away, in fact. If anything happened . . .”
“That’s the whole point: I will have no choice but to stand on my own two feet.”
“No, Margaret, you are being wholly irresponsible. When you have considered the matter more rationally—”
“I don’t want to be rational, Julia.” Margaret leapt to her feet again, smiling, spreading her arms. “I am the black sheep of the family, the outcast. Why on earth would I be sensible?”
“I think you have lost your senses.”
“No, I haven’t, I promise.” She took Julia’s hands in hers. “You have been so good to me, and so kind. Don’t be angry with me, please. Can you not try to understand—”
Julia snatched her hands away. “Think of the ramifications of what you are proposing, Margaret. It seems to me that you are deliberately choosing the most unconventional option, simply to thumb your nose at the duke.”
“My father may choose to interpret it that way, but I can no more dictate his thoughts than he can mine.”
“You are truly set on it, then?”
“Yes.” There was that fizz of excitement inside her again. The future beckoned enticingly for the first time in many months. The prospect of facing the unknown was terrifying, but it was also irresistible. “Yes,” Margaret said firmly. “I truly am set on it.”
Julia sighed, getting to her feet. “Very well, then. I suppose we must turn our thoughts to the practicalities. You will need a travelling companion for a start. You may call it serendipity if you like, but I had a letter the other day from my aunt Marion. She is not really my aunt—she is a friend of my mother’s who was widowed a couple of years ago now. She has no children, and her diplomat husband left her rather badly off. She is forced to live in genteel poverty in Twickenham but has spent most of her life in rather more exotic locations. If you were to offer to pay her return fare and take her on as a companion for a few months until you are settled, I am fairly certain she would leap at the opportunity. You need more than a companion, you need someone well-travelled and worldly wise, and Aunt Marion is most certainly that.”
“Do you think we will get on?”
Julia permitted herself a small smile. “In addition to being extremely practical, she is very outspoken and rather eccentric. I think the pair of you will get along very well indeed.”