"Why not?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Why aren't you married?" She looked directly at him. "You're old enough."
Old enough. He was eight and twenty. It was a fair, if brutally blunt, assessment.
When he didn’t respond, she added, "Don't you want to be married?"
Sebastian could feel the honest answer pressing against the inside of his ribs, and he had absolutely no intention of sharing it with an eight-year-old in a carriage.
"It isn't that simple," he said.
"It seems simple. You find someone nice, and you marry them. That's what Estella says she's going to do. She says she doesn't need to be in love, she just needs someone kind and responsible." Charlotte frowned. "I told her that sounds horrible."
His hand clenched with a spasm. Kind and responsible. That was what Estella wanted. Or was it all she dared to hope for?
All he knew was it was the very least of what she deserved.
He cut the thought off. What she deserved was irrelevant. What mattered was what she needed, and she needed someone without blood on his hands.
Charlotte was watching him. "Why don't you marry Estella?"
The carriage hit a rut. Sebastian's hand gripped the edge of the seat. "Pardon?"
"I only mean, you must marry, mustn’t you? Isn’t that how a marquess gets an heir?"
Sebastian stared at her, torn between horror and amusement. "Have you been talking to my mother?"
Charlotte's brow furrowed. "No. Why? Does your mother want you to marry Estella too?"
Too. The word implied that Charlotte wanted it, which was—absurd, given that she'd known him for approximately ninety minutes, and for most of that time he'd been sitting silent at a dinner table.
Children had the most astonishing lack of discernment.
But this child was waiting expectantly for an answer. He chose his words carefully. "My mother does indeed want me to marry someone. But it needn't concern you."
Charlotte leaned forward with a frown. "Do you already have a fiancée, then?"
Did he? No. Not yet. But his mother's last letter sat in the top drawer of his desk, and the woman she'd suggested was everything Estella was not. Well-connected, well-funded—and entirely unknown to him.
He’d never met the woman, but he could say with certainty that Lady Clarissa was a woman who would never make him wish for things he didn't deserve.
"I might," he said.
Charlotte's face fell, but she recovered quickly. "Is she nice?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "But I’ve heard that she is."
"You’ve never met her?" Charlotte sounded horrified.
He shook his head, resisting the urge to fidget under her wide-eyed stare. Blast. He would not feel sheepish before a child.
"Then how can you marry her?" Charlotte looked genuinely baffled. "You should marry someone you know. Someone who makes good lemon tarts and doesn't mind that your hand does that."
He looked down at it. "Charlotte?—"
"Estella wouldn't mind," Charlotte continued. "She doesn't mind anything like that. She says that people are more than what they look like on the outside, and that anyone who thinks otherwise isn't worth knowing."
