Percival sat up with Cordelia in his lap.
“We are engaged, if that is at all helpful,” he said to the onlookers.
*
The days thatfollowed comprised perhaps the most unique engagement the duke’s house had ever experienced.
Cordelia would be carried down to the drawing room, while Lord Harveston’s valet would lead him down the stairs to avoid any jostling.
There, they found their preferred corner, the view of its sofa blocked by the hulking pianoforte.
It turned out very convenient that the duke and duchess were such active people. They nearly always had their guests engaged in some sort of activity and the drawing room was theirs alone.
The couple would laugh and think of their good luck on the occasions when some of the exhausted guests would stagger into the drawing room looking for quiet refuge away from the storm of things to do.
They’d had to cover their mouths to stop their laughter when Lord and Lady Ledwellen had collapsed on chairs, entirely unaware of their presence.
Lady Ledwellen had said, “How many days left, Ledwellen. How many days?”
Her lord had answered, “Six. Six more days. We must just survive it, then we will return home and rest a month.”
“We should hide after dinner,” Lady Ledwellen said. “I positively refuse to lawn bowl in the dark again.”
Though it had at first seemed highly inconvenient that Cordelia had sprained her ankle and Harveston had jostled his brain, they were happy to be just where they were.
Whether there was any jostling done in the drawing room…well it seemed there were no lasting ill-effects from it.
Though Lord Harveston would have, in any other circumstances, ridden to the earl’s estate to ask for his daughter’s hand, it was not possible at that very moment.
Instead, he wrote a long letter outlining his case. Cordelia wrote her own letter and enclosed it within. Her father was to know that it had recently been pointed out to her that she was an intellectual of the heart.
The earl’s approval came a few days later, along with a note from Juliet that said she wished for her sister’s happiness and if it must be Harveston, so be it.
They were married three weeks later, at the first opportunity that their injuries allowed.
For a wedding trip, Harveston told Cordelia nothing was out of reach. Wherever she wished to go, they would go.
Rather than setting off to Timbuktu or Bombay, Cordelia chose a small cottage that the lord owned in the Cotswolds. He had described it to her during their long hours together in the duke’s drawing room and it seemed precisely where they should go.
And so it was.
Nestled in a pine forest and miles away from any other being, sat a thatched cottage that only had a caretaker come twice a month to keep it up.
They hauled in everything they would need on a farmer’s cart and settled in for a month.
Amidst the quiet of the forest, where even their footsteps were silenced by a carpet of pine needles, Cordelia and Lord Harveston lolled in bed and had shockingly late breakfasts.
It turned out Lord Harveston could manage cooking eggs and could even get bread toasted sometimes. The rest of the meals were more a roll of the dice and they had smoked themselves out of the cottage on more than one occasion. The lord admitted to thinking the duke and duchess of Dembric Dale had been ridiculous in their inability to cook for themselves, but now he saw the veracity of the situation.
When they were not busy nearly burning the cottage down, they wandered the pine forest and stopped by a favored stream and watched quietly as the small forest animals went about their work. They rather felt like forest animals themselves, as they roamed with Cordelia only in a shift and the lord in just his breeches.
They came to know each other in both mentionable and unmentionable ways and came to know better who and what they were. There were long and languid conversations about histories and views.
Upon hearing of her lord’s childhood household, Cordelia glimpsed a frigid world she could never have imagined. What would she have been, had she been raised in such a house?
Makepeace greatly grew in her estimation, when she was apprised of his opinion of the old baron and his treatment of poor Clara.
Percival, for his part, heard of Cordelia’s household, full of children’s running feet and laughter and Miss Mayton surrounding them with unwavering approval.
