Page 58 of Miss Beresford and the Beast

She winced. “Did you feel that way too?”

He shook his head. “No. I considered myself too modern for such distinctions of class. It was one thing in London, but here… I believed it better for us to live with our Yorkshire neighbors as equals.” He paused. “It was my fatal mistake.”

Her expression sharpened with alertness. “What do you mean?”

“One day, I was driving home from a visit to Upper Beadwell when I passed Miss Farr on the road. She was returning from the market, struggling with an armful of packages. Her father had a carriage, and plenty of servants to have accompanied her. But that day, she was alone. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was a trap from the first and I too naïve to have spotted it? Regardless… I had my driver stop the carriage and I offered her a ride.”

Charlotte’s countenance went a shade paler. Or possibly it only seemed that way to Magnus because he knew what came next.

“Squire Farr was a widower, and a very rich man by local standards. The chief landowner aside from my father. He had great aspirations for his two children, especially for his daughter. I never imagined they would be in my direction.” Magnus uttered a harsh laugh. “Which just goes to show how skin-deep my belief in equality was. For all my modern thinking, it didn’t occur to me that Miss Farr might reach so high as to consider me a potential suitor. I was blinded by my own arrogance.”

Charlotte studied his face. Her own was unusually grave. “What happened?”

Magnus vaguely registered that his palms had dampened. Bloody stupid. The events had occurred eleven years ago. A different time. A different life. It had no bearing at all on who he was in the here and now.

Yet, it didn’t feel that way in the telling. His mere recitation of the facts resurrected the past for him as vividly as if it had happened yesterday.

“Nothing then,” he said. “I had my driver set her down at the Farr’s house, that was all. But their servants saw it. So did her older brother, Jeremiah. That Sunday, in church, Miss Farr joined us in our pew. It was on some pretext or other. We didn’t object. It had been fifteen years since my mother died. I rather think my father was flattered by her attention.”

Chance pawed at Magnus beneath the table. Charlotte pulled the little dog closer to her by his lead. She dropped him another scrap, her eyes never leaving Magnus’s. “She must have been a very pretty girl.”

“I didn’t see her that way. I didn’t see her at all. More of my arrogance, I daresay. I was for university, then travel abroad. Marriage was for later. I had no particular lady in mind.” Magnus turned the handle of his teacup watching the tea swirl slowly within. “Twice more I encountered her in need of help. Once at a village fete when she required assistance with her rowboat. And once more on the road when I again—stupidly—offered her a ride, this time in an open gig. Within a month, news had reached my father’s ears of a potential engagement.”

“Had you proposed?” Charlotte asked.

Magnus’s brows snapped together in a scowl. “I bloody well hadn’t.”

“Then—”

“It never occurred to me that she was angling for a proposal. The very idea of it—a farmer’s daughter and the heir to an earldom.”

“It’s not unheard of.”

“For my father it was.” Magnus leaned back in his chair. “My mother was the daughter of a viscount. I never knew her. She died when I was still in leading strings. But my father waxed rhapsodic about her at every opportunity. Her grace. Her poise. Her elegant manner. He wed her in London and then set her here like a jewel. Her death…”

“What about her death?”

“I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t the spark that ignited his madness.”

Charlotte’s mouth fell open. “But he wasn’t mad, surely?”

“Look about you, Charlotte. Would a sane man have let his home descend into this state? Granted, he kept it up as long as he could. Constantly striving to have the best. To be the best. To him, reputation was all. He expected me to uphold the same standards.”

“In other words⁠—”

“In other words,” Magnus said, “he was outraged to learn of the gossip about Miss Farr and me. He demanded to know what I had promised her. I assured him that I’d made no promises, and that I would disabuse Miss Farr of the notion at the first opportunity.”

“But if she genuinely believed you had intentions⁠—”

“Miss Farr was a great reader of novels.”

Charlotte’s gaze narrowed. “I’m a great reader of novels.”

“Romance novels?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “What has reading to do with it? You’re not claiming that⁠—”

“Arabella Farr imagined herself a figure in a romance,” Magnus stated. “It was the very thinking that inspired all of the helpless-damsel traps she set for me. And I—oblivious, arrogant, and too preoccupied with my own affairs to properly guard myself—unwittingly fell straight into them.”