Page 153 of The Summer Country

She couldn’t be quite sure if he was mocking her. He was much better than she at controlling his emotions. Emily knew everything she felt showed on her face, particularly now. She twisted her hands together. “That isn’t open to anyone else. There’s only one candidate I would consider for that role.”

Nathaniel tilted his head and looked down at her. “Are you proposing to me, Miss Dawson?”

“Not if you would rather I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want to do anything that would put you in an uncomfortable position.” Emily could feel her cheeks flushing, her tongue tangling, her words falling over each other. It was now or never; her mother, she knew, wouldn’t have faltered. She took a deep breath and tried again. “But you should know, if it makes any difference, that I—I love you.”

“Do you?”

The room suddenly felt much smaller, shrunk to the two of them. Emily smiled painfully up at him. “It’s either that or measles. Although I have it on the best authority that love isn’t a medically verified form of death.”

“That wasn’t my diagnosis; it was Shakespeare’s. And he wasn’t, so far as I know, a doctor,” said Nathaniel slowly, as though working out what to say next. “Emily—”

“I don’t think I should die from loving you.” Emily knew she had to say it all now, or she never would. “But I should miss you terribly. I have missed you terribly. I admired you before I loved you. I admired your skill as a surgeon. I admired the way you defied anyone who would make you less than you were. But I ought to have known truly what it was—what I felt—when we were in Bridgetown and I ought to have been mourning Adam and instead all I could think of was you. I could tell myself I was happy because I was doing good and useful work—and I was!—but I’ve been doing the same work here, and without you, I’ve felt . . .”

“Empty?” suggested Nathaniel. “Flat?”

“Both of those,” said Emily. “I would have written you, but I didn’t want to—oh, I don’t know. Presume, I suppose.” It sounded very silly when put that way.

Nathaniel’s lips twisted up on one side. “Half the paper in Bridgetown lies crumpled in the wastebasket next to my desk. I almost wrote you, a dozen times. But I wasn’t sure you would welcome a letter from me.”

Emily bit her lip, hating herself. “I said awful things.”

“No. You didn’t.” Nathaniel’s eyes burned brighter than the coals on the fire. Emily found she couldn’t look away. “You asked me to have the courage of my convictions. Here it is. I love you. There’s no hypothetical in it. I love you. There has never been anyone like you and there will never be again.”

“Some would say that’s a good thing,” said Emily unevenly.

“Then they’re fools,” said Nathaniel shortly. “I’ve never believed in this whole falling-in-love business. Fondness, certainly. Affection. But to be swept away by one’s emotions and lose one’s reason—it seemed like an absurdity. And then you came to Bridgetown.”

“Did you lose your reason?” Emily asked, scarcely daring to breathe.

“I must have done,” said Nathaniel ruefully. “There I was, in the midst of the cholera, with everyone dying around us, up to my elbows in excrescence, and I’ve never been happier, because you were there at the end of it.”

“Those evenings together—I didn’t want them to end.”

“Neither did I. When you left for Beckles—the color left the world. Everything was grim and dark, and smelled horrible.”

“That was probably because I wasn’t there dousing everything with lime,” said Emily practically.

“No,” said Nathaniel. “It was because you weren’t there. As absurd and impractical as it may be, I love you. And because I love you . . .”

“Yes?” Wasn’t this the bit where they were meant to be rushing into each other’s arms? But Nathaniel stayed, stubbornly, where he was.

Quietly, he said, “I love you well enough not to marry you.”

It took Emily a moment for the words to have meaning. “If you love me—” She caught herself up short. He had already told her there was no if about it. “If you love me, why wouldn’t you marry me? There’s no bar to our union. Unless you have a wife left in Edinburgh you neglected to mention.”

“No, only a skeleton named Harold. But he’s beside the point.” Nathaniel rubbed his temples and the simple gesture tore at Emily’s heart. “There might be no legal bar. But have you thought of the consequences? I would be asking you to put yourself beyond the pale, to abandon your friends and relations.”

“Is that all? I’m rather good at putting myself beyond the pale. I don’t need your help with that.” When he failed to smile at that, Emily said passionately, “I mean it. I’ve never cared for society. My parents always took the view that character was what mattered most, and anyone who would shun one out of snobbery wasn’t worth knowing.”

Reluctantly, Nathaniel shook his head. “You might say that now . . .”

“If you don’t want to marry me, if you cannot imagine a life with me, refuse me then. But not for the horridness of others. I don’t care for them if you don’t.” The memory of her parents and grandparents pressed down upon her. Trying to will Nathaniel to understand, Emily said hurriedly, “When Mrs. Davenant was sick, she told me a story about a family broken apart because the law wouldn’t allow them to be together. Well, really, because of her. But the point is, they fought to be together, even when it meant lying and deceiving people and risking prison or worse. And we—we’re so very lucky. We don’t have to hide or pretend to be anybody other than what we are.”

“And what are we?” Nathaniel asked, his voice rough.

Emily took a step toward him, her hands twisted in her skirts. “You’re Nathaniel Braithwaite, a doctor. And I’m Emily Dawson. My mother was a reformer and my father is a minister and I might be neither of those things, but I’m rather good at tending to sick people.”

Nathaniel grasped her hands in his, so hard that she could feel the bones crunch. “I might be tempted to suspect you only want to marry me to have access to a steady stream of patients.”