Page 116 of The Wallflower Takes All

His face tightened. “Poppy.”

“You said you would help us find a practical solution.”

“Yes, but?—”

“This is the practical solution.”

“You need not decide tonight.”

“You are wrong.” She was proud of how steady she sounded. “I cannot keep waiting for some gentleman to decide whether Mama and I are tolerable enough. Nor can I impose upon Bea and Georgie simply because they love me too well to object. The cottage may be dank. It may be small. Mama may despise it. But it will be a decision I make for myself.”

Gabriel did not take the paper.

Poppy held it steady between them. “Please. Find us a cottage in the country. The least unsuitable one you can manage. Once we arrive, I will see about finding work.”

For one moment, she saw the wound her words had caused. But for once, she refused to comfort the person who had caused her pain.

Then he took the list. His fingers closed around the paper without touching hers. His nostrils flared. “I will make inquiries,” he said.

“Thank you.” The words were perfectly polite. Poppy hated them.

She hated the cottage too. She hated the sad little future it represented, the narrow rooms, the reduced fires, the careful counting of coal. Yet beneath the hurt, beneath the embarrassment, something steadier held. She had chosen for herself.

Gabriel stood before her with his cravat still slightly askew and her list in his hand.

For one breath, she thought he would finally say the thing that might alter everything.

Instead, he bowed. “Good night, Poppy.”

Her name in his voice nearly broke the composure she had fought so hard to preserve.

Poppy lifted her chin. “Good night, Gabriel.”

He left.

The front door closed a few moments later, and the house settled back into its strange, temporary quiet.

Poppy stood alone in the drawing room with Freddie beside her, the wilted flowers upon the mantel, the papers spread across the escritoire, and the distant knowledge that Lady Lemonwood’s ballroom would still be alive with music and possibility.

She touched her fingers to her lips.

Then she straightened the papers and sat down to calculate precisely how much coal a small country cottage might require.

Chapter Nineteen

By nine o’clock the next morning, Gabriel had found three cottages, rejected two, and developed a profound dislike of the third.

The first lay too far from any village to be useful unless Lady Montague learned to milk a cow, bake bread, and exist without an audience. Gabriel considered the chances of that transformation and discarded it at once.

The second had two bedchambers, a serviceable kitchen, and a salon large enough for Lady Montague to call inadequate, but its roof showed signs of past betrayal, and the landlord’s evasive notes suggested he considered rain an occasional visitor rather than a structural concern.

The third was possible, which was precisely why he hated it.

Possible was not the same as right.

It sat outside a small village in Surrey, within reach of provisions and too far from London for casual callers. The rent was within the limits of Lady Montague’s reduced income. The roof was reliable. There was a small garden for Freddie, a salon, two bedchambers, a kitchen, and a landlord whose temper seemed mild enough to withstand poetry, spaniels, and Lady Montague in reasonable quantities.

It also sounded dismal, at least according to the description he’d received. The house was built of weather-darkened stone and approached by a narrow path leading to a crooked little gate. Small windows peered from beneath a slate roof, and even the climbing rose sounded defeated. It was said to bloom “in favorable years,” suggesting it had largely given up.