Page 29 of The Marriage Method

“But I wasn’t. I only concussed myself.” Again, she paused, her gray eyes troubled by memory. “I woke a long while later, with an injured leg, some of my teeth knocked loose, and several other cuts and bruises. I’d saved my friend, but destroyed by own future in the bargain.”

“How do you mean?”

“At your office yesterday morning, you asked me if I’d ever wanted to leave the school and go out into the world. The truth is, I did before I fell—quite desperately. I had so many dreams. But not afterward. Since that day, the school has become the whole of my life. I don’t know who I am without it.”

Compassion stirred in Miles’s breast. “You’re the same, surely.”

“Am I?” she wondered. “All of my learning has been theory rather than practice. My visit to the Courant was the first time I’ve left these grounds since the day I arrived as a child. And we saw how swimmingly that went.”

“You’re afraid,” he concluded.

She didn’t deny it.

Miles hesitated. Duty had brought him to this moment, not infatuation or affection. But he couldn’t deny that he felt something for her, even if it was only that same nagging ache of responsibility he’d experienced when he’d handed her into his carriage in Fleet Street. It prompted him to share something he’d never shared with anyone before.

“I was thirteen when I left the Rookery,” he said. “My mother purchased an apprenticeship for me with a printer in the West Country. I had no wish to go. To live among strangers—my betters, supposedly. It meant leaving the one person I loved. Altering everything I was, my whole identity. I was frightened, too. Change is frightening. But that change…It was the making of me.”

Her mouth curved with bitter irony. “And this one will be the making of me, is that it?”

“It will be whatever we make it,” he said.

We.

The single word didn’t appear lost on her. She wasn’t alone in this. For better or worse, they were in it together.

Her bosom rose and fell on an unsteady breath. She lifted her chin. “Well,” she said. “What now?”

“That depends. Do you require a grand wedding? A gown, guests, and so on?”

“No.”

“Good.” Releasing her hand, Miles reached into the inner pocket of his coat and withdrew a piece of paper. He presented it to her without comment.

“What’s this?” She took it, scanning the printed text and signature. Her face drained of color. “A special license?” Her eyes flew to his. “How on earth did you manage it?”

“I went to Doctors’ Commons yesterday afternoon,” he said.

“But this means—”

“That we can marry anywhere, at a time of our choosing, without the necessity of calling the banns.”

Her throat worked on a swallow. “Anywhere and anytime being…?”

“On the return journey to London,” he said decisively. “If we leave now, we can stop off along the way. There’s a vicar I know of in Enfield who will oblige us. We can be married by the time we arrive at my house in St. James’s Square.”

Nell slowly refolded the special license. Her slim shoulders squared like a brave but unwilling recruit about to march into battle. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll collect my things.”

7

Nell couldn’t recall if she’d ever imagined her wedding day as a girl. Marriage had, for so long, seemed an impossibility; so unlikely and unwanted as to make fantasizing about it an exercise in futility. When the moment finally came, when she stood with Miles Quincey—a gentleman she’d known less than forty-eight hours—in the small North London church, hearing the aged vicar pronounce them man and wife, it seemed very much a dream.

And not for any romantical reasons.

The illusion of closeness they’d shared when Miles had taken her hand in the garden had ended as quickly as it had begun. Indeed, to say that their wedding was a businesslike affair would be to vastly understate the matter. Miles had been from the start as logical and unsentimental as Nell had observed him being in most every other respect. When addressed by the vicar, he’d brusquely admitted to not having a ring, equally brusquely answered “I will” at the appropriate place, and then dashed off his name in the register with all the impatience of a man who was late to catch an omnibus.

Nell was relieved that the words from the Book of Common Prayer hadn’t instructed Miles to kiss his new bride. She’d undoubtedly have been subjected to the same variety of unwilling peck on the cheek that a reluctant guardian might bestow on a burdensome ward.

She didn’t let it affect her. She had larger concerns than the questionable sentimentality of her new husband. Even as she signed her maiden name for the final time—Penelope Trewlove—her thoughts were on Academy business.