I asked my man in Ketmore to ensure someone was with her when it arrived. Nora stared at him. You thought of that. You told me she was alone in the house most mornings. She had mentioned it once in passing.
And on the second garden morning in the middle of talking about something else entirely. He had filed it and kept it and used it. The precise, careful attention of it moved through her like warm light. "Could I? " she said. "Yes. " "Ask me properly," she said.
"Not in a garden at dawn. Not in passing. Properly. " He looked at her for a moment. Then he stood. He did not go down on one knee immediately.
Not yet. That would come later in the correct place and time with the correct witnesses. But he stood in front of her and took both her hands and held them in his and looked at her with everything present. Nothing managed, nothing held back. "I want you to be my wife," he said.
"Not because the selection required an outcome. Not because my grandmother arranged a week and I had to choose someone. Because you walked into this house to mend a hem and you moved toward every problem and you told me true things and you said my name and I have not been the same since any of it. " He paused. "I want to spend the rest of my life being looked at the way you look at me. And I want to spend it looking at you. " The library was warm and firelit and Mr.
Aldous Pritt was somewhere down the corridor with his leather case and the dowager was updating her documents and outside the winter sun was making the frost on the garden wall look briefly like something precious. "Yes," Nora said. Plainly. Certainly. The way she did everything that mattered.
He raised her hands and pressed his lips to her knuckles. And when he looked up, his face was the most unguarded she had ever seen it. Open all the way through. Nothing performing. Nothing protecting.