Nicola Cornick - The Notorious Marriage

He thought that his cousin looked as though she would explode and he almost backed away. Beth could be awesome when her anger was roused.

‘Kit,’ Beth said, with reasonable restraint, ‘you are speaking nonsense!’ She took a deep breath. ‘We were not going to tell you this since we both agreed that it was Eleanor’s place to speak to you, but…’ she broke off at Charlotte’s murmured objection ‘…no, Lottie, I cannot keep quiet! For some extraordinary reason Kit thinks himself the injured party, when poor Eleanor is only nineteen and has been reviled and laughed at and ruined through the careless way in which he abandoned her—’ She ran out of breath and started again. ‘And now Kit adds his own voice to the chorus of disapproval! Oh, it makes me so cross!’

‘Yes,’ Charlotte said, in her customary, more measured tones. ‘Beth is correct, you know, Kit!’

Kit held a hand up in surrender. ‘Perhaps I have misjudged the situation…’

Beth glared at him. ‘You have, Kit! Indeed you have!’

‘I am sorry.’

There was a startled silence.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Beth said faintly.

Kit gave her a glimmer of a smile. ‘I know you think I can never apologise…’

‘No, I know it…’

‘Whatever the case…’ Kit grimaced. ‘I had no notion of any of this.’ He looked away. ‘I do not understand. How could Eleanor have been reviled when I was the one who deserted her?’

Beth raised her eyes to heaven.

Charlotte tutted. ‘For all your supposed experience of the world, Kit, I sometimes think you the veriest babe in arms! Do you not know that it is always the woman’s reputation that suffers? If you left her there must have been a reason—so goes the reckoning. In this case the favourite explanation is that you found her not to be virtuous…Which is where the rumours started!’

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