“If you love Mr. Burnham,” Iris said with patience that was more forced than felt, “surely you see that you must tell him about the baby so that he may marry you. I realize that he is not what your family hoped for you—”
“He is a good man!” Fleur interrupted. “I won’t have you denigrating him.”
Lord help me, Iris thought. How could she talk sense when Fleur’s every sentence contradicted the last?
“I would not dream of speaking ill of Mr. Burnham,” Iris said carefully. “I was saying only that—”
“He is a wonderful man.” Fleur crossed her arms belligerently, and Iris wondered if she’d even noticed that no one was arguing with her. “Honorable and true.”
“Yes, of course—”
“Better than any of the so-called”—she sneered the last—“gentlemen I see at local assemblies.”
“Then you should marry him.”
“I can’t!”
Iris took a long, steadying breath through her nose. She was never going to be the sort of woman who cradled distraught friends and sisters in her arms and murmured, “There, there.”
She decided she was at ease with that.
Instead, she was the plainspoken, occasional termagant who yelled, “For the love of God, Fleur, what the devil is wrong with you?”
Fleur blinked. And stepped back. With real concern in her eyes.
Iris forcibly unclenched her teeth. “You already made one mistake. Don’t compound it with another.”
“But—”
“You say you love him, but you don’t respect him enough even to tell him he is to be a father.”
“That is not true!”
“I can only deduce that your refusal has to do with his social status,” Iris said.
Fleur gave a small, bitter nod.
“Well, if that’s the case,” Iris snapped, shaking a finger perilously close to Fleur’s nose, “you should bloody well have taken that into consideration before you gave him your virginity.”
Fleur’s jaw jutted out. “It wasn’t like that.”
“As I was not there, I will not argue with you. However,” Iris said pointedly when she saw Fleur open her mouth to argue, “you did lie with him, and now you’re pregnant.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?”
Iris decided to ignore this utterly superfluous question. “Let me ask you this,” she said instead. “If you are so concerned about your position, why are you fighting Richard about adopting the baby? Surely you see that it’s the only way to protect your reputation.”
“Because it’s my baby,” Fleur cried. “I can’t just give it away.”
“It’s not as if it would go to strangers,” Iris said as callously as she could manage. She had to push Fleur to the edge. She could think of no other way to make her see sense.
“Don’t you see that that is almost worse?” Fleur’s face fell into her hands, and she began to weep. “To have to smile when my child calls me his aunt Fleur? To have to pretend it doesn’t kill me every time he calls you his mama?”
“Then marry Mr. Burnham,” Iris pleaded.
“I can’t.”
“Why the bloody hell not?”
Iris’s foul language seemed to give Fleur a momentary jolt, and she blinked.
“Is it Marie-Claire?” Iris asked.
Fleur slowly raised her head, her eyes red and wet and so heartbreakingly bleak. She did not nod, but she did not need to. Iris had her answer.
Marie-Claire had said it all earlier that morning. If Fleur married her brother’s tenant farmer, the local scandal would be stupendous. Fleur would no longer be welcome in any of the better homes in the area. All the families with whom she’d socialized would turn their heads and pretend not to see her when they crossed paths in the village.
“We British do not think warmly of those who dare to trade one social class for another,” Iris said with wry inflection, “whether the movement be up or down.”
“Indeed,” Fleur said, her smile small, wobbly, and humorless. She touched a tightly furled rosebud, her fingers sliding across the pale pink petals. She turned abruptly, regarding Iris with an expression that was disconcertingly devoid of emotion. “Did you know that there are over one hundred species of roses?”
Iris shook her head.
“My mother bred them. She taught me a great deal. These”—Fleur trailed her hand along the leaves of the climbing vines behind her—“are all centifolia roses. People like them because they have lots of petals.” She leaned forward and gave a sniff. “And they are quite fragrant.”