Chapter One

 

 

“Mary, if you tell me one more time that the blue ribbon is more practical, I will leave you here with the fishmonger and his opinions about mackerel.”

“I am only saying, miss, that the green will show every spot of rain, and it has been threatening all morning.”

“It has been threatening all morning because this is London and London does not know how to do anything else.” Marietta Potter held the green ribbon up to the light, watching the silk catch the pale glow that filtered through the market stalls. It was a ridiculous purchase. She could not afford ribbons or the pins holding her hair in place, strictly speaking, since the pin money her father had promised at the start of the season had never materialised and was unlikely to appear all of a sudden, , given that his idea of financial planning involved a bottle of whiskey and a card table.

But the ribbon was beautiful. It was the exact green of new leaves in spring, and Marietta had decided, sometime around her twenty-second birthday, that she was entitled to beautiful things even if the world disagreed.

“The green,” she said to the vendor, and pressed her last shilling into his palm before Mary could object.

Mary did object, naturally, because Mary had been objecting to Marietta’s decisions since Marietta was twelve years old and had announced her intention to climb the elm tree behind the vicarage during a thunderstorm. Mary had been right about the elm tree. Marietta had broken her wrist and spent six weeks in a splint, scowling at everyone who told her it was her own doing. But Mary had been wrong about other things since then, and Marietta preferred to remember the times Mary was wrong, because it made the green ribbon feel less irresponsible.

She was tucking the ribbon into her basket and turning to tell Mary that they ought to stop at the cheese stall before the good cheddar was gone when something large and solid collided with her from behind.

The impact was not gentle. It drove the breath from her lungs and sent her stumbling forward into the edge of a vegetable cart, her parcels scattering across a display of turnips with a clatter that turned every head within ten feet. A hand caught her arm before she went down entirely, fingers closing around her elbow with a grip that was firm and steadying and entirely too familiar for a stranger’s touch, and for one disorienting heartbeat she was pressed back against the solid wall of a man’s chest, the warmth of him radiating through her spencer, the scent of something clean and expensive filling her nose.

She did not see his face. She saw his hand on her arm, large and ungloved, the fingers long and precise. She felt the breadth of his body against her back, the way his other hand hovered near her waist as if deciding whether to steady her further or release her. She felt the heat of him, close and startling, the kind of warmth that sank through fabric and settled against skin.

And then instinct overtook thought, because a man she did not know had his hands on her in a public street, and Marietta Potter had spent enough years navigating the world without a protector to know that hesitation was a luxury she could not afford.

She spun and slapped him across the face.

The crack of her palm against his cheek was sharp enough to silence the surrounding chatter. A woman at the next stall gasped. The cheese vendor paused mid-sentence. Mary made a sound that was half horror and half resignation, the particular sound she reserved for situations where Marietta had done something that could not be undone and would almost certainly need to be explained to someone later.

Marietta looked up.

The man was tall. That was the first thing she registered, because she had to tilt her head back considerably further than expected, and Marietta was not short. He was broad across the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with padding, dark-haired, and dressed with the kind of severe, immaculate tailoring that whispered money so quietly it did not need to shout. His jaw was hard. His mouth was set in a line that might have been carved from marble. And his eyes, pale blue and startlingly clear against the dark frame of his lashes, were looking down at her with the flat, assessing regard of someone cataloguing an insect and deciding whether it was worth the effort of stepping on.

He remained unmoved. The mark of her hand was rising pink against his cheekbone, and he did not so much as blink.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. His voice was low, unhurried, and so devoid of warmth that she felt the temperature drop between them. “I did not see you.”

“Then perhaps you should take greater care and mind where you are going.”

“Perhaps you should not assault strangers in the street.”

“Perhaps strangers should not put their hands on me.”

He inclined his head with a courtesy so icy it might have frozen the Thames.

“Duly noted,” he said, and stepped around her, and vanished into the crowd as if he had never existed at all.

Marietta stood among the scattered turnips with her palm stinging and her heart hammering against her ribs and a strange, unwelcome heat blooming across her chest where his body had pressed against hers. She watched the space where he had disappeared and felt something she refused to name settle beneath her breastbone.

“Miss.” Mary was at her elbow, picking up parcels, her expression carefully neutral in the way it always was when she was saving her opinions for a private moment. “Are you quite well?”

“Perfectly well.”

“You have just struck a man in the face before a multitude of witnesses.”

“He should not have touched me.”

“He was catching you before you fell into the turnips.”

“Then he should have caught me more politely.”

Mary pressed her lips together. Marietta could see the lecture building behind her eyes, assembling itself brick by careful brick, but Mary looked at Marietta’s face and swallowed it.

“The green ribbon survived,” Mary offered sheepishly instead, holding it up.

Marietta took it. Her hand was still trembling. She closed her fingers around the silk and told herself it was only anger, and not the phantom sensation of a stranger’s body against her back and the clean, warm scent of cedar and skin lingering on her clothes.

 

***

 

“You look as though someone has stepped on your hem,” her father said that evening, not looking up from the glass in his hand. The study smelled of whiskey and stale tobacco and the particular variety of neglect that comes from a man who has given up on the room and himself in equal measure. “Smile, girl. Lord Whitmore’s wife has a sharp eye for sulking.”

“I am not sulking.”

“You are standing in my doorway with a face that could curdle milk. If that is not sulking, it is a creditable imitation.” He drained the glass and refilled it from the decanter on his desk, the amber liquid catching the lamplight. He still did not look at her. “The Whitmore ball begins at nine. You will attend. You will be pleasant. You will dance if asked.”

“Father.”

“You will not argue with me tonight, Marietta. I am tired.”

He was always tired. He had been tired for nine years, since the morning Marietta’s mother had failed to wake up and everything in the Potter household had begun its slow, irreversible slide into ruin. Tired was his word for it. Marietta had other words, but she kept them locked behind her teeth because using them had never once changed anything, and she had learned by now to conserve her ammunition for battles she could win.

She looked at her father, hunched in his chair, his waistcoat stained, his cravat hanging loose and crooked. Her mind turned to the mother who had held this man in such high esteem, given him her hand, and believed in him implicitly, and she felt the old, familiar ache settle in her chest. Not grief, exactly. Grief implied something lost. This was more like the dull awareness of an absence that had been present so long it had become architecture.

“Nine on the hour.” she said, and went to find Mary.

 

***

 

Lord and Lady Whitmore’s ballroom was precisely the kind of glittering, overheated spectacle that Marietta would have enjoyed immensely if she had been anyone other than herself. The chandeliers threw prismatic light across a sea of silk and superficiality, the orchestra played with more enthusiasm than skill, and every conversation she could overhear involved either the weather, the scandalous cost of candle wax, or somebody’s unattached daughter.

She positioned herself near the wall, half-hidden behind a potted fern that was that was doing its utmost to fade away unobserved in the corner, and surveyed the room with the detached attention of someone who had long since accepted that she was not part of the performance. Her gown was two seasons old. Her gloves had been mended at the wrist. The green ribbon was threaded through her hair because Mary had done something clever with pins and determination, and it was the only new thing she owned.

She was calculating how long she could remain behind the fern before someone noticed when the room changed.

It was not a sound, precisely. It was more like a shift in pressure, the way the air changes before a storm, a subtle rearrangement of attention that rippled outward from the ballroom entrance. Conversations faltered. Heads turned. A woman near the refreshment table touched her hair with the unconscious vanity of someone who has just become aware of being observed.

Marietta followed the collective gaze to the entrance, and her stomach fell through the floor.

It was him.

The man from the marketplace. The man she had slapped in front of a vegetable cart and a multitude of witnesses. He was standing in the doorway in evening clothes so dark they seemed to absorb the candlelight, and the severe, angular beauty of his face was even more devastating by lamplight than it had been in the grey drizzle of a London morning. He wore black as if it were armor. He stood as if the room had been built for the specific purpose of giving him something to survey. And when his gaze swept the ballroom, unhurried and thorough, it stopped when it reached the fern which was slowly in demise in its corner.

His gaze locked with hers, and for a breathless interval, neither could look away. A sudden, violent tremor of her pulse throbbed against her throat, threatening to betray her entire composure with the heat she had spent the entire afternoon refusing to acknowledge roared back to life in her chest, traitorous and immediate.

The Whitmores’ butler drew a breath that carried to every corner of the room.

“His Grace, the Duke of Wyndham.”

A duke. The thought arrived with distant clarity .She had slapped a duke in the street, in front of turnips.

Of all the men in London. Of all the men I could have struck in broad daylight. A duke. The Duke of Wyndham. The Marchettis, the family whose Florentine forebears had crossed the Channel two centuries ago and planted themselves so deep in English soil that only the name remained to mark their origins. I have heard of him. Everyone has heard of him. They call him the cold titles. They say his servants do not speak above a whisper.

They say his own mother could not make him laugh before she passed away, and that he delivered the eulogy at her funeral without a single crack in his voice. They say he has never wanted anything badly enough to lose his composure, and that the only warmth about him is the fortune he sits on.

And I slapped him.

My hand still tingles.

I wonder if his face still stings.

I hope so.

He was crossing the ballroom. The crowd parted for him the way water parts for the prow of a ship, effortlessly, instinctively, and he moved through the opening as if he had never expected anything less. His stride was long and unhurried, and he did not look left or right, did not acknowledge the murmured greetings or the curtseys that bloomed in his wake like flowers bending toward a frost.

He was walking directly toward her.

Marietta straightened her spine, lifted her chin, and prepared to depart this world with dignity behind a failing fern.

He stopped three feet from her. Close enough that she caught his scent again, cedar and candlelight and something beneath it that was simply him, warm and clean and faintly unsettling in its intimacy. Close enough that she could see the faintest shadow of a mark on his left cheekbone where her palm had connected that morning.

Excellent. She harbored a fervent hope that it would leave a lasting mark.

“Miss Potter,” he said.

Her name in his mouth was a strange sensation. He said it precisely, each syllable given its full weight, as though he had taken the trouble to learn it in the hours between the marketplace and this moment. As though her name were something worth pronouncing correctly.

“Your Grace.” She curtsied. It was not a good curtsey. Mary would have winced. “I was not aware we had been introduced.”

“We have not. I made enquiries.”

“You made enquiries about the woman who slapped you in the street?”

“I make enquiries about everyone who strikes me. It is a short list. You are, in fact, the only name on it.”

She felt the absurd urge to laugh and crushed it ruthlessly. He was watching her face with that same unnerving attention from the marketplace, those pale eyes tracking every shift in her expression as if she were a text written in a language he was determined to translate.

“I believe,” he continued, his voice pitched low enough that only she could hear, “that you owe me an apology.”

“I believe that you owe me one first. You knocked me into a vegetable cart.”

“I steadied you before you fell.”

“You put your hands on my person without invitation.”

“A courtesy that was repaid with violence.”

“A liberty that was met with appropriate consequence.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. It was not a smile. It did not resemble a smile. It was the ghost of a smile’s ghost, the barest suggestion that somewhere beneath the marble exterior, something was capable of being amused.

“You are blushing,” he observed.

“I am not.”

“Your throat is flushed. Your cheeks are pink. Your breathing has changed. You are blushing, Miss Potter, and I suspect you are furious about it.”

She was. She was absolutely furious about it, because her body was betraying her in ways that had nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with the fact that he was standing close enough for his warmth to reach her through the thin fabric of her gown, and the low register of his voice was doing something inadvisable to her nervous system. Heat prickled along her collarbone. Her skin felt too tight. She was acutely, horribly aware of the rise and fall of her own breathing and the fact that his gaze had dropped, just for an instant, to the place where her pulse fluttered at the base of her throat before returning to her eyes.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. He noticed everything.

“I am memorable, then,” she said, because attack was the only strategy she had left.

“Exceedingly.” He said it without inflection, without warmth, but the word landed like a hand placed deliberately against bare skin, and the flush she was denying climbed higher.

“Your Grace.” A new voice, warm and easy, arrived at her elbow with the practiced timing of a man accustomed to inserting himself into conversations at precisely the right moment. “I see you have met Miss Potter.”

Lord Thomas Ashby was everything the Duke of Wyndham was not, at least on the surface. Where Elliot was dark, severe, and built along lines that suggested a sculptor had been given a commission for something intimidating, Thomas was golden-haired and smiling, his features open and pleasant, his manner the kind of effortless charm that put people at ease before they had time to wonder whether they should be. He was handsome in the conventional way, the way that made mothers nudge their daughters and daughters pretend not to look.

“Miss Potter and I are old acquaintances,” Thomas said, and there was something in his voice that she could not quite place. A warmth that did not reach the flat, watchful quality of his hazel eyes. “We were introduced two seasons ago. Were we not, Miss Potter?”

“We were.” Marietta kept her voice even. Thomas Ashby had courted her, briefly and persistently, during the worst year of her life. She had been alone, frightened, drowning in her father’s debts, and Thomas had appeared with flowers and flattery and an attention that had felt, at the time, like rescue. She had refused him. She had refused him because something in the way he looked at her had made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, a wrongness she could not articulate but could not ignore, and she had learned long ago to trust the instincts that kept her alive when no one else was watching.

He had taken the refusal graciously. His smile had not changed. His courtesy had not wavered. But something behind his eyes had shifted, and she had never forgotten the flat, cold quality of his expression when he thought she was no longer looking.

“Elliot is my oldest friend,” Thomas said now, laying his hand on the duke’s arm with the casual possessiveness of long familiarity. “We were at Cambridge together. I should warn you, Miss Potter, he is appalling company at parties. He once stood in a corner for the entirety of a Michaelmas ball and frightened two debutantes into tears simply by existing.”

“I spoke to one of them,” Elliot said. “She was standing on my foot.”

“You see? Appalling.” Thomas smiled at her. His teeth were very white. “May I fetch you a glass of wine, Miss Potter? You look as though you could use one.”

“Thank you, my lord. That is kind.”

Thomas inclined his head and disappeared into the crowd with the smooth efficiency of a man who had mastered the art of the graceful exit. Marietta watched him go and felt the skin along her arms prickle in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.

She turned back to find Elliot watching her with an expression she could not read.

“He is your friend,” she said.

“He is.”

“He is very charming.”

“He is.” A pause, barely perceptible. “You do not trust him.”

It was not a question. Marietta felt something cold slide through her stomach. She opened her mouth to deny it, to say something polite and deflecting, and found that she could not. He regarded her with those clear, pale eyes, and she felt that to offer him a falsehood was both an impossibility and an utterly dangerous folly.

“I did not say that.”

“You did not need to. Your shoulders shifted when he touched my arm. You tracked him across the room rather than observe him leave. And you are gripping your fan as though you intend to use it as a weapon.” He tilted his head, studying her. “You have good instincts, Miss Potter.”

“That is not a confirmation that my instincts are correct.”

“No. It is not.”

The orchestra struck up a waltz. Around them, the ballroom swirled into motion, couples pairing off with the choreographed casualness of people who had been performing the same steps since they could walk. Marietta stayed where she was, beside the fern, with the Duke of Wyndham standing close enough that she could count the stitches in his waistcoat.

“Will you dance?” he asked.

“Are you asking me to dance, Your Grace?”

“I am observing that the music has begun and enquiring whether you intend to participate.”

“That is the most reluctant invitation I have ever received.”

“I do not extend invitations. I state facts and allow others to draw conclusions.”

She looked at him. The mark on his cheek was fading. His countenance was composed, impenetrable, and quite beautiful in the way that cliffs are beautiful: striking and remote and entirely indifferent to whether you survived the fall. And beneath that composure, so faint she might have imagined it, something was watching her. Something that was not indifferent at all.

“Goodnight, Your Grace,” she said, and walked away before he could respond, before the heat crawling up her throat could reach her face again, before her voice could betray what her body already knew.

She kept her eyes forward. His gaze followed her anyway , she could feel it on her, steady and precise and faintly searing, all the way across the ballroom and out through the doors and into the cool night air where she stood on the Whitmores’ front steps and pressed her stinging palm against the stone railing and breathed.

Behind her, in the bright, hot swirl of the ballroom, the Duke of Wyndham stood exactly where she had left him, beside a failing fern, and watched the empty doorway she had walked through.

He did not follow.

He did not stop watching.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“Sit down, Marietta.”

Her father’s voice carried the particular flatness of a man who had been drinking since noon and had arrived at the other side of it, past slurring and belligerence and into the hollow calm that frightened her more than either. He was sitting behind his desk in the study, though “study” was generous for what the room had become. The shelves were half-empty, the better volumes had been sold off quietly over the past two years. The carpet was heavily stained. The curtains were drawn against a Tuesday afternoon, and the only light came from a single lamp whose oil was running low, casting shadows that made her father look older than his three and fifty years and considerably less alive.

The room smelled of whiskey and stale smoke and something underneath both that Marietta had come to associate with surrender. She had been summoned by a note slipped under her bedroom door, written in her father’s hand, the letters uneven but legible. Come to the study. Now.

She did not sit. She stood in the doorway with her hands clasped in front of her and waited.

“I said sit down.”

“I heard you. I prefer to stand.”

He fixed his eyes upon her then with true discernment, and something passed over his face that closely resembled recognition, as if he had forgotten her appearance and was surprised to find a woman grown where he had expected a child to stand before him. Then the mask returned. He reached for his glass, and the moment was utterly lost.

“You are to be wedded,” he said. “To the Duke of Wyndham.”

The words landed in the space between them and lay there, inert and impossible. Marietta stared at her father. He stared at his glass. The lamp guttered, and in the shifting light his face resembled something left too long in water.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Duke of Wyndham. Elliot Marchetti. You met him at the Whitmore ball three nights ago. He has offered for you, and I have accepted.”

Three days had passed since she had slapped a duke beside a vegetable cart and then fled his presence at a ball, and now she was apparently betrothed to him. The absurdity of it was so complete that for a moment she could not find the shape of a response.

“Why would a duke enter into a matrimony with me?” she asked, and her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was a small mercy. “I have no fortune. No connections worth mentioning. No reputation beyond being the daughter of a man who has gambled away everything he ever owned. What possible reason could the Duke of Wyndham have for wanting to attach himself to this family?”

Her father set down his glass. He did not refill it. That, more than anything, told her something was coming that would hurt.

“Potter House is being seized,” he said. “The debts have been called in. All of them. The bailiffs come Friday. Within the week, the house, the furnishings, the silver, everything will be gone. You will have nothing. Mary will have nothing. I will have nothing.”

She had known, in the abstract way one knows about a wound before the bandage comes off, that matters were amiss. She had witnessed the household staff diminish from twelve to six, until a scant three servants remained. She had noticed the empty hooks on the walls where paintings had hung, the gaps in the china cabinet, the way her father winced when letters arrived. But hearing it spoken aloud, in the flat, clinical language of a man who had already accepted his own destruction, was different. It was the bandage coming off, and the wound beneath it was worse than she had imagined.

“Why,” she said again, and this time the word was sharper. “Why would a duke involve himself in our ruin? What does he owe us?”

Her father was quiet for a long time. Long enough that the lamp sputtered unsteadily twice and the room seemed to contract around them, growing smaller and closer and harder to breathe in. When he finally spoke, his voice had changed. The flatness was gone. In its place was something raw and old and exhausted, the voice of a man setting down a weight he had carried for so long that his spine had curved around it.

“Because his father was a thief,” he said. “And I was a fool.”

 

***

 

It was at that moment when he made a full and unreserved confession to her.

The old Duke of Wyndham, Elliot’s father, had embezzled from the family trust. Not a modest sum quietly diverted, but a staggering fortune, siphoned over years from a fund meant to support the estate’s tenants, dependents, and the families who relied on Wyndham generosity for their livelihoods. Gambling debts and his private indulgences were the result of a slow, insatiable appetite of a man who believed his title placed him above consequence. If it had been discovered, the Wyndham name would have been dragged before Parliament. The estates seized. The title stripped of everything but its hollow syllables.

The old duke had come to her father in a panic. They had been friends since boyhood. Schoolfellows, then companions, then the kind of friends who knew each other’s worst secrets because they had been present for most of them. Her father had held the old duke in his affections the old duke the way loyal men cherish their friends: completely, uncritically, with a faith that did not require proof because it had never been tested.

And when the test came, her father had not hesitated.

He forged documents. He restructured accounts. He used his own name, his own connections, and his own reputation as collateral to paper over the hole the old duke had torn in his family’s finances. He affixed his signature to documents that might well have cost him his liberty. He put himself between his friend and ruin, and he did it because he believed, with the unshakeable certainty of a man who had never been betrayed, that the old duke would make things right. Would repay the money. Would acknowledge the risk. Would, at the very least, remember what had been done for him.

The old duke never made things right. He never repaid a single penny. He never acknowledged the danger her father had shouldered. He simply continued living as the Duke of Wyndham, grand and untouchable, while Marietta’s father carried the weight of what they had done together, alone. The guilt. The forgeries. The slow, corrosive knowledge that his loyalty had been consumed and discarded like kindling.

And then the old duke passed away. He simply ceased to be, leaving behind a ruin of guilt, scandal, and unliquidated debt sitting among his papers like an unsolicited confession.

“So I ruined myself for a man who forgot me the moment I was no longer useful,” her father said. His voice was flat. Empty. The whiskey sat untouched beside his hand. “And now his son wants to make it right by taking you as his wife. As though a wedding could settle what is owed.”

Marietta stood very still. The room felt altered, as though the furniture had rearranged itself while she was not looking. She thought of the drinking. The gambling. The slow, deliberate destruction of everything they had owned. She had spent years believing her father was weak. Dissolute. A man who had simply given up.

She understood now. He had not given up. He had been broken. Broken by a friend who had used his loyalty like currency and spent it without a thought.

It did not excuse the years. It did not undo the nights she had spent awake, calculating whether they could afford flour. It did not mend the distance between them or return the father she remembered from before her mother passed on the man who had laughed easily and swung her onto his shoulders and told her she was brave. The man who had taken her to Derbyshire every summer, to the village where her mother had grown up, where the hills rolled green and endless and the stone walls ran along the lanes like sentences that never ended. She had been wild in Derbyshire. She had climbed trees and run barefoot through orchards and befriended the Langley boy from the neighboring farm, and the two of them had spent whole days in the fields doing nothing of consequence and believing that nothing of consequence was all the world required. She had not been back since her mother’s demise. She had not thought of it in years, and now the memory surfaced like something dredged from deep water, heavy and dripping and impossible to set down.

But it explained him. And that was something.

“Does Elliot know?” she asked. “Does the duke know what his father did?”

“He found it all in the old man’s papers. Every document. Every forged signature with my name on it. He has known for months, apparently. He has been investigating, quietly, through solicitors, the extent of the damage. When he discovered the debts had been called in and that we would be turned out by the end of the week, he came to me directly. Three days ago. The morning after the Whitmore ball.” Her father’s voice was flat. “He said matrimony was the fastest means of bringing us under the protection of the Wyndham name and fortune. That any financial arrangement short of it could be contested by creditors. He was… thorough.”

“He knows exactly what his family owes mine.”

Marietta was silent for a long moment. She looked at her father, and he looked at his glass, and neither of them said the things that pressed against the inside of their throats. She thought about saying I am sorry. She thought about saying You should have told me. She thought about crossing the room and putting her arms around him, this diminished man in his stained waistcoat, this ruin of a father who had once carried her on his shoulders.

She did not do any of those things, because tenderness between them had become a language neither of them remembered how to speak.

Instead, she straightened her spine and smoothed her skirts and said, “I need to speak with the Duke of Wyndham. Tonight.”

Her father looked up. Something flickered in his reddened eyes. Surprise, perhaps. Or recognition of the girl who had climbed the elm tree in a thunderstorm and broken her wrist and scowled at everyone who told her it was her own fault.

“Marietta,” he merely uttered her name, nothing more.

“Tonight,” she repeated, and left him in his study with his empty glass and his full confession and the low, sputtering light.

Tears would have been a relief. The anger burned them away before they could form.

 

***

 

“Miss Potter.” The Duke of Wyndham’s butler was a man of considerable composure, but even considerable composure had its limits, and a young woman arriving unannounced at half past nine in the evening with dirt on her hem and fury in her eyes was evidently past them. “His Grace is not receiving visitors.”

“His Grace is receiving me. Step aside, please.”

“I must insist that you return at a suitable hour, and with a suitable chaperone, and perhaps with the suitable courtesy of a written request. His Grace’s schedule is…”

But Marietta was already past him, because she had spent years learning that doors only remained closed if you waited for someone to open them, and she had stopped waiting a long time ago. She moved through the entrance hall with the certainty of a woman who did not belong there and did not care, following the light and the faint scent of brandy down a corridor until she found an open door and, beyond it, a study lined with books and lit by a fire that had been burning for hours.

Elliot was standing by the mantelpiece. He held a glass of something amber in one hand and a letter in the other, and when Marietta appeared at the threshold, windblown and breathing hard, something shifted behind his face. A rearrangement, quick and controlled, as though he had been caught in an expression he did not wish to explain and had smoothed it away before she could read it.

Surprise. She was almost certain it was surprise. It looked deeply unfamiliar on him.

“Miss Potter.” He set the letter down. “You are not expected.”

“I am aware.” She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. The butler’s protests faded down the corridor. “Please sit down, Your Grace. We need to discuss terms.”

He did not sit. He leaned against the edge of his desk and folded his arms across his chest, and the firelight threw the angles of his face into sharp relief, catching the hard line of his jaw and the unsettling clarity of those pale eyes. He was in shirtsleeves. She had not expected that. The absence of his coat and cravat should have made him look less imposing, but it had the opposite effect. The white linen of his shirt was open at the throat, and she could see the hollow at the base of his neck, the suggestion of a collarbone, a triangle of skin that was warmer-toned than she would have expected from a man everyone called ice.

She shyly cast away her gaze and looked down.

He bore witness to her nervousness as he observed her calmly and unhurriedly and she knew, with a certainty that made her stomach tighten, that he had seen exactly where her attention had gone.

“You have terms?” he said. His voice gave away nothing.

“I have conditions. Two of them. If you want this matrimony to proceed, you will agree to both.”

He studied her. She was trembling. She had been trembling since the study, since her father’s confession, and she was fighting to hide it, but the tremor was in her hands and her voice and the set of her jaw, and she knew he could see it. He saw everything.

She lifted her chin and held his gaze and let him look. Let him see the anger. Let him see the knowledge sitting behind her eyes, sharp and heavy and fully formed, because she wanted him to understand that she was not walking into this arrangement blind. She knew what his father had done. She knew what her father had sacrificed. And she was looking at him with the full weight of that knowledge pressing against every word she was about to speak.

Something shifted in his expression. Not guilt, exactly. Something more complex than guilt. The quiet, unwavering recognition of a man standing in a house his family’s crime had preserved, looking at the woman whose family had paid for it.

“I am listening,” he said.

“First. I will not be corrected, managed, or spoken for in public. I am aware that I do not know how to be a duchess. I do not know the correct fork for the fish course or the proper form of address for an archbishop or which topics of conversation are suitable for a drawing room and which will have me quietly removed from a dinner party. I will learn. I will learn at my own pace, in my own way, and if I embarrass you at a supper or say the wrong thing to the wrong countess, that is your burden to carry in silence. You shall not reshape my disposition merely to serve your own accommodation.”

She did not say: Your family has already reshaped my life enough. She did not need to. It sat between them like a third person in the room.

Elliot’s face did not change. He regarded her for a long, measured moment, his arms still folded, his body still, and then the corner of his mouth moved by a fraction that might have been acknowledgment.

“I would not presume to reshape you, Miss Potter. You are already quite…” He paused, as though selecting a word from several options and discarding the ones that were too revealing. “Fully formed.”

“Is that a compliment or an insult?”

“It is an observation. Your first condition is accepted. What is the second?”

The second.

She had rehearsed this. She had rehearsed it in the carriage, muttering the words under her breath while the driver navigated the evening traffic, and she had rehearsed it walking up the front steps, and she had rehearsed it in the entrance hall while the butler sputtered. She had rehearsed it because she knew, with absolute certainty, that if she did not push through the embarrassment, she would lose her nerve, and she had promised herself she would not lose her nerve tonight. Not about this. Not about anything.

Color crept up her throat. She felt it climbing, unstoppable, and she loathed it.

“I have spent years,” she said, her voice steady despite the heat in her face, “listening to my wedded friends. Women who were courted with poetry and promises. Women who were desired and pursued and made to feel, for the length of a courtship, that they were the center of someone’s world. And within months of their weddings, they found themselves lying beside men who had stopped trying entirely. I have watched matrimonies curdle into quiet endurance. I have observed women shrink.”

The room was very still. The fire crackled. Elliot had not moved, but something in the quality of his attention had changed, sharpening to a focus that was almost physical.

“If I enter into matrimony with you,” she continued, and the heat in her face was a furnace now, consuming, but her voice held, “I expect to be satisfied. I will not lie beside a husband who treats the matrimonial bed as an obligation to be endured twice a year in the dark.”

The silence that followed was enormous.

It filled the room. It pressed against the walls and the windows and the books on the shelves and the space between their bodies, which was suddenly, acutely, not enough. Marietta held her ground and held his gaze and refused to look away, though her cheeks were burning and her heart was hammering so hard she could feel her pulse in her fingertips.

Elliot stared at her. His arms had uncrossed. His hands were at his sides, and one of them had tightened around the edge of the desk in a grip that had turned his knuckles pale. His expression was unreadable for one breath, two, and then, a subtle alteration stirred beneath the surface. A warmth that had no place in so cool a gaze. A recognition that looked like fascination and something more dangerous underneath it, something that made her stomach flip and her skin go tight.

“You are asking me,” he said, and his voice had dropped, low enough that the sound of it seemed to travel along her nerve endings rather than through the air, “to prioritise your pleasure.”

“I am telling you that it is a condition of this arrangement.”

He pushed off the desk. He took one step toward her, then another, and the room contracted around the diminishing space between them until he was close enough that she had to tilt her head back to maintain eye contact, close enough that his warmth reached her through the air, close enough that the scent of him filled her lungs on every inhale. Cedar. Candlelight. The faint trace of brandy on his breath.

Her heart was a fist, pounding against the cage of her ribs.

“Miss Potter.” His voice was quiet, faintly amused, and devastating at that volume. “I have many failings. Coldness. Silence. An inability to make conversation at dinner parties. But I assure you…” He paused, and his gaze dropped to her mouth, lingering there for one long, ruinous second before returning to her eyes. “Neglecting a woman in my bed has never been among them.”

She swallowed. The sound was audible. “That is… reassuring.”

“I intend it to be.” Something glinted in his expression, warm and sharp and deliberately held, a promise wearing the disguise of courtesy. “I will perform my husbandly duties with considerable attention. You have my word.”

“You are mocking me.”

“I am making a promise. And I keep my promises, Miss Potter. Every single one.”

Her face was burning. She wanted to step back. She wanted to step forward. She wanted to press her hand against his chest and feel whether his heart was beating as hard as hers, and she loathed that she wanted it, and it was an insupportable bitterness to know that her vulnerability had been laid bare.

She then artfully diverted the conversation to a safer topic. She asked about the household. About Mary’s position, whether she could keep her maid. About practical arrangements, the kind of questions that had solid, manageable answers and did not make her feel as though she were standing at the edge of a cliff.

Elliot conceded discreetly to the change and eased slowly back, giving her the fraction of distance she needed to breathe.

He answered her questions with the same cool precision he applied to everything, and she absorbed the answers and filed them and did not think about the hollow of his throat or the way his voice sounded when it dropped to that register or the fact that her skin still felt electrified from the proximity.

She was turning to leave when his hand caught her arm at the door.

His grip was light. Barely there. But his thumb settled against the inside of her wrist, directly over her pulse, and the touch sent a jolt through her body so sharp and immediate that her breath hitched audibly.

He felt it. He felt the leap of her pulse under his thumb, and she saw the knowledge register in his face, a trace of something hot and quickly controlled.

“Miss Potter.”

She turned. His hand was still on her wrist. His thumb was still pressed to her pulse. She could feel her own heartbeat hammering against the pad of his finger, and she knew he could feel it too, and the intimacy of that knowledge, the shared awareness of her body’s involuntary response to his touch, was more exposing than anything she had said tonight.

“Your conditions are accepted. All of them.” His eyes held hers, steady, certain, lit with a warmth that was not ice at all. “I look forward to fulfilling them.”

A small pause followed and his thumb shifted against her wrist, the smallest movement, a stroke so slight it might have been accidental if not for the way his gaze sharpened when she shivered.

“I have one condition of my own,” he said.

Her chin lifted. Her voice came out thinner than she intended. “And what is that?”

“You will refrain from striking me in public. My cheek has only just recovered from the vegetable cart incident, and I would prefer to enter this matrimony with both sides of my face intact.”

She stared at him. He stared back. His expression was perfectly composed, but something was happening at the corner of his mouth, a movement so small it could have been a trick of the firelight. Something warm. Something that looked, impossibly, like play.

“I make no promises,” she said.

“Then I shall endeavor to stay out of range.”

She pulled her wrist free and walked out into the night, her skin burning where his thumb had pressed, her face burning hotter, and the cool air doing nothing at all to calm the heat settling low in her belly with a persistence that felt like a warning.

Behind her, the Duke of Wyndham stood in his study doorway and watched her make her departure.

She came to my home. Uninvited. Unannounced. She stood in my study with her chin raised and her hands shaking and told me to satisfy her.

She knows what my father did. She knows what her father sacrificed. She looked at me with the full weight of that knowledge in her eyes, and she did not quail. She did not weep. She did not beg. She set conditions.

This woman, whose life my family destroyed, walked into my study and demanded that I earn her.

No woman has ever looked at me with that particular combination of fury and courage and barely concealed terror. She was trembling, and she did not retreat. She blushed when I stepped toward her, and I wanted to trace that flush with my fingers. With my mouth. I wanted to follow it down the column of her throat and across her collarbone and lower, to the place where it disappeared beneath her neckline, and I wanted to know what sound she would make if I pressed my lips to the hollow of her throat while her pulse hammered beneath my tongue.

This is a debt I can never fully repay.

This is a woman who slapped me in front of a vegetable cart and has now informed me that I am required to please her in bed.

Upon my word, I begin to suspect that wedded life will suit me altogether too well.

And I truly believe I do not deserve to.

He closed the study door. He poured another measure of brandy and did not drink it. He stood by the fire and looked at the chair where she had not sat, because she had stood the entire time, refusing the comfort of his furniture the way she refused everything else he offered: with her spine straight and her chin lifted and that maddening flush climbing her throat.

 

***

 

He went to bed late. He lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought of nothing, which was a falsehood, and eventually the nothing wore a green ribbon in its hair and smelled of rain and fury, and sleep took him before he could fight it off.

She is in his study again.

The fire is burning low. The door is closed. She is standing where she stood tonight, her hands clasped in front of her, her chin raised, that defiant angle that makes him want to do things he has no language for. But something is different. The trembling is gone. The fear is gone. She is looking at him as though she has already won whatever game they are playing, and she is waiting for him to understand that he has lost.

“You owe me an apology,” she says.

“I believe we have established that you owe me one first.”

“For what?”

“For the marketplace.” He steps toward her. She does not step back. “For the slap. For striking a man who was trying to keep you from falling.”

“You deserved it.”

“Perhaps.” Another step. She is within arm’s reach now, and the firelight paints her skin in shades of honey and gold, and the neckline of her dress sits low enough that he can see the rapid flutter of her breathing in the hollow of her throat. “But debts must be settled, Miss Potter. You said so yourself.”

“I said your family owed mine. I said nothing about my hand on your face.”

“And yet.” He is close enough to touch her. He does not touch her. He lets the proximity do the work, lets his warmth reach her through the diminishing air between them, and watches the gooseflesh rise along her bare arms with a satisfaction that sits heavy and hot at the base of his spine. “You struck me. In the street. In front of witnesses. My cheek carried the mark of your hand for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Excellent.”

“You are not sorry.”

“I am never sorry.”

“No,” he says, and his voice has dropped to something low and textured that he does not recognise as his own. “I do not think you are.”

He takes her arm. Not roughly, but firmly. The way he caught her at the vegetable cart, his fingers closing around her elbow, his grip steady and sure, and the contact sends a jolt through both of them that he feels in his teeth. She inhales sharply. Her lips part.

“What are you doing?”

“Settling a debt.”

He sits in his desk chair and pulls her across his lap in a single motion, and she goes, not because she is willing but because the momentum carries her, and the sound she makes when her stomach meets his thighs is half outrage and half something else, something breathless and startled that shoots straight through him like a lit fuse.

She tries to push up. He presses a hand flat between her shoulder blades, holding her there, not hard, but enough. She is draped across his thighs, her hair falling forward, her breath coming fast, and the weight of her body against his legs is warm and solid and devastating.

“Let me up.”

“Not yet.”

“Elliot.”

His name in her mouth. The first time she has used it. It hits him like a second slap, and something in him tightens to a point so fine it aches.

“You struck me in the street,” he says, and his hand settles against the curve of her backside, not striking, just resting there, the heat of her body seeping through the thin fabric of her dress into his palm. “You left a mark. You told me I deserved it. And you were not sorry.”

“I am still not sorry.”

“I know.” His hand lifts. “But debts must be settled.”

The first strike is light. Barely more than a tap, the flat of his palm connecting with the swell of her backside through her skirts. But the sound of it fills the room the way the crack of her hand against his face filled the marketplace, and she jerks against his lap, and the friction of that movement, her body shifting against his thighs, sends a pulse of heat through him so intense that his vision narrows.

She gasps. Not in pain. In shock, and beneath the shock, something molten.

“One,” he says. “For the vegetable cart.”

The second is harder. She arches. Her fingers grip the leg of his chair, and the sound she makes is no longer outrage. It is low and involuntary and wrecked, a sound pulled from somewhere deep in her body that she did not know existed, and he wants to hear it again so badly his hand is shaking.

“Two. For the witnesses.”

“You are…” She cannot finish the sentence. She is breathing in short, sharp bursts, and her hips have shifted, pressing down against his lap, and she can feel what she is doing to him, the hard, unmistakable evidence of exactly how much this is costing his composure, and knowing that she can feel it makes something in his control fracture.

“I am settling a debt,” he says, and his voice is not steady. “You of all people should appreciate the principle.”

He does not deliver a third. His hand remains where it is, curved against her, hot through the fabric, and she is trembling against his thighs, and he can hear her breathing and feel the rapid percussion of her heartbeat through the places where their bodies press together, and the wanting is so enormous it fills the room like smoke.

“Elliot.” Her voice is different now. Rough. Low. The defiance is still there, threaded through every syllable, but it is wrapped around something softer, something that sounds like please and want and more and do not stop.

She turns her head. He can see the flush on her face, vivid and hot, and her lips are parted, and her eyes…

He woke in a start.

The bedroom was dark. The fire had burned to embers. He was on his back, the sheets twisted around his hips, his body rigid with arousal so sharp it bordered on pain. His breathing was ragged, each exhale leaving him in a rush that sounded, in the silence of the room, embarrassingly close to her name.

He did not get up. He did not cross to the washstand or splash water on his face or perform any of the rituals of a man attempting to master himself through discomfort. He simply lay there, hard and aching and furious at himself, and stared at the ceiling, and let the wanting sit beside him like a guest he could not turn away.

She slapped you in the street. She stood in your study and demanded satisfaction. She looked at you with the full knowledge of what your family owes hers and did not wince.

And your sleeping mind made her a chapel bride in a shift that hid nothing and asked her to say the word promised.

He closed his eyes. The image of her throat, pale in the chapel light, was still printed on the inside of his eyelids.

He did not sleep again. But the disgust he expected to feel, the cold, corrective shame that his father’s voice had installed as reliably as a clock mechanism, did not arrive. In its place was something worse: the quiet, persistent suspicion that the dream had not been a failure of discipline but a message from the only part of him still capable of honesty.

He lay with that suspicion until dawn, and it did not become more comfortable, and it did not go away.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“If you fidget with that veil one more time, miss, I will pin your hands to your sides and march you down the aisle myself.”

“I am not fidgeting. I am adjusting.”

“You have been adjusting for twenty minutes. The veil is perfect. Your hair is perfect. You are going to pull the whole thing apart and then blame me for it, and I will not stand for it. Not today.” Mary stepped back, hands on her hips, and surveyed her work with the critical eye of a woman who had been dressing Marietta for nearly a decade and had opinions about every stitch. “There. You look like a duchess.”

“I look like a woman wearing her mother’s wedding dress who is about to enter into matrimony with a man she has spoken to exactly twice.”

“Three times, if you count the vegetable cart.”

“I do not count the vegetable cart.”

“You should. It is the most romantic thing that has ever happened to you.”

Marietta turned from the mirror. The dress was beautiful and did not fit her properly. It had been her mother’s, kept in a trunk at the foot of her father’s bed for nine years, wrapped in muslin that smelled of lavender and old grief. Mary had taken it in at the waist and let it out at the bust and performed a minor miracle with the hem, but it was a dress made for a different woman’s body, and Marietta could feel the difference in every seam. Too tight across the shoulders. Too loose at the hips. As though she were wearing the shape of someone she was supposed to become but had not quite managed.

 

***

 

The chapel at Wyndham Park was visible through the window of the guest room they had given her. Small, stone, ivy-crawling, tucked against the east wing of the estate like an afterthought. Marietta had arrived at Wyndham Park the previous afternoon with Mary and a trunk that contained everything she owned, which was not much, and had spent the night in a bedroom that was larger than the entire ground floor of Potter House and considerably colder.

She had not seen Elliot since the night in his study. Six days went by and he had written once. A brief letter, formal and correct, confirming the arrangements and informing her that Mr. Harding, his butler, would see to whatever she required upon her arrival. The handwriting was precise and angular and revealed nothing. She had read it four times and then put it in the drawer of her bedside table and then taken it out again and read it twice more before admitting to herself that she was looking for something between the lines that was not there.

“Miss.” Mary’s voice had softened. She was standing behind Marietta now, her reflection a steady, familiar presence in the mirror. “Are you quite well?”

“I am about to enter into matrimony with a duke I barely know in order to settle a debt my father incurred protecting a departed man’s fortune. I am wearing a deceased woman’s dress. I have not eaten since yesterday. I do believe that I am faring quite well.”

Mary’s mouth twitched. She reached up and tucked a loose strand of her Auburn hair behind Marietta’s ear, her fingers gentle, and for a moment the touch was so like her mother’s that Marietta’s throat closed.

“You are brave,” Mary said. “You have always been brave. And if he is unkind to you, I will put salt in his tea every morning until he learns better.”

Marietta laughed, though it came out thin and unsteady. “I am relying on you to keep that promise.”

“I keep all my promises, miss. It is the one thing we have in common with dukes.”

 

***

 

The chapel held perhaps thirty people, though fewer than twenty were present. Marietta had insisted on nothing elaborate, and Elliot had not objected, which she was beginning to understand was his way of agreeing without committing the indignity of appearing to have feelings about it. The pews held a scattering of Wyndham relations she had not met, a solicitor, Mr. Harding standing at the back with the composed vigilance of a man guarding the gates of a small, extremely well-maintained fortress, and Mary, who had positioned herself at the end of the second row with a handkerchief and an expression of determined optimism.

Her father had not come.

He had sent a note. Brief, illegible, something about his health not permitting travel. She had read it and folded it and placed it inside the drawer with Elliot’s letter and closed the drawer firmly and not thought about it again, except for the four or five hundred times she had thought about it since.

The vicar was elderly and cheerful and entirely unaware that the ceremony he was officiating had the emotional temperature of a business transaction conducted in a meat locker. He beamed at Marietta as she walked down the aisle alone, clutching a small bouquet of white roses that Mr. Harding had produced from somewhere with the quiet efficiency of a man who anticipated needs before they were spoken.

Elliot was waiting at the altar.

He was dressed in dark blue, the coat cut close across his shoulders in a way that made the breadth of them unavoidable. His waistcoat was ivory silk. His cravat was tied with a precision that suggested either considerable skill or a valet who feared for his life. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his spine straight and his face composed into an expression of perfect, impenetrable calm, and when Marietta reached the front of the chapel and took her place beside him, she became abruptly, viscerally aware of the sheer physical scale of the man she was about to enter into wedlock with.

He was so much larger than she remembered. In the marketplace and the ballroom and his study, she had registered his height in the abstract, as a fact about him, like the color of his hair or the precision of his tailoring. But standing beside him now, close enough that his arm nearly touched hers, she felt the difference between knowing a thing and experiencing it. His shoulders blocked the light from the chapel windows. When she tilted her head to look at his face, the angle was steep enough that the movement pulled at the muscles in her neck. He was solid and warm and very, very still, and she could feel the heat of his body radiating through the narrow space between them with an intensity that seemed disproportionate to the temperature of the chapel.

She thought, absurdly, about standing in front of a fire and how the warmth reaches you before the light does.

“Dearly beloved,” the vicar began, and Marietta stopped thinking and started surviving.

The vows were hollow in her mouth. Not because she did not mean them, but because she did not yet know what they meant. To have and to hold. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. They were promises made to a stranger, spoken in a chapel belonging to a family that had destroyed hers, and she delivered them with the mechanical precision of a woman reciting lines she had memorised without understanding the play.

Elliot’s voice, by contrast, was steady and low and carried the weight of a man who said nothing he did not mean. When he spoke the words “I will,” something in the certainty of it raised the hair along her arms.

He slid the ring onto her finger. His hands were warm and steady. The gold was cool against her skin, and his fingertips lingered for a fraction of a second longer than necessary, the pad of his thumb brushing the base of her finger as the ring settled into place.

“You may kiss the bride.”

The vicar said it with the jovial enthusiasm of a man who had spoken the same words a thousand times and still found them delightful. The chapel held its breath. Mary pressed the handkerchief to her mouth.

Elliot turned to her. He raised one hand and tipped her chin up with a single finger, his touch feather-light against the underside of her jaw, and the gentleness of the gesture undid something inside her that she had been holding very tightly in place. He held her face as if he were cradling something fragile and breakable, and his thumb grazed the corner of her mouth, a touch so brief and so deliberate that her breath stuttered.

He leaned down. She tilted back. The angle was vertiginous, the chapel ceiling wheeling above her, and then his mouth was on hers.

The kiss lasted exactly as long as propriety required and not a second more. His lips were firm and warm, unhurried in the contact despite its brevity, and the pressure was precise, as though he had calculated the exact amount of force needed to make it count without making it indecent. She tasted nothing. She felt everything. The controlled warmth of his mouth. The steadiness of the finger beneath her chin. The brush of his breath against her upper lip as he pulled away.

It was over before her body could decide how to respond, and she was left standing at the altar with her lips tingling and her skin flushed and the phantom sensation of his thumb at the corner of her mouth burning like a brand.

He stepped back. His face revealed nothing.

Hers, she suspected, revealed everything.

 

***

 

The wedding breakfast was a small, polite, interminable affair held in a dining room that could have seated sixty and contained fourteen. The food was excellent and Marietta tasted none of it. She sat beside Elliot at the head of the table and made conversation with Wyndham cousins whose names she forgot as soon as they were spoken, and she smiled until her face ached, and she did not look at her husband because every time she did, her gaze snagged on his mouth and the memory of the kiss replayed itself with a vividness that made it difficult to form sentences.

His thumb on the corner of her mouth. The controlled pressure of his lips. The way he had held her chin as though she were precious and temporary.

She reached for her wine glass and drank too quickly.

“Duchess.” Thomas Ashby appeared at her side with the smooth, unhurried confidence of a man who had been waiting for the right moment and had identified it with surgical precision. He was smiling. He was always smiling. He took her hand and kissed her cheek, and his lips lingered a breath too long, close enough to her ear that his words reached only her. “Welcome to the family. Elliot has needed someone to warm him up for years.”

His tone was light and friendly. The kind of remark a charming man makes at a wedding breakfast to put a nervous bride at ease. But his hand held hers a fraction too tightly, and when he pulled back, his hazel eyes were flat and watchful, taking her measure the way one sizes up an opponent before the first move of a game.

“Thank you, Lord Ashby,” she said, and retrieved her hand with a smile that cost her more effort than any she had produced that day.

“Thomas. Please. We are family now.” He lifted his glass in a toast, his smile widening, and turned to Elliot with the practiced ease of a man who wore intimacy like a garment he could put on and remove at will. “To the Duke and Duchess of Wyndham. May your matrimony be everything it was designed to be.”

The word “designed” sat in the air for a moment too long. Elliot’s jaw tightened, a movement so small that Marietta would not have noticed it a week ago but which she now read as fluently as a sentence. He raised his glass without comment.

Marietta looked at Thomas across the rim of her own glass and thought of Mary’s voice in the guest room that morning. I keep all my promises, miss. She thought of salt in tea. She thought of foxes.

She drank.

That night, she waited.

She sat at the vanity in her new bedroom, which was three times the size of her old one and decorated in shades of pale blue and cream that were beautiful and impersonal, the aesthetic choices of someone who had selected them from a catalogue rather than a life. Mary had unpacked her things and arranged them as best she could, but Marietta’s belongings looked small and insufficient in the vast space, like a child’s toys left in a cathedral.

Mary had brushed her hair and helped her into her nightgown, the nicest one she owned, white cotton with lace at the throat that had yellowed slightly despite careful washing. Mary had squeezed her hand and told her she would be just down the hall if she was needed, and then Mary had left, and Marietta was alone.

She brushed her own hair. Slowly, stroke after stroke, counting them the way she had as a child because counting gave her something to hold onto when everything else was sliding.

She looked at the connecting door. A simple wooden door with a brass handle, unremarkable in every way, and yet the space beyond it, Elliot’s bedroom, her husband, exerted a pull she could not ignore.

Her husband, who had kissed her at the altar with devastating precision and then spent the rest of the day treating her like a business associate he respected but did not particularly wish to have dinner with.

Her husband, who had promised, in the low heat of his study, to perform his duties with “considerable attention.”

Her husband, who had looked at her mouth while speaking those words and made her forget her own name.

She waited.

She waited through the sounds of the house settling into silence around her. Through the distant chime of the clock in the hallway marking ten, then eleven, then midnight. Through the creak of floorboards and the whisper of wind against the windowpanes and the slow, guttering demise of the candles she had not bothered to snuff because snuffing them felt like giving up.

He did not come.

The connecting door remained closed. No footsteps could be heard on the other side. There was no knock. No handle turning. No broad-shouldered silhouette filling the doorframe, no low voice saying her name, no warm hands reaching for her in the candlelight.

Nothing. The silence on the other side of that door was so complete it felt deliberate. Pointed. A message delivered in the absence of a message.

She pressed her thumb against the inside of her own wrist, to the exact spot where his thumb had rested in his study, and felt her pulse beating steady and fast beneath her own touch. It was not the same. Her hands were smaller. Her skin was cooler. The pressure was wrong, too tentative, and too familiar. It lacked the particular jolt of someone else’s touch, the shock of another person’s warmth against a place where the blood runs close to the surface.

She loathed that she was doing this. She loathed that she was lying in the dark, pressing her own thumb to her own wrist, trying to recreate a sensation that had lasted perhaps three seconds and had been seared into her body like a scar. She loathed that she was thinking about his mouth. She loathed that she was thinking about his promise. She loathed that she was wondering whether “considerable attention” was merely something a cold man said to a trembling woman in a firelit room to make her stop asking questions, or whether he had meant it, and if he had meant it, why he was on the other side of a closed door while she lay here in yellowed lace and confusion.

She lay awake until the sky outside the window shifted from black to the dark, bruised blue that comes before dawn, and the fury and the confusion braided together into something she could not untangle, and she told herself it did not matter, and the telling changed nothing.

If this was considerable attention, she was already in trouble.

And not the kind she had expected.