The Lord She Loathed (Enemies of the Season #1)

Chapter 1

A Brighton Arrival

The salt hit her before the rooftops did.

Sophia Ainsworth pressed her glove to the carriage window, the glass cool through the kid leather, and breathed in air that tasted of brine and distant kelp and something sharper underneath—coal smoke from the steam-packets, perhaps, or the particular tang of a town that lived half in the water and half on the promenade.

The horses had slowed to navigate the crush of barouches and delivery carts clogging North Street, and she could hear, beneath the clatter of harness and the cries of oyster-sellers, the low grumble of surf working the shingle.

Brighton. After three days of jolting along the London road, past hedgerows thick with summer dust and coaching inns where the mutton was always grey, they had arrived.

Her mother sat opposite, a rigid column of dove-grey silk and ostrich feathers, her face arranged in the expression she wore whenever she was calculating something—household accounts, social advantage, the precise angle at which to incline her head to a viscountess.

Lady Eleanor Ainsworth had not spoken for the last six miles.

This was not unusual. Her silences were never empty; they were occupied, Sophia had learned, by lists.

“The house is farther along Marine Parade,” Lady Eleanor said, as though Sophia might have forgotten the address they had discussed seventeen times since leaving Derbyshire.

“Mrs. Hargrave assures me the drawing-room has been aired, but I shall want to inspect the chimneys myself. The last tenants were not fastidious.”

“The last tenants were the Dowager Lady Tewkesbury and her twelve cats,” Sophia said. “I imagine the chimneys are lined with fur.”

Lady Eleanor’s mouth tightened. “You imagine a great many things, Sophia.”

More than you would credit me for. Sophia turned back to the window.

A bathing-machine stood abandoned on the shingle below the promenade, its striped canvas flapping in the breeze, and beyond it the Channel stretched grey and restless to a horizon that blurred into cloud.

Gulls wheeled above the fishing boats, their cries thin and querulous.

It was not a pretty view—not in the manner of the Ainsworths’ Derbyshire parkland, with its placid oaks and its carefully managed vistas—but it was alive in a way that Greenly Hall had not been alive for years.

The house in Derbyshire had grown quiet as a held breath, every corridor and drawing-room stiff with the effort of maintaining appearances on an income that no longer quite stretched to the required number of footmen.

That was why they were here, of course. Brighton in the Season.

Where eligible young men congregated like gulls around a fishing catch, and where a girl with a respectable name and a tolerable face might—if she smiled at the right dinners and danced with the right partners—secure a future that would keep the roof on Greenly Hall for another generation.

Sophia had no objection to tolerable. She had, however, a very strong objection to being the roof-repair fund.

“The Cavendishes have taken a house on Marine Parade,” Lady Eleanor said, in the tone of someone remarking on an infestation of rats.

Sophia’s hand stilled on the window frame. “Already? I thought they preferred London.”

“Lady Beatrice Cavendish prefers wherever she can be most visible. Apparently the Regent’s patronage of Brighton has made it sufficiently fashionable for her tastes.

” Her mother’s voice carried the particular acidity reserved for the Cavendish family, a vintage Sophia had been tasting since childhood.

“We shall be obliged to acknowledge them, of course. In public. One cannot cut a family of their standing without provoking comment.”

“No,” Sophia murmured. “One cannot.”

The carriage lurched around a corner, and Marine Parade opened before them—a sweeping crescent of white-stuccoed terraces facing the sea, their bow windows glittering with the flat grey light of late afternoon.

The Ainsworth residence stood at the eastern end, a house of five bays and three storeys, its paintwork fresh but its proportions just slightly narrower than its neighbours, as though the architect had been forced to economise at the last moment. Sophia understood the feeling.

They descended into a hall that smelled of beeswax and the faint, sweet must of a house that had been shut up for months.

A fire had been lit in the grate—Mrs. Hargrave had been as good as her word—and the flames threw shivering shadows across the marble floor.

The footmen were hauling trunks from the carriage; Lady Eleanor was already issuing instructions to the housekeeper in a low, rapid voice; and Sophia, seeing her moment, slipped up the stairs before anyone could assign her a task.

Her bedchamber faced the sea. She crossed to the window and stood for a moment, watching the light change over the water—grey to silver, silver to something paler, the colour of a pearl just before it clouds.

Then she drew the curtains, lit the candle on the writing-desk, and reached into the valise she had refused to entrust to the servants.

The journal was bound in plain brown leather, unadorned, unmonogrammed. It had cost her sixpence at a stationer’s in St. Albans, and it contained the only version of herself she had never shown anyone.

She opened it to the page marked by a ribbon and read the last lines she had written, three days ago in a coaching inn near Epsom:

The debutante ball is a market dressed as a dance, and the girls are the livestock.

They are paraded, appraised, and priced according to the quality of their breeding and the soundness of their teeth.

The buyers, for let us not call them suitors when their interest is so purely transactional, circulate with the same expressions one sees on farmers at a cattle fair: calculating, comparative, faintly bored.

And the girls smile, because they have been taught that smiling is the surest route to a ring on the finger and a house in the country.

They smile until their cheeks ache and their souls shrink to the size of a wedding band.

Sophia read the passage twice. It was too sharp.

The satire was true, she knew it was true, but the tone verged on bitter, and bitterness was not persuasive.

Bitterness was what people expected from a woman who had failed to secure a match.

She was not yet in that position, and she did not intend to be.

What she needed was a voice that cut without drawing blood, that made people laugh and then, a moment later, made them uncomfortable about what they had laughed at.

She dipped her pen in the inkwell and began to revise.

An hour passed. The light outside faded from pearl to pewter.

Sophia wrote, crossed out, wrote again. She was deep in a passage about the particular absurdity of the quadrille—“a dance in which four people perform elaborate geometrical patterns while strenuously avoiding any conversation of substance”—when the door opened without a knock.

She closed the journal in a single motion, sliding it beneath a sheet of blotting paper.

“Still scribbling,” Lady Eleanor said from the doorway. It was not a question.

“Letters,” Sophia said. “To Eliza.”

Her mother’s gaze moved to the desk, then back to Sophia’s face. “You write a great many letters to your cousin.”

“She writes a great many back. It is the nature of correspondence.”

Lady Eleanor did not pursue it. She had larger concerns.

“The Hargraves are holding a reception tomorrow evening. A general affair, all of Brighton society will be there. It will be your first appearance.” She paused, and her voice softened, which was how Sophia knew the next part would be difficult.

“I have had Mrs. Bellamy send over the rose silk. It will need to be taken in at the bodice, you have grown thinner since Easter.”

“I have grown exactly the same since Easter.”

“The rose silk,” Lady Eleanor repeated, “and the pearl combs. You will look very well.”

You will look very well. Not you will be happy, or you will find someone who deserves you, or you will have an interesting evening. You will look very well. Because looking well was the point. Looking well was the entire enterprise.

“I am sure I shall,” Sophia said.

Her mother hesitated in the doorway, one hand on the jamb.

In the candlelight, the lines around her mouth looked deeper than they had in Derbyshire.

“Sophia. I know you find all this”—she gestured vaguely at the room, the house, the Season waiting outside—“trying. But we have not the luxury of being fastidious. Your father’s investments have not recovered, and Benedict’s commission cost more than we anticipated.

A good match is not merely desirable. It is necessary. ”

Sophia had known this, in the abstract, for years. Hearing it stated plainly was different. It made the walls of the room feel closer.

“I understand,” she said.

“Do you?”

She met her mother’s eyes. “I understand the situation. I am not certain I accept the conclusion.”

Lady Eleanor’s expression flickered, something between exasperation and a tenderness she did not know how to express. “Accept it or not, my dear. The world will not arrange itself around your preferences.”

She left. The door clicked shut. Sophia sat motionless for a long moment, her hand resting on the blotting paper that concealed her journal, feeling the faint vibration of footsteps in the corridor below and the distant, rhythmic wash of the sea against the shingle.

Then she pulled the journal out and wrote, without stopping to edit: