Chapter 1
Chapter
London, England
Four Years Later
Lady Catherine West paces the vestibule of the church. Her blonde hair is powdered with glittering gold and her silk wedding gown fluffed with layer upon layer of underthings and petticoats and crinolines. Her cousin, Violet Crawford, stands pregnant and beaming beside her.
Violet traveled to Surrey from Kent just this morning to see Catherine marry in the small church of the Waverly Viscountcy family seat.
“Can you breathe?” Violet asks.
The stays of Catherine’s wedding gown are pulled as tightly as a drum, just as her nerves are.
“Not particularly. But there’s nothing to be done about it now.”
Catherine had spent the last six months practicing the art of self-defense alone in her bedroom at night, and those exercises have had their effects on her body.
They’d made her bigger. And stronger. Such that the contours of her arms now dip and swell like a miniature mountain range.
And the muscles in her thighs and calves have made themselves known under her skin, so much that she can trace their topography with her finger.
Her body, which has always felt small and frail to her, now feels hard. Competent. Like Andrew McGann’s.
Not that he’ll ever speak to her again after the last, disastrous time they saw each other. But she still has this last vestige of him. She has his exercises, and so she has his strength. At least a little of it.
Catherine isn’t surprised exactly at the fit of her wedding dress. She’s noticed the changes in herself over the last weeks and she’s enjoyed them. In her mind, there’s no downside to her new figure.
Or there wasn’t until her last gown fitting and the raised eyebrow of Madame Tremaux, the modiste. Her dress, which had fit for the last several sessions, had suddenly grown too small around her back and shoulders.
“Can you fix it?” Catherine asked.
“Oui,” the modiste replied. “Of course I can. It is only a surprise. Most brides, they do not eat. They become smaller. But you, cherie. You are growing.”
The French woman stepped back and surveyed Catherine in her gown. “It is good,” she declared. “Oui. You are perfection. I will deliver it tonight.”
True to her word, the altered dress arrived at Chester House that evening, starched and steamed and extremely fitted to Catherine’s new form.
This morning, the light of dawn gives way to a cold and gray wedding day. Not exactly picturesque, but Catherine doesn’t particularly care about the weather. She doesn’t need sunshine, blue skies, or a gentle breeze in the air.
She isn’t a romantic. If she was, she’d have chosen to marry in the spring, not the winter. And to someone else. Someone, preferably, not besotted with another woman.
But she’s made her peace with the arrangement, and she supposes her groom, the Honorable Henry Pembrooke, heir to the Waverly Viscountcy, has as well. This is not a love match.
It’s only ever been a marriage of convenience, embraced by the aristocracy and imbued with the familiar rhythm of its expectations: balls where they dance two dances together, fifteen-minute social calls where they drink tea under the watchful eyes of Catherine’s mother, and rides together in Hyde Park, where they speak of nothing more pressing than the weather or the ton’s latest on-dit.
She sighs, and Violet grasps her hand to still her pacing.
“Are you certain you’re alright?” Violet gives Catherine’s hand a tiny squeeze. “You look quite beautiful, but a touch,” she holds her hand to Catherine’s cheek, “pale.”
“Just nerves, I suspect. Didn’t you have them on your wedding day?” Catherine realizes this question is a mistake the moment it’s out of her mouth. Of course Violet didn’t have nerves.
“Never mind,” she says. “I retract the question. Yours is a love match for the ages.”
Violet takes both of Catherine’s hands in hers. “I will say this only once more, cousin. You don’t have to go through with this marriage. We’ll support you if you cry off. Alistair and I, and both our mothers. We’re here for you.”
Catherine squeezes Violet’s hands right back. “I know, and I am grateful. Truly. But this is for the best. Pembrooke and I fit.”
“If you say so.”
“We can’t all be as lucky as you have been, cousin.”
Violet furrows her brow. “I am lucky,” she says.
“And to be certain, I am aware of it. But you’ll recall as well as I that it wasn’t always so.
I didn’t know Alistair and I fit right away.
In fact, I was certain we didn’t.” She pauses, as if deciding what to say next.
“And by most measures, we still don’t. But most measures don’t matter.
They are nothing more than window dressing.
We fit because he makes me light. And because I make him steady.
And together, we are the best of ourselves.
That’s what matters. That’s all that matters.
Everything else, titles and dowries and society and what have you, is nothing but nonsense.
A match made of those things is not what’s best, only what is easiest.”
“Then what’s best?” Catherine asks against her better judgment. She knows what Violet will say, just as she knows the kind of bond Violet has with her husband, made of love and respect and a deep mutual attraction, isn’t in her future.
“Best is best.” Violet gives a little shrug. “True fit is best. Love is best.”
“And if you don’t have those things?”
“That is up to you, dearest. As I said, you will always have my support, financially or otherwise.”
“I’ll never take your money, Violet. Your husband won’t even take your money for his company! You need it for your medical clinic.”
Violet, a nurse and heiress to a timber fortune, is well on her way to achieving her dream of opening a medical clinic in London. One that will serve her patients—rich and poor, men and women—with the dignity and medical excellence all people deserve.
Catherine’s mother pokes her head into the vestibule before Violet can argue.
“It’s time,” she says. “Violet, I’ll help you to your seat. Catherine, are you sure you wish to walk alone? I will escort you. Or Chester will. He came all this way.”
“I’m sure,” Catherine answers.
The last thing she wants is to be walked down the aisle by her cousin, the Earl of Chester. His decree she marry before the season ends is the reason she’s standing in this church vestibule in Surrey. “I’ll be there in just a moment.”
After Violet and her mother leave, Catherine walks to the entryway of the small church and watches the mid-morning sun fight to be seen through cracks in the cloud cover. The drizzle has let up for the moment, but the gray and dismal coloring remains.
To begin a gray and dismal marriage, she thinks but then shakes her head.
It needn’t be so.
Somewhere, a few hours away, Andrew McGann is putting the finishing touches on his ship, The Elphame.
Her betrothed is at the altar waiting for her.
Her mother has enough money to provide for her future.
Violet is pregnant and building her hospital.
All is well.
She closes her eyes in the cold, December air.
This is what’s right, she tells herself, and not for the first time. Pembrooke and I fit in our own way. We don’t have a love match, to be sure, but I think we’ll have a friendship one day. This is the life I was born into and the one I will continue.
The sun breaks through the cloud cover and reaches its rosy fingers across the landscape. She turns her face to it, freckles be damned, and lets the warmth soak into her eyelids and cheeks.
And then she opens her eyes, squinting into the suddenly bright light. Just one moment more, and she’ll head back into the church and her wedding.
A flicker of movement catches at the edge of her vision—more clouds, perhaps, or the shifting morning light on frost.
But—wait a moment—
Is that…McGann?
She sees him. Or she thinks she sees him, just for a moment.
But it’s impossible. Andrew McGann is far away in Kent, readying his ship. The man she sees now on horseback, outside the church, only resembles him.
He’s just an outline, backlit by the sun.
But—
She blinks. The silhouette is so like him. The height, the curly hair, the span of shoulders and chest, and the bear-paw of a hand he raises in greeting.
She raises her own gloved fingers in return, and he gallops away.
It isn’t him.
She hasn’t seen Andrew McGann in six months. They haven’t spoken a word to each other since that last, horrible meeting.
That was just a stranger with a similar build greeting a bride on her wedding day.
She shakes her glittered head and watches the golden flakes float through the air. And then she smooths down her gown and goes back inside.
The door to the vestibule is open a hair’s breadth. They are in an old country church with an equally old door that has swelled in the morning rain.
Through it, she can see the back of her mother’s head and her aunt’s. And Violet, of course, with her husband, Lord Alistair Crawford, who is Andrew McGann’s business partner. And hers. Although no one, not even McGann or Crawford, knows it.
And there’s Pembrooke, up at the altar, ready and waiting for her entrance. She leans in, peering at her betrothed. He looks pained. Not even resigned, as she feels. The man looks like someone has wrenched the heart right out of his chest.
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
She thinks again of the figure on horseback. She knows it can’t have been McGann but wonders if it wasn’t some kind of omen nonetheless. For the split second when she thought she saw him, there was a surge of joy in her heart.
She definitely does not feel joy looking at Pembrooke.
Pembrooke seemingly does not feel joy waiting for her.
She ponders what might happen if she just… fled.
Now that’s a ridiculous notion.
Where would she go? McGann wants nothing to do with her. And she’s to be married. Today. Right now.
Except—
She didn’t expect to feel quite like the weight around Pembrooke’s neck that his face indicates she is. His heart is his own business, but there’s no reason to make her the sink-stone.
She edges backward, away from the vestibule. She just needs a moment to think. And to find where the noxious smell of cheroot smoke wafting inside is coming from.
Who is smoking at my wedding?
She follows the stench out the front door, only to find her cousin, Lord Sedgewick, the new Earl of Chester, leaning against the church with cheroot in hand.
“You’re in the wrong place,” he says, filling his lungs with smoke.
“So are you,” she replies, wrinkling her nose at the smell.
She hasn’t spoken more than a handful of sentences to the man since he inherited the earldom upon her father’s death and came back from the continent. This doesn’t seem like an auspicious beginning to their relationship. But if he doesn’t care, neither will she.
“I am aware,” he says and takes another drag. “Are you going to bolt?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
An honest statement, to which the dratted man only laughs.
“Look,” he replies slowly, as if explaining his reasoning to a child.
“I couldn’t care less either way.” He raises the cheroot to his lips again.
“I’m only here because you are. So, if you’re going to sneak out, I’d be glad for the advance notice.
Believe it or not, there are other ways I would prefer to spend my day that do not involve the inside of a country church. Or my relatives.”
Catherine can only stare at him. Heaven knows what the man nicknamed the Local Adonis—with his blond curls and dimpled cheeks and general air of having just stepped out of a Renaissance-era painting—would rather be doing than be here with her and the rest of the family on the wedding day he’d demanded she have.
“I beg your pardon?” she says. “You’re only here because I am? I am only here because you decreed it.”
“Actually,” he exhales and blows out the smoke rather too close to her face, “your father decreed it. I couldn’t care less. So, I repeat, are you going to bolt?”
Catherine shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”
Another honest statement to which he rolls his eyes. She’s fairly certain now that she hates him.
“Good heavens, woman. I dislike repeating myself, but one last time: Your father demanded you marry and then turned up his toes. I gave you a dowry to see it done and signed the marriage contracts as the inheritance of the earldom required of me. Duty dispatched.”
“Marriage does generally follow that sequence of events,” Catherine says.
She can’t help but glance behind her to the church, filled with her friends and family. All of them waiting on her.
Chester puts his cheroot out on the side of the wall.
“What generally follows isn’t a concern of mine.
” He pushes himself up from his slouch. “If it’s a concern of yours, by all means, go back inside.
But if you are going to run, I’d do it before your mother comes out.
” He nods his head toward the line of carriages and horses not far away. “Mine’s the last, if you want it.”
And then he shrugs and stalks back inside.