Prologue
The groom had been absent for nineteen minutes.
Rhysand Birchwood, Duke of Pecking, stood at the back of his family’s chapel and watched sixty people work out what they were permitted to think about it.
They had begun generously. For the first ten minutes they had been indulgent in the way of people who expect to have a story to tell over breakfast. A young man is nervous.
A horse casts a shoe. The lane from the Hall takes water badly, and there had been rain on Tuesday.
At twelve minutes, Lady Carmody had turned in her pew to look at the door.
At fifteen, she had turned instead to look at the Fairfords’ side of the chapel, and that was the moment the morning changed, because Lady Carmody had never in her life looked at anything she did not intend to describe.
The note was in his breast pocket. He had read it twice in the stable yard and once more on the walk down, and it had not improved with acquaintance.
Forgive me.
I cannot be what she believes me.
Nine words. His brother had always been sparing with the things that cost him something.
Rhysand knew the arithmetic. He had been raised on the arithmetic before he had been taught anything else.
A gentleman’s daughter with no fortune, left standing before the whole county in a gown made over from her mother’s, was not ruined all at once and loudly.
It was never so clean as that. She would be received, and pitied, and seated a little lower each year, and asked to make up a table when a table wanted making up.
In three years nobody would remember why.
They would only remember that there had been a reason.
Her mother would go down with her. Her sister would go down with her. The sister was nineteen.
At the front, the clergyman had begun turning the pages of a book he had no need to consult.
He looked, because he could no longer help it, at the empty place at the altar rail where she was meant to stand.
She had been awake since before light. He knew it absurdly and precisely, because he had seen a candle moving behind the guest wing curtains at four and had lain awake afterwards being angry about it, and had not once permitted himself to examine why.
Six weeks. He had known the woman six weeks. He had disliked almost every word he had said to her in that time, and had said them anyway.
His mother caught his eye from the second pew. She had understood already. She was waiting to be told what he intended to do about it. It was a great deal of confidence to place in a man who had spent his whole life doing what was correct and nothing whatever that was brave.
There was one remedy. He had known it since the fifteenth minute and had spent the four since declining to look straight at it, in the way a man declines to look at a bill he has every intention of paying.
He looked at it.
It would cost him his name in every drawing room between here and London for a season. It would cost his brother a great deal more, and his brother had earned it. It would cost the woman nothing she had not already been made to pay before breakfast.
And it would cost him the one comfortable arrangement of his life. Nobody had ever yet been given cause to ask him what he wanted.
Rhysand set his hand flat against the pocket with the note in it.
Then he went out by the vestry door to find her.