Chapter 1
Lady Hattie Sutton had long ago concluded that country house parties were merely marriage markets in better lighting.
There were distinctions, certainly. In town, one was steered beneath chandeliers and social expectation with all the elegance of a horse being guided toward auction.
In the country, the same business was managed under climbing roses and polite invitations to admire shrubbery.
Yet the principle remained identical. A hostess with unmarried ladies in residence ceased, at some point during the first afternoon, to see chairs, tea trays, and scenic walks as neutral objects.
Everything became an opportunity. A stroll became a pairing, a musicale became strategy, and a simple request to pass the biscuits became the first movement in a campaign to place a gentleman at one’s elbow long enough for gossip to take root.
Hattie had attended enough such gatherings to recognize the symptoms early.
They were all present at Rowanmere.
The house itself was blameless. Indeed, it was almost offensively lovely.
Set just beyond a gentle rise of lawn and ringed with old beeches and silver birch, Rowanmere possessed that airy, gracious charm peculiar to estates long cherished by generations with good taste and sufficient funds to indulge it.
The stone front glowed pale as cream in the late afternoon light, ivy climbed one wing with picturesque restraint, and long windows stood open upon terraces where urns overflowed with tulips and trailing ivy.
Somewhere behind the south gardens lay a lake, and somewhere beyond that an ornamental ruin, because no English family of ambition had yet managed to convince itself that natural beauty was sufficient without a crumbling arch somewhere in the distance.
Inside, Rowanmere was all warm polish, pale carpets, family portraits, and the hum of a well-bred household preparing to receive more guests than it could possibly trust. Footmen moved discreetly through the front hall with luggage.
Ladies drifted upstairs in rustling silks to change before dinner.
A pair of young gentlemen stood near the library doors discussing horses with the solemnity of cabinet ministers.
Through it all, Hattie moved with the smooth confidence of a woman perfectly aware of how to occupy a room without ever appearing to strive for it.
She did not dislike house parties in principle. She disliked only what people became within them.
Or perhaps that was too charitable. At present she disliked one specific person in one specific drawing room and wished she had not arrived in time to be cornered by him before she had even removed her gloves.
Mr. Algernon Price was not, in any objective sense, objectionable.
That, if anything, was the trouble.
If the man had been vulgar, pompous, or laughably vain, Hattie might have dismissed him with ease.
Unfortunately, he was merely earnest, correct, and endowed with the sort of mild, handsome face older ladies trusted instinctively and younger ladies were expected to admire.
He possessed a respectable estate in Sussex, an aunt who knew everyone of consequence in Bath, and a way of speaking to Hattie as though she were already halfway convinced of his merits and merely waiting for the correct opening through which to admit it.
She was not waiting.
She was, however, standing beside one of the long windows in the principal drawing room while he explained the particular virtues of well-managed tenant boundaries, and because she had been raised to civility and not warfare, she could not yet hurl herself bodily through the glass.
“I have always thought,” Mr. Price was saying, “that too many gentlemen take a careless view of agricultural responsibility. It is not enough merely to inherit. One must apply oneself.”
“Undoubtedly,” Hattie murmured.
She held her teacup at precisely the correct angle, her expression composed, her posture elegant, and her attention nowhere in the world near tenant boundaries.
Around them the drawing room rippled with that soft, shifting noise made by genteel company before dinner: low laughter, porcelain against saucers, the whisper of silk upon upholstery.
At the far end of the room Lady Armitage, their hostess, sat upon a pale blue sofa surrounded by enough eligible people to found a minor principality.
Her daughter, recently married and therefore insufferably radiant, had already begun moving guests about the room in arrangements so artful they would have been admirable if they were not so transparent.
Hattie took one glance toward the sofa and understood everything.
She had been placed.
Again.
This was the third time since arriving an hour earlier that some smiling woman had managed to set Mr. Price near her as though by accident.
A tea tray had been offered at the exact moment he approached.
A conversation about dogs had turned, with suspicious efficiency, into one about estate life.
And now, here he was, speaking earnestly of drainage while the room politely pretended not to watch.
Hattie was beginning to think murder a sadly underutilized social remedy.
“Lady Hattie?” Mr. Price said.
She realized at once she had let a pause grow too long.
“My apologies,” she replied, summoning one of her brighter smiles. “I was reflecting upon the moral force of proper hedgerows.”
He looked pleased rather than chastened.
“Yes, quite.”
Good heavens.
He was the kind of man who mistook politeness for interest and seriousness for depth.
Had Hattie been in a more charitable mood, she might have pitied him.
As it was, she felt only the mounting pressure of being observed, weighed, and quietly arranged by people who believed a woman of six-and-twenty with sharp opinions and an unmarried state ought to be grateful for a gentleman who did not visibly perspire at dinner.
Across the room, Lady Louisa Foxmere caught her eye.
Louisa did not smile. She merely lifted one brow in a question so precise Hattie nearly laughed.
Are you in distress?
Hattie, without moving any feature more than was absolutely necessary, widened her eyes the smallest fraction.
Yes.
Louisa’s mouth twitched.
Unfortunately, before salvation could arrive in any useful form, Lady Armitage herself sailed toward them in mauve silk and matchmaking satisfaction.
“My dear Lady Hattie,” she said, taking Hattie lightly by the arm, “I was just telling Mrs. Denslow that no one admires the west terrace more than Mr. Price. And you have not yet seen the view in this light, have you? The roses are at their most obliging just before sunset.”
Hattie looked at the west terrace doors, then at Mr. Price, then back at Lady Armitage.
It was all quite beautifully done.
Too beautifully done.
“No?” Hattie said.
“No,” said Lady Armitage, smiling still more.
Mr. Price offered his arm with such prompt correctness that Hattie wondered whether he had been rehearsed.
Likely not, she decided. Men of that sort rehearsed themselves without assistance.
There were moments in a woman’s life when she could submit to absurdity with grace, and there were moments when submission became an encouragement to future absurdity. Hattie had reached the latter.
She was just preparing to decline with exquisite finality when a voice at her shoulder said, “Lady Hattie, there you are. Lady Armitage, forgive me. I fear I must steal her for a moment.”
Every muscle in Hattie’s body went still.
She knew that voice.
Benedict Ellsworth, Viscount Hartwell, stood at her side with the air of a man who had not the slightest doubt of his right to interrupt whatever arrangement had just been made.
He was tall, dark-haired, and so immaculately correct that even his interference seemed to arrive with polished boots and proper introductions.
His coat, a deep evening blue that only barely distinguished itself from black, fit him with the clean precision of something cut by a very confident tailor.
He possessed the sort of face artists generally ruined by over-idealizing: strong mouth, intelligent eyes, and a composure so habitual it made most other people seem under-edited.
Hattie had known him for some time, of course.
Their circles overlapped too often for ignorance.
He was counted among the Ellsworths one saw everywhere good sense and quiet money were valued.
He was also, more personally irritatingly, a particular friend of Benedict Berkshire and on comfortable terms with half the men who had already married Hattie’s friends.
She had danced with him twice in town, argued with him three times, and on each occasion left with the distinct impression that he considered her entertaining in the way some men considered thunderstorms entertaining: vivid at a distance, potentially troublesome if allowed too near.
She was not, generally, a woman who appreciated being categorized.
Lady Armitage blinked. “Lord Hartwell?”
Benedict bowed. “My apologies. I should not interrupt, but Lady Hattie promised to settle a disagreement between Lady Louisa and my sister regarding a song for this evening’s musicale, and I fear both ladies are already arming themselves with conviction.”
This was complete nonsense.
Hattie knew it. He knew it. Lady Louisa, across the room, most certainly knew it.
And yet because he delivered the lie with such grave civility, everyone around them was forced to treat it as plausible.
“Oh,” said Lady Armitage, disappointed but too well bred to object. “Well, of course. Musical disputes must be dealt with immediately.”
Mr. Price lowered his arm. “Naturally.”
Hattie, who had no intention of making the scene uglier by exposing the rescue as fiction, smiled sweetly enough to sting her own teeth. “How remiss of me. Do excuse me.”
Then, because she had no better choice left, she allowed Benedict to guide her out of the line of attack and across the room toward the music alcove.