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Chapter One

“ O h, for heaven’s sake, six children?” Evelyn did not so much as glance up from the reticule she was embroidering, her needle slipping smoothly through the velvet like a knife through butter. “Surely you jest, Mama.”

Lady Brimwood did not jest.

She stood in the middle of the drawing room with her cheeks flushed and her bonnet utterly askew. Her gloves were still dangling from one hand as though she had burst through the front door and never quite finished the task of undressing.

“Evelyn, I am serious. Lord Wimberly is a most respectable gentleman. Wealthy, industrious, God-fearing, and yes, a widower but with an excellent reputation and even more excellent prospects still ahead of him. Your father has entered into a new investment with him. This union would solidify a most favorable alliance.”

“I have no desire to wed an alliance,” Evelyn said calmly, carefully tying off a pale gold thread. “Least of all one that requires me to memorize the names and dietary peculiarities of six children. Do they all reside in one nursery, or have they colonized the west wing?”

Her mother wrung her gloves. “You cannot keep refusing every sensible match. You are not getting any younger, and this… this is not just any proposal. Lord Wimberly is a solution, Evelyn.”

“A solution to what, exactly, Mama?” Evelyn raised a brow at her hoop. “The terrible scandal of an unmarried daughter who reads Pamela without shame and wears last year’s silk slippers? Shall I hang myself in the orangery and be done with it?”

“Evelyn!”

“Well, you must admit,” she paused, tilting her head to examine her stitching, “it would be easier to manage than six children and Lord Wimberly’s nightly prayers.”

Lady Brimwood began to pace, her voice rising with each step. “He is kind. And generous! And he would make room for you in his household. You would have your own rooms. You would never want for anything—servants, respectability, a place in society again. You must be practical about this.”

“I am practical,” Evelyn said with a smile that did not reach her eyes.

“That is why I know precisely what I would become in that marriage. An ornament. A governess with embroidery privileges. A warm shoulder for Lord Wimberly to weep upon when he remembers his late wife and the horror of trying to keep young boys from setting fire to the stables.”

“You would have a home.”

“I already have a home.” She returned to her needle, voice maddeningly light. “A tolerable one though the mornings are rather noisy when Papa yells at the butler.”

Her mother’s face crumpled, the fight bleeding out of her.

“You think you are untouchable, Evelyn. But you are alone . And you may think it amusing now to reject every gentleman who does not sparkle with poetry and grand declarations, but when the years pass, when beauty fades, when all the friends you have are married?—”

“Oh, Mama.” Evelyn sighed. “Do stop. You’ll frighten the footman.”

“I will arrange for Lord Wimberly to call on Tuesday,” her mother stated with her voice full of injured dignity. “I expect you to at least be presentable.”

“I shall wear mourning,” Evelyn said sweetly. “For my liberty.”

Slowly, like a woman surrendering something heavy, her mother crossed the room and sat across from her daughter. Her skirts whispered as she settled into the chair, and the silence between them stretched taut.

Evelyn felt it, a shift in the air. She looked up, needle paused mid-stitch. Her mother was staring at her, not with frustration nor the usual exasperated concern but something quieter, something that was worn and worn-through.

“I was eighteen when I married your father,” Lady Brimwood divulged. “I did not know him. I had spoken to him three times before the banns were read.”

Evelyn blinked. “You always said it was a perfectly respectable match.”

“It was ,” her mother said with a tight smile. “He was the eldest son, and I was pretty enough, and my dowry was large enough, and that was enough.” She looked down at her gloves, twisting them slowly in her lap. “But I never loved him. Not truly. Not the way a girl dreams of loving.”

Evelyn felt her heart catch, but she knew that this was all a charade. It was not a tender moment between a mother and a daughter but rather an attempt to get her to do what was expected of her.

“And yet I gave him everything. My youth. My body. My children. I made a life with him because I had to. Because my father arranged it, and my mother wept with relief. Because it was what we did, Evelyn. We were not asked what we wanted. We did what was necessary.”

She looked up now. “You think I am cruel for urging you toward Lord Wimberly. I know you do. But I look at you, my clever, difficult girl, and I wonder if you understand how quickly time moves when no one calls you beautiful anymore. When people stop caring what you read or what you think or whether you’ve eaten breakfast. When the rooms get quiet. ”

Evelyn listened. Her fingers stopped working.

“I want you safe,” her mother whispered.

“I want you cared for. Not dependent on your brother’s charity when your father is gone or shunted into some relative’s attic like an old chair no one knows what to do with.

I know Lord Wimberly is not a fairytale, but he is a man who will give you a household, a name, a place in the world. You will never be left behind.”

“I’m not you,” Evelyn said softly. “And I don’t think I’m strong enough to live like you did. To make do with enough. I want something more.”

Her mother gave a laugh that sounded almost like a sob. “Then you’d better marry a poet, darling. Or a fool. Because men who love like that are rare, and they don’t always stay.”

Evelyn smiled. “Oh, but I have the perfect solution to that. I do not wish to marry. At all.”

For a moment, her mother only stared. Then, with a gasp, she shot to her feet as if stung. “Do not be absurd!”

Evelyn arched a brow. “I’m never absurd before tea.”

“Do not jest with me!” Her mother’s voice cracked, and she began to pace as her skirts rustled furiously. “You cannot mean it. You cannot truly… I mean, Evelyn, it is unnatural. What would people say? What would become of you?”

“I should think,” Evelyn said, returning to her embroidery hoop with infuriating composure, “that people will say I am a spinster and be done with it. They are already saying it, no doubt, in much less charming words.”

“Spinster?” Lady Brimwood repeated the word like it were an illness. “You would choose such a thing? To grow old alone, without a husband’s name or children of your own? To live in the margins of other people’s households like some… some governess or maiden aunt?”

“Better an honest maiden aunt than a wife with an aching soul,” Evelyn said lightly, adjusting a stitch. “And who says I’ll be anyone’s charity case? I have my own plans.”

“Plans?” Her mother’s eyes flashed. “Embroidery and stubbornness are not plans!”

Evelyn laughed, and it nearly drove her mother to collapse onto the nearest ottoman.

“Mama, I adore you, but truly, listen to yourself. You speak as if unmarried women vanish into fog the moment they reach five-and-twenty. I am not declaring myself a nun. I shall have friends, and a garden and a room with good light. I shall read what I like, write what I like, and if I’m very lucky, scandalize at least two neighbors a year. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”

“It sounds mad,” Lady Brimwood cried. “You are still young, Evelyn! You could have so much… you could still marry well!”

“Well, I could also still fall into the duck pond and catch influenza, but we don’t plan around maybes , do we?”

Lady Brimwood made a sound between a sigh and a growl. “Do not make sport of this, Evelyn. You are twenty years old. The season has come and gone twice since?—”

“Yes, yes,” Evelyn interrupted, snipping a thread with delicate precision. “Since my sister’s dramatic departure from civility and my own ruinous encounter with the Viscount of Forth. I remember it perfectly, thank you. A shining chapter in the Ellory family ledger.”

Lady Brimwood stared at her daughter across the drawing room, breathing hard. Her hands trembled in her lap until, all at once, they stilled.

And then, her voice came, very quietly. “Do you know why I want this marriage for you, Evelyn?”

Evelyn didn’t look up. She was carefully threading a new needle, her lips pursed in concentration, too calm by half.

Her mother’s voice didn’t only rise, it sharpened. “Because I have not seen your sister since the day she ran off to Gretna Green.”

Eleanor’s needle paused mid-air.

“She writes,” Lady Brimwood went on louder now, each word spat as though it burned her tongue. “But she will not come home. She will not visit. She will not so much as pass through London for fear of your scorn and your silence. Because you made it clear you would not forgive her.”

Evelyn looked up slowly. Her hands lowered. Her face had gone pale, the color draining from her so fast it left only steel behind.

“That is not my doing,” she replied in a voice flat and cold. “She ran off with the man who was courting me . And you would now have me clap and curtsy and call it love?”

“She does love him!” Lady Brimwood cried. “And you… what did you have with him, truly? A few weeks of compliments and dances? He never asked for your hand. He never even wrote.”

Evelyn stood abruptly, the embroidery hoop slipping from her lap and landing on the rug with a dull thud .

“He never wrote,” she echoed, and her voice cracked just for a moment before she caught it again. “No. He never wrote because he was too busy stealing my sister in the dead of night.”

“She was the one with no prospects,” her mother shouted. “She was the one fading in the drawing room, season after season, while you basked in attention and suitors and admiration. And now you have the audacity to act as if you were the one betrayed.”

“I was betrayed,” Evelyn said.

There was a horrible silence.

Lady Brimwood was still trembling when she found her words. “Well, it is time you put your feelings aside. The world does not revolve around your heartbreak, Evelyn.”

Evelyn frowned. “You mistake my heartbreak with leftover affection for the Viscount, but it has never been about him, Mama. The sole cause of my heartbreak is Matilda’s doing.”

“But she is your sister. And two years are long enough to nurse a grudge.”

Evelyn bent slowly, retrieving her embroidery with steady fingers. She smoothed the fabric with delicate care, like a woman preparing to leave a wake.

“I see,” her mother said. “You will regret this, you know. Now, you have your youth, your beauty and your virtue.”

“Oh, but that is exactly the point, Mama. I don’t.

” She paused just for a moment, relishing the look of surprise on her mother’s face.

“I have already been ruined by the Duke of Aberon. And if you continue to force my hand, I shall inform every man in the ton that a dead man, who will never be able to make it right, stole my virtue. So, I shall remain forever ruined.”