Page 1 of How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days

‘ Who wishes to marry me?’ Lydia demanded, looking up from her novel in some alarm.

‘I can hardly believe it myself,’ Aunt Agatha said, pulling vigorously at the bell to call for Lydia’s maid. ‘Quick, let us tidy your hair – we mustn’t keep him waiting.’

Turning a deaf ear to Aunt Agatha’s wittering was one of Lydia’s chief policies in life – what one didn’t hear couldn’t upset one – but today it was clear she had missed something rather crucial.

‘Keep who waiting?’

Aunt Agatha ignored her. In a few deft movements she had pulled the book from Lydia’s hands, Lydia from her armchair, and deposited her at the dressing table, where – too impatient to wait for assistance – she began to tug at Lydia’s chignon herself.

‘How on earth do you dishevel so quickly?’ she muttered.

Lydia submitted to the manhandling without protest, too busy cudgelling her brain for any gentlemen who might be desirous of marrying her. Not one came to mind.

‘If your grandfather could only see this,’ Aunt Agatha breathed. ‘You to wed to such a person as this!’

Lydia reached up to still her aunt’s hands.

‘Of whom can you possibly be speaking?’ she asked.

‘Were you not listening?’ Aunt Agatha demanded. She drew in a rapturous breath and declared, with the same fervour their Vicar invoked Jesus Christ Our Lord and Saviour: ‘It is Ashford !’

Lydia stared. Had the disappointment of Lydia’s second failed Season sent Aunt Agatha mad?

‘Aunt …’ she began, slowly and carefully – she did not wish to upset her fragile faculties further – ‘That is utterly absurd.’

For the Marquess of Ashford, Earl of Bath and future Duke of Ancaster, one of the highest-ranking peers in England and certainly the most eligible, most certainly did not wish to marry Lydia, Miss Hanworth of Nowhere, Lady of Nothing.

Why, she was barely better born than Aunt Agatha’s pug and given the fastidious Ashford had already rejected several diamonds of the ton , Lydia did not think pug was the level at which he wished to settle.

‘It is beyond anything I dared to dream.’ Aunt Agatha said, pulling tightly on Lydia’s hair. ‘I had not thought his attentions were serious .’

Neither had Lydia. They were barely acquainted, their first conversation occurring only a fortnight earlier, and in their encounters since, Ashford’s manner had never been the least loverlike. He was always so entirely proper, so perfectly correct.

‘Is it possible he has come to the wrong house?’ she wondered aloud. ‘Perhaps he meant to offer for Miss Callow, across the square.’

The state of the masculine intellect meant such a mistake – though embarrassing – was not improbable.

‘What nonsense,’ Aunt Agatha tutted. ‘Consider: this must be why Lady Phoebe invited you and Pip to her house party. Ashford must have requested she do so!’

Two days before, Lydia and her brother had received billets from Lady Phoebe Henley, Ashford’s enormously wealthy and tremendously fashionable cousin. The invitation to join her house party at Hawkscroft House had been flattering but incomprehensible. Until now.

‘Lawks,’ Lydia breathed, stunned.

‘Mind your tongue!’ Aunt Agatha snapped, with an accompanying jab of a hairpin to strengthen the reprimand. ‘If you dare utter such vulgarities in front of Ashford, I shall see you speedily regret it. Recollect, he could have anyone!’

‘He could have anyone,’ Lydia said, ‘so why me? It is not as if he requires my dowry.’

It was plain that most gentlemen found Lydia’s impressive dowry by far the most alluring part of her character.

‘Ladies do not to speak of such things,’ Aunt Agatha said, weaponizing her pin once more. ‘You might try to look more pleased! A thousand women should die for such an opportunity as this!’

This was true. Alas, Lydia was not one of them.

‘I decline,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I do not wish to marry him.’

‘ Why ?’

‘I care not for him.’

Aunt Agatha could not have looked more shocked than if she had been run through with a sword.

‘I do not understand,’ Aunt Agatha said. ‘You have danced with him happily enough …’

‘I could not exactly refuse him,’ Lydia pointed out. ‘Though I should have, had I been able. He is dreadfully haughty, you know.’

Aunt Agatha’s hands fell from Lydia’s hair to her shoulders and clenched.

‘Do you mean to tell me,’ she said, ‘you wish to decline a proposal from a marquess, because you do not care for him ?’

Lydia’s heart began to quicken, but she raised her chin and forced herself to her aunt’s gaze.

‘If you could tell him that I am very sorry,’ she said. ‘But—’

‘You cannot decline, Lydia,’ Aunt Agatha interrupted. ‘You cannot! After all this family have worked towards, all these years … It would ruin us.’

The Hanworth family might be passably respectable now, but it had not always been so.

Lydia might be the daughter of a gentleman, but she was the granddaughter of a wool merchant.

For her to refuse so lofty a member of the peerage …

there would be talk. Unpleasant talk, and lots of it.

If each step of the Hanworths’ climb from the streets of Cheapside to the lofty townhouses of Berkley Square was the work of two generations, a fall from grace would be the work of a moment.

But Lydia could not live her life according to such fear. She could not.

‘You promised it would be my choice,’ she said.

‘Ashford will one day be a duke ,’ Aunt Agatha said. ‘You ought to be falling over yourself to choose him.’

‘I do not want him!’ Lydia interrupted. ‘Does that not signify?’

‘I have introduced you to every eligible gentleman I could place my hands on,’ Aunt Agatha’s cheeks were turning blotchy with emotion, ‘and you have not wanted any of them!’

‘You and I have wildly different definitions of eligible,’ Lydia muttered.

Indeed, judging by the specimens Aunt Agatha could ‘place her hands on’, the whole breed of man was in a state of emergency.

‘At times, I should even suspect you of purposefully driving them away!’ her aunt accused.

Lydia worked to keep her expression clear.

For Lydia had developed certain strategies for repulsing unwanted suitors out of Aunt Agatha’s sight and earshot.

It was not difficult. Gentlemen of quality had high standards, and while they might be willing to overlook Lydia’s birth for a chance at the Hanworth fortune, they were less willing to endure poor behaviour.

Thus, Lydia had found most marital inclinations could be cured by the liberal application of her foot upon theirs during the waltz, or, failing that, a single lecture on her Views on Shakespeare.

‘You are impossible,’ Aunt Agatha raged on, pressing a hand to her forehead. ‘You and your brother, both. What is wrong with you? You with your romantic turns, Philip with his—’

‘There is nothing wrong with Pip,’ Lydia said fiercely.

They glared at each other for a long moment, as bristling and hackled as a pair of alley cats.

‘If you do wish to reject Ashford’s suit, then on your head be it,’ Aunt Agatha said, in a voice both calmer and colder and no less intimidating for it. ‘But I will not ease your way. You shall have to tell him.’

She turned to the wardrobe, selected a fuchsia pink sash from within and motioned for Lydia to stand and turn. Lydia obeyed, reluctantly.

‘Of course, such a choice will not be without consequence,’ Aunt Agatha said. She held Lydia’s eyes. ‘If you refuse such an offer, your uncle will send you to Aunt Mildred.’

Lydia’s breath caught, and not just because her aunt was tightening the sash around her waist to mythical proportions.

The threat of living in rural isolation with Aunt Mildred – severe, austere, and only marginally more animated than a slug – had for years served as Lydia’s very own sword of Damocles.

‘You must prevent him,’ Lydia said. ‘Persuade him …’

‘He is my husband,’ Aunt Agatha said. ‘I must obey his wishes.’

Lydia’s chest was constricting. If only she had a moment to catch her breath, but there was none, for Aunt Agatha was giving each of her cheeks a pinch and pulling her from the room.

‘Recollect everything I have taught you,’ she said, speaking low and fast. ‘Smile, but without teeth. Speak quietly and briefly and only when spoken to, laugh at his jests, without teeth.’

Lydia followed blindly.

She could not become engaged, now, not to someone for whom she did not care a fig. Yet could she truly face such consequences as these? Her reputation tarnished, sent far away from everything and everyone she knew?

There had to be a way out. If only she could think , but it was impossible with Aunt Agatha still hissing in her ear.

‘Speak only of ladylike subjects: no talk of dowries, your grandparents, or any financial matters. You will utter no vulgarities, use no cant. You will not sing.’

‘Why on earth would I sing?’ Lydia protested.

‘No singing!’

They were downstairs, now, and nearing the library, and in the next moment, Aunt Agatha was pushing open the door and thrusting Lydia inside. Lydia blinked into the gloom. The two men standing before the unlit fireplace turned at the sound of the door: Uncle Edmund, face beaming, and … Ashford.

Lydia’s stomach sank into her shoes. Until that very moment, there had still been a part of her sure this was all some grand misunderstanding, but it really was him, dark hair and light eyes, handsome in face and frame and looking so terribly elegant, his coat and boots bearing the unmistakeable signs of the kind of expert craftmanship of which Uncle Edmund only dreamt.

In appearance, he was the sort of person one might be very pleased to be in love with, if one had the inclination.

Unfortunately, to Lydia, he had all the romantic allure of a tree stump.

‘Good morning, Miss Hanworth,’ Ashford said, making a very proper leg.

‘Good morning,’ she said, her voice a little hoarse. Aunt Agatha gave her a little press in the back. ‘My lord,’ she added hastily.