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CHAPTER ONE

A nne Sutton sat in the quiet pool of colored light falling through the windows of the church and watched her childhood friend—the woman Anne had once thought would be her ally for life—say her wedding vows to a man who really ought to have married Anne.

She shifted on the hard bench while the vicar expounded on the delights of marriage. Marriage, the promised future for which Anne had been preparing her entire life, and Gwen—disgraced, exiled, ruined Gwen—achieved it first.

To a viscount .

Anne opened her fan and studied the delicate painting on the leaf as if it could explain how her life had gone so terribly wrong.

Anne was lovelier than Gwen, always had been.

Gwen had that dark red-brown hair and tended to freckle if she were not careful to stay out of the sun, and she never did stay out of the sun.

Anne was the classic English rose: skin fair as porcelain, large eyes as blue as a summer sky, a prim red mouth, and hair the color of an old guinea.

True, Anne’s nose was too long for her face and had that bridge her mother referred to as “aristocratic,” but Mrs. Sutton had always read her nose as a sign Anne ought to marry high.

A score of years ago, when the wide-eyed, motherless Gwenllian Carew had been delivered to Vine Court, Anne had sat on the tasseled cushion of fortune, in possession of every asset of birth and breeding, favored and petted and loved. And now look at her.

She watched the motes of dust twirl in the air when she swished her fan through them. Untethered, directionless, just like Anne’s future. In the old abbey’s lancet windows, stained-glass saints stared down on the scene. Saints didn’t care how quickly, how sharply, fortune turned her wheel.

Richard Sutton, son of a successful collier in Oswestry, was once a gentleman rising in the world.

His estate was the pride of the neighborhood, his wife and daughter envied, his heir adored by all.

But then Gwen, his charity ward, drew the son of Vine Court into her snares, and that was the first cut, really. The first wound.

The Suttons turned her out at once, Anne’s mother bitterly holding her head up above the scandal while Anne was forbidden contact with her companion of ten years.

Daron’s intended broke their betrothal and Daron ran wild after that, racking up debts.

Then fate and a summer storm spilled Richard Sutton’s last hopes into the ocean, leaving the family with only their house and their name.

And David Carew discovered veins of lead-silver, won himself a knighthood, and left all his lands and mines and money to Gwen. Who, after she had gone off alone and without a word, breaking her friendship with Anne like an old stick, found a viscount to marry her.

Anne’s stomach pinched. She’d had nothing but a nibble of toast to break her fast and some tea brewed of weeds from St. Sefin’s gardens.

She must not let her belly rumble before Lady Vaughn, sitting on the bench beside her.

Her son Calvin might have made an ass of himself recently, but her ladyship meant to assure everyone in attendance that the Vaughns were a family to be reckoned with.

In the weeks since she had come to Newport, Anne had taken real tea, China tea, with Calvin’s mother and the Penrydd dowager viscountesses enough times to know that the Vaughn matriarch was born a predator.

Weakness, to her, was a bone thrown to a hungry dog; she would attack.

Lord Penrydd pledged to endow Gwen with all his worldly goods, and the hot, dry taste of sand filled Anne’s mouth.

Gwen had broken the bounds of propriety and gentility, had lived for years on the ragged edge of respectability and poverty, and now she would be a viscountess.

She would have several homes and estates, including Penrydd Castle nearby, which was as admired as Tredegar House.

Anne had peeped at grand Tredegar House in its park, home of the Morgans, when they drove the bumpy track between St. Sefin’s and the Vaughn estate of Greenfield.

Anne was meant for all these things. A husband with a distinguished family.

Influence. A beautiful home furnished with expensive and tasteful items and herself, dressed in exquisite gowns.

The viscount gave his bride a wicked smirk when he said the bit about worshipping her with his body.

Anne wondered if he knew that Daron had worshipped Gwen with his body first. She squeezed the ivory sticks of her fan, focusing on the prick of pain.

The child would have been Anne’s niece, had she lived.

Anne knew nothing about children, making or birthing or raising them, and she was four-and-twenty now. Her best child-bearing years were falling away like petals while Calvin Vaughn, who had accepted her parents’ offer for Anne’s hand, waited for her dowry to be restored.

There was a certain freedom in the waiting, in being admired and claimed but not yet bestowed.

Yet for a young woman bred for one purpose, to preside over an elegant home and raise comely and well-behaved children, no dowry was a sentence of eternal spinsterhood.

Such a girl would end up alone. Pitied. Probably poor.

At least she was not obliged to marry Calvin any longer.

He’d thrown over Anne when he tried to convince Gwen to marry him.

The gleam of those lead-silver mines held a powerful allure.

When Daron failed to win Gwen back, Calvin made his bid, and neither of them, of course, had any chance against a viscount.

Anne didn’t blame them for trying. She’d made her own pitch at Penrydd—how could she not, given she was obviously the superior choice?

But he’d already lost his heart to Gwen, and Gwen had given hers to him.

The vicar, a mild, genial man with spectacles and a rather endearing flop of hair over his brow, solicited Gwen’s consent to the marriage, and she promptly gave it, along with an adoring gaze at her bridegroom.

What a notion. Marrying for affection instead of the usual reasons. Just one more instance of Gwen not caring about the rules.

He was an English vicar, so Anne could understand him.

She had never learned the Welsh tongue, though she was born and raised in Llanfyllin, a good ten miles from the English border.

Her turn of fate might taste less bitter were the ceremony held in Welsh and she couldn’t understand more than the broadest outlines, Anne thought.

“Just as well they’re making their vows before the babe comes.” Lady Vaughn sniffed.

“Do you mean her maid of honor, Mathry?” Anne whispered behind her fan. The girl was clearly enceinte.

Anne had heard talk that Mathry had been employed in the Vaughn household.

Of course maids weren’t supposed to fall pregnant; it was a guaranteed dismissal.

But the disgraced Mathry had nevertheless caught the eye of Lord Penrydd’s secretary and would be installed in Penrydd Castle as the housekeeper, so here was another girl who had given away her virtue and come out quite well on the other end of things.

“La, the viscountess herself is expecting a happy event, judging from the ripe look of her,” Lady Vaughn replied.

“I’ve had the girl harping in my house, and she’s never been more than a scrawny sack of bones.

How fortunate my Calvin was promised to you, dear, so that cunning baggage didn’t get her hooks into him. ”

His mother could not think that Calvin still wanted Anne, not after all that had transpired.

But Anne was not going to contradict her ladyship.

She was too well-bred, for one thing, and for another, she was currently Lady Vaughn’s guest at Greenfield while St. Sefin’s filled with Penrydd family and friends in advance of the wedding.

And after the wedding, Anne would be blown off like dandelion fluff, with no notion of where she might land.

The vicar moved into his discussion of marital duties, placidly recommending the wife’s subjugation to her husband, advising a meek and quiet spirit.

Anne barely contained her snort. Gwen didn’t have a single part of her frame that bent toward subjugation.

Anne was the one who had been raised to obedience. She was an expert at meekness.

And look what that had achieved her. Gwen, the woman turned out in disgrace, had won the lordly husband and the title and the castles, and Anne had nothing, nothing.

What had she done wrong ?

The crowd stood when the vicar pronounced the pair man and wife. Anne clapped politely along with the rest, but her thoughts floated everywhere, like those dust motes.

What did she do now?

Anne followed the stream of guests into the spacious, well-lit refectory where the wedding feast was laid out, her stomach a pot of boiling eels.

The crumbling old priory meant enough to Gwen, and to her new husband, that they’d chosen to host their wedding festivities here and not somewhere more elegant, like a decent church in Bristol across the bay, or perhaps the cathedral at Gloucester.

Married in a cathedral: that was a way Anne could do well for herself. And a viscount was practically the lowest rung of English nobility, one bare step up from a baron. Anne could attach an earl and become a countess, and then she would outrank Gwen.

Too bad English lords were thin on the ground in Wales. Anne would have to go Bath, or even London, to put herself in the way of one, and how was she to manage that, without any money to fund such travel nor a dowry to tempt a lord?