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She’d not find any prospects here, though Penrydd had made a public occasion of his wedding.

Several of his London acquaintances and a good portion of the men he’d served with in the Navy were attending, including some who had survived whatever battle had injured Penrydd.

Most of the population of Newport had also turned out, though this was a small enough number, considering Wales had nothing like a proper town—unless one considered Cardiff, which Anne didn’t.

Then there was the strange community who lived at St. Sefin’s, the misfits that Gwen had collected when she left the Suttons and came south.

Thank goodness Prunella was here, one other young lady of birth and breeding.

Prunella had married Penrydd’s elder brother, the one who died trying to swim a cold Scottish loch for wager, and as a dowager viscountness, still young and pleasant looking, she, too, must be considering the options before her.

“A rather poor ceremony, didn’t you think?” Anne whispered, attaching herself like a limpet to Prunella’s side.

Prunella wasn’t Anne’s usual sort of acquaintance.

For one, she was a soft, sweet dumpling of a woman, whose mother clearly had not hawkishly supervised every morsel of food Prunella put in her mouth.

She also had no proper respect for London fashions.

Unlike the muslin drapery which was à la mode, Prunella wore the native Welsh costume of a bedgown with the addition of lace at her bodice and a linen apron covering her silk petticoat.

On another woman the bright red shawl and tall beaver hat would have looked a bizarre affectation, and on Prunella, it looked adorable.

“I thought it was lovely. Ooh, Gwen made her Welsh cakes.” Prunella gazed with delight at the long, heavy oak table laden with dishes. “I helped pick the blackberries. Quite a few brambles around here, though I think we were on Morgan land. Went with the widows, didn’t I, Mother?”

Prunella beamed at the old crone pushing her way toward the pile of golden, luscious cakes.

Anne recognized her as one of the two widows who lived at St. Sefin’s because they had no family and nowhere else to go.

Why else would anyone live in a drafty old priory that smelled of old, wet stone and dust?

“All right for a Saes .” With a cackle, the crone snatched the very cake Anne had staked out for herself.

“What did she call you?” Anne whispered.

“It’s what they call the English,” Prunella said serenely. “It’s not likely Mother Morris will ever approve of us. She has such a sad history, do you know it? Everyone here does. It was wonderful of Gwen to take them all in.”

Anne shuddered, a chill dancing its way across the delicate muslin of her bodice and the lace she’d tucked around her neck.

Gwen had said Anne might remain at St. Sefin’s if she didn’t wish to return to Vine Court and the teeth of her mother’s disappointment, the trap of another arranged marriage, the humiliation of seeing her father burying himself in a bottle to avoid staring his problems in the eye and ignoring Anne, who had always been his pet.

As if she’d consider staying here, living in this half-ruined pile, with a motley group of outcasts and the destitute.

How would she ever find a husband to support her?

She’d never see the fashion plates or hear news from London.

Lady Vaughn was at the center of the Newport circle.

Anne would never escape the humiliation of being jilted.

She stabbed a cake and lofted it onto her plate.

Of course everyone would admire Gwen for taking in outcasts.

She’d been one herself, a motherless child, brought to Anne’s home to be a companion, receiving the same tutoring, sharing the same table and even a bedchamber.

And what had the Suttons received for their generosity?

Betrayal.

Little enough here she’d care to eat even if she could force food into her mouth, Anne thought peevishly.

Half the dishes looked unpalatable. Breads too thick and heavy, several dishes with seaweed—could anything be less like food?

What wasn’t mutton or beef was cockles. At least there was a wedding cake, alongside an assortment of pies and tarts.

Anne’s mouth watered despite herself at the red, purple, and blue juices leaking out of the cut fillings.

A proper sweet would temper the bile in her belly.

She took a tiny piece of the bilberry tart as she followed Prunella down the line.

Their housekeeper at Vine Court was ever trying to show Anne how to forage from the land, and while Anne didn’t care to put things in her mouth until they’d been properly washed and gone through the mysterious alchemy of the kitchen, Gwen had been an avid learner.

Anne still remembered an afternoon when she and Gwen sneaked away from lessons on Greek history and lolled in an empty field full of knapweed and meadowsweet, daring each other to eat raw wimberries off the bramble and laughing at the faces the other made.

They’d come home with their chins and aprons stained purplish-blue, mouths puckered in smiles that survived Mama’s scolding about their errant ways.

What had they talked about in those golden rambles, those sun-blessed days?

Anne plucked flowers and muttered verses over puddles of water, scrying to see the face of the man she’d marry.

Gwen stopped to chat with every crofter or peasant or miner or carter whose path they crossed.

Anne fussed over catching her apron or spoiling her shoes, while Gwen didn’t care if her hair fell loose and snarled in the wind.

Gwen was nothing but a miner’s daughter; she was permitted such hoydenish ways.

Anne was a gentleman’s daughter and must behave like a gentlewoman at all times.

A destitute gentlewoman, on the knife edge of spinsterhood.

Defiantly, Anne took another slice of pie—raspberry, she hoped—and trailed Prunella to a table.

She couldn’t grow fat and horsey when she needed to be married, but she could expect two days of greasy food from coaching inns when she traveled back to Llanfyllin.

Prunella’s mother-in-law, the other dowager Viscountess Penrydd, took a seat down the long oak table, holding court with the Price relations. Lady Vaughn hovered near, trying to insert herself into their conversation. Prunella seated herself a safe distance away, and Anne beside her.

“So what shall you do, Miss Sutton? Now that you’re not to be married after all.” There was no malice in Prunella’s expression, only a friendly warmth as she took a large bite of tart.

Anne put down her fork.

It was too noisy in this room, all the feasting people speaking so loudly.

The scent of myrtle overpowered all, reeking from Gwen’s bridal bouquet, strewn in small bowls along the table, spilling from the deep recessed windowsills.

Just seeing other people put seaweed on their plate, though she would never eat it, set those eels alive in Anne’s belly.

“I do not know,” Anne confessed. “There is no one at home left to marry.” An engagement broken, at her advanced age, and what other prospects had she? Panic clawed up her throat.

Penrydd and Gwen stood near the door of the chapel, accepting congratulations. They hadn’t been showered with grain yet, but if Gwen had already caught a babe, they didn’t need blessings for fertility.

Gwen was five and twenty, only a year older than Anne.

All the years Gwen had spent building this place, overseeing a community, cooking and tending to travelers and providing care to the ill and needy, Anne had sat quietly in the parlor at Vine Court, embroidering pillows and darning stockings, having the same conversations and organizing the same church meals, waiting for her family to scratch up a dowry so Anne might marry at last.

Penrydd hadn’t married Gwen for her mines of lead-silver.

Anne wanted to shriek her rage and grief to the high timbered ceiling of the hall, built to house ancient Welsh nuns. Her future ruined and lost, everything she’d hoped for her life out of reach, and she’d done nothing to deserve this. Had she?

“I don’t suppose I shall marry again.” Prunella bit into another thick slice of tart. Prunella didn’t appear the type to let anything turn her off her feed.

“But you’re a viscountess,” Anne said. “Men will want you for your title, if nothing else.”

Prunella wrinkled her nose. “But do I want them?”

Not to be married? The thought drew a great blank in Anne’s mind.

What did a woman become if she weren’t desired by, attached to, under the protection of a man?

Marriage defined a woman. It meant everything, a house, a home, a family.

A spinster was an emptied-out husk, pushed about by any careless breeze.

“What will you do instead?” Anne asked.

Prunella shrugged and chewed her tart. “I’d liefer set up my own house somewhere.

Lydia, that’s the dowager, I’m naught but a servant in her eyes.

She orders the household as she likes, and the townhouse in London is so poky, at least a hundred years old.

I’d like a cottage of my own where I might order things as I wish. ”

Anne regarded her tart. Prunella would have a jointure from her husband, a comfortable income if she spent it wisely. Widows were not held in contempt.

But what could Anne do? Return to Vine Court and live quietly with her parents, an embarrassment, their unmarried daughter aging before their eyes. She would grow crotchety and eccentric and end up keeping the kind of small, nervous dog she had always detested.

Or she could go to a fashionable town and find a post as a lady’s companion, fading to a long gray shadow in her looking glass, overlooked and unloved.

At the moment, either of those options appealed more than marriage to a man who didn’t really want her.