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“I’ve been looking for you two merry maids, I have. Here’s wine.”

Anne drew back as Mathry set a goblet before her. A pregnant and unmarried woman must be beneath Anne’s notice, even if Gwen had made her, and not Anne, a bridesmaid. “Oh, I’m afraid?—”

“Elderberry? I’m very partial.” Prunella sniffed her goblet, then took a hearty sip.

Elderberry wine at a wedding breakfast? Anne went rigid. Not to serve proper, imported French or Portuguese wines, at least to the ladies?—

“Made it meself a few days ago. Dovey showed me how.” Mathry leaned against the table edge beside Prunella as if she had every right to mingle with gentlewomen, one of them a dowager viscountess. “Turned out rather fine, would you say?”

Prunella smacked her lips. “Delicious. You must give me the receipt.”

Mathry fixed her gaze on Anne. “And where’s that brother of yours got to, then?”

Anne put down her cup and swallowed, trying to push the bilberry down her throat. “I—I do not know.”

Daron was not invited to the wedding on account of his attempt to blackmail Gwen into marrying him by bringing, with Calvin Vaughn’s assistance, a suit claiming that St. Sefin’s was a brothel and Gwen its madame.

Penrydd, as the proper owner of St. Sefin’s, had put paid to that notion.

Anne had been witness to his rather splendid performance in court, and must admit it was a fine thing for a well-looking man to behave heroically.

Not one to quit when he was already behind, Daron had then attempted to negotiate with a notorious criminal who insisted Penrydd owed him money.

To Anne’s everlasting shame, she had delivered Gwen, the Viscountesses Penrydd, and herself into the clutches of the Black Hound to lure Penrydd and save Daron.

Penrydd had managed another heroic rescue, the result being that Gwen had finally been brought to admit she loved him and Daron must never show his face around St. Sefin’s again.

Anne herself was only here by the grace of abject and humilating apologies to her former friend, who had been polite but distant with Anne ever since.

“My dear Miss Sutton,” Lady Vaughn broke in, delivering a glare so potent that Mathry ought to have disappeared with a shriek and a puff of smoke.

“I hope you will not listen to a word of gossip that evil-intentioned people may spread about my son. People,” she added pointedly, “who have reason to bear a grudge against my family, though they had been deprived of their position on proper grounds.”

Mathry merely lifted her brows and stared Lady Vaughn full in the face. Anne, in her position, would have shriveled into tears.

No, Anne would never be in Mathry’s position, because she would cast herself into the pit of hell before she would submit to a man without marriage. Just look what it gained a woman.

Gwen, a viscountess. And Mathry, a marriage proposal from Penrydd’s Scottish secretary, who, it seemed, planned to accept her despite the babe in her belly and offer her a home in a lovely Welsh castle.

Anne blinked. The wages of sin were not what she’d been taught to believe.

“I … I suppose you are looking forward to your own wedding?” Anne ventured as Mathry showed no sign of taking her leave. “You and the father of your babe.”

Mathry’s normally dreamy face hardened. “Oh, the Scot didn’t plant a babe in me. Want to know who did?”

The glitter in the other woman’s eyes warned Anne that she did not, in fact, want to know who had fathered Mathry’s babe.

“Your intended,” Mathry said, cutting a look down the table at Lady Vaughn.

The words splashed into Anne’s stomach like a stone in an algae-covered pond.

“Came at me like a midge the moment I set foot in that house, and won me, twymffat that I was, with promises he never meant. Then when I caught, told his mother I’d tucked meself into his bed, and she turned me out with no more than the clothes on my back.

Calvin Vaughn,” Mathry said with a sneer, “ain’t fit to lick your boots, nor mine. ”

Anne stiffened her shoulders. A knight’s second son could not be expected to acknowledge a throw he’d gotten on a serving maid. It simply wasn’t done. Men had their needs, and women accommodated.

But Anne, as a gentleman’s daughter, deserved at least some boot-licking, didn’t she? As a consequence of her birth?

“I don’t?—”

Anne closed her mouth on the words. She’d been about to say she didn’t believe Mathry, but that was a reflex that came from her long training not to question men, not to trouble men, not to defy men. Every aspect of Mathry’s expression said she was not lying.

Anne believed her. And moreover, she knew, with the knowledge that went deeper than training, that Calvin Vaughn was exactly the type of man who would do such a thing.

“I … I don’t suppose he’s attempted to make things right with you since,” Anne managed, since she couldn’t leave the previous words hanging, especially with the way Mathry and Prunella were staring at her.

Mathry snorted. “You’re a sweet dolly, aren’t you? He’s too much a slubber de gullion for an innocent like you.”

“I’m not a simpleton,” Anne riled, though she feared she was. All she knew was how to navigate the safe, cushioned spaces she’d been born into. A place like St. Sefin’s, on the edge of society, was beyond the pale to her.

No one seemed to heed the usual boundaries between lord and peasant.

The maimed and idiots dined at a table with titled ladies, and Dovey, an African woman who had been born enslaved, sat beside a new viscountess, heads nearly touching, ash-brown hair tangling with black as they discussed some private and delightful business, judging from the smiles on both of their faces.

No, Anne didn’t have the sophistication, if such it was, to navigate this kind of world. Praise God she was going back to Vine Court, where at least if she were poor, she would remain respectable about it, and the lines that ordered the world in its proper hierarchies were clearly drawn.

“Mum’s right. Shouldn’t be listening to nasty gossip, my sweet.”

Calvin Vaughn appeared out of the crowd. Anne swallowed a gasp that felt more like a burp of those noxious fumes boiling in her belly. Calvin, for all that he looked like a spoiled prince, was another predator.

“You should not be here,” Anne said in a low voice. My, but she sounded so calm and steady. Almost achieving Lady Vaughn’s archness. “I am sure Lord Penrydd does not want to see you.”

Or Gwen, given that Calvin had tried to publicly shame her. But Gwen only borrowed her power from her spouse, another advantage of having a titled husband.

“My pet.” Cavlin gave her a full-toothed smile. “I am a Vaughn of Greenfield. I am the son of Sir Lambert Vaughn of Rogerstone. Everyone wants to see me.”

“Knight of the Bath or of the Garter?” Prunella demanded.

Calvin blinked. “Er. Knight Bachelor. Awarded for service in the Royal Household, under the direction of the Marquess of Bute, he who?—”

Prunella scoffed. “Not inducted to an order, then.”

Anne would never in her life be able to deliver a man such a cool, evaluating stare as Prunella levied at Calvin Vaughn. She didn’t have the temerity.

Calvin straightened his shoulders, eyes flaring. “Our family is on its way up. Hewitt was quite the hero at Acre. Honor to the name, and all that.”

In her visits to Greenfield, Anne had heard the Vaughns’ elder son, Hewitt, spoken of as if he were no less than a second Jesus setting foot on the Levant.

Bolstering the Royal Navy as they held back the conquering forces of the French and their megalomaniac little general, Napoleon.

Protecting the Holy Land as if he were a crusading knight, this time preserving it for Ottoman rule, rather than Europe’s.

He was likely twice as arrogant as his brother, and three times as proud.

On the surface, Calvin Vaughn appealed. His blond hair was brushed forward in the current style, his eyes the blue of the sky on a cool day in spring.

His dark blue coat was expertly cut, and the clawhammer tails tapped the backs of his knees in tune with the latest fashion.

But on closer appearance, his stiff neckline lent the illusion of a line to a jaw that was puffy with signs of spleen.

The eye-watering stripes of his waistcoat disguised the barrel-shaped chest and stomach.

The buckskin breeches, on the other hand, disguised nothing.

The leather clung and dipped to every bulge in his plump thighs and—she couldn’t not look—his crotch.

Anne averted her eyes. Calvin Vaughn appeared as slenderly endowed with virility as with good sense. Since here he was, showing up at the wedding reception as if he’d never tried to ruin Gwen, as if he’d never cozened and then rejected Mathry, who faced him with a stare as cool as Prunella’s.

“I hope your lady’s smarter than I was. Listen to that gossip long and hard, dearie,” Mathry advised Anne. She straightened and strolled away, hips swaying.

The bride and groom took seats at their small table of honor beside a distinguished-looking gentleman with white hair, the epaulettes of an admiral on his coat, and the badge of the Knight of the Garter on his chest. Prunella whispered that he was the new Earl of St. Vincent, under whom Lord Penrydd had served when he was still a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.

An earl! Anne regarded the honored guest with new attention. Did he have children? A pleasant, robust, well-shaped son who was not prone to swimming icy waters or getting himself blown up in battle?

“Would you look at that. Penrydd giving his wife a love spoon. How very Welsh,” Calvin sneered. “Completely gone native, hasn’t he?”

“A what?” Anne asked.

“A love spoon,” sighed Widow Jones, taking Mathry’s place at their table.

Widow Jones was slightly younger than the other crone, but they were two peas in a pod when it came to running St. Sefin’s and poking their noses into the business of folks about.

“My Conan carved one for me, he did. One with a wheel, to signify our life going on well together. And so we did, until he went and died.”

Anne froze. What was she to say that would not sound condescending or ineffectual? Losing the man she had pinned her hopes on upended a woman’s world, whether it was after many years of marriage or simply a long-hoped-for betrothal.

Look at Lydia, the Dowager Viscountess Penrydd, who, having failed to catch the notice of the earl, sat with her mouth puckered as though she’d been served vinegar instead of wine.

Her husband had died and she relied on a stepson to support her, and with a new viscountess who clearly had a leash around Penrydd’s neck, what could the dowager do to protect her position?

Look at Prunella, who despite her wishes would have to keep her brother-in-law happy to claim her jointure.

What could Anne, a gentleman’s daughter, say to a peasant woman whose life had been years of childcare and endless work?

They all of them were made to depend on men, fathers or lovers or husbands or brothers.

And when they lost that protection, they were prey, naked as field mice.

No wonder Gwen, destitute and alone, had taken shelter in this old stone abbey, trying to find some rest from the cold and the wind.

Anne might very well find herself in such a position, one day.

Calvin Vaughn scoffed. “Looks as if Penrydd carved that one himself, and not with any skill.”

Gwen accepted the token, her eyes shining with a softness Anne had never seen. “What is this, milord?” she asked with laughter brimming in her voice. “A sea serpent?”

“A bird,” Penrydd replied, affecting sternness. “Which anyone with proper eyes would detect. Clearly my whittling skills are far beyond your ability to decipher.”

“Clearly,” Gwen burbled. “I will treasure it, sir.”

Anne had to turn away at the look that passed between them. Such adoration. Such joy . She’d never seen a man look so at a woman, with such care and feeling, as if she were the sun that bounded his world, all the light he needed to live.

“Come, Anne,” Calvin said. “I’ve no stomach for more of this foolishness. Your brother’s waiting.”

Anne’s last bit of courage picked up its skirts and whisked out the door like a child set free from her lessons. “I don’t believe I want to see him,” Anne said faintly.

But when had a man ever heeded Anne’s wishes? When had anyone?