Loving Lysander

No alchemy in the world can create love where it is not meant to be.
“I know what I have. I would never do anything to jeopardize it.”
Lysander Theodore Barton, Marquess of Hawes, makes that declaration on a bright, frosty morning on the twenty-second day of December, in the year 1827. He is one of the guests at Myddleton House, the magnificent Derbyshire seat of the Earl of Hutton. And the declaration is made while looking at the woman he loves; Lady Catherine Northcott, the Earl’s daughter.
Catherine loves Lysander with equal ferocity. Theirs is a love eternal, a match surely made in Heaven. Yet, even as Lysander speaks the words, the hands of fate are busy molding and shaping a very different future to the one he has envisaged.