Chapter 1
Thaddeus
The club was a haven from the noise outside. A sanctuary of polished wood and quiet conversation—everything the streets were not. London was getting worse. Beggars on every corner, children running wild with hollow cheeks and thinner coats. I could never understand why they kept having more when they couldn’t feed the ones they already had.
Henry and Ezra sat close to the fire, newspapers spread open between them. A women’s college opening up. The rise of liberalism. The sort of things that made the old families twitch. If we couldn’t keep our own house in order, the French would start calling us weak.
God forbid that.
“Have a port brought to my table,” I said, handing the young footman my hat and coat.
He nodded, but I didn’t wait for his reply. I crossed the room toward my friends, the hush of the club settling over my shoulders like a familiar cloak.
“Oh-ho, here he is,” Ezra said, earning a withering glare from Lord Crompton.
I sank into the armchair opposite them and shook my head.
“If you’re excluded from the club again, old boy, I shall not be seen leaving with you.”
“I should say not,” Henry drawled, folding his newspaper with lazy precision.“But do enlighten us. How did it go with Lady Harriet?”
“You sound like my mother, Henry. I had no notion my potential nuptials would prove such entertainment.”
Both of them were respectable husbands in public and absolute degenerates in private — a hypocrisy neither seemed troubled by.
“Ah, I remember when I first met my Anna,” Ezra said fondly.“Those sweet days don’t last long.”
“Good God, man,” Henry scoffed, lips curling into a smirk.“You are seven-and-twenty. You ought to have been married an age ago.”
The truth was that my chaperoned meeting with Lady Harriet’s daughter had been rather dull. She was the same as all the other young ladies my parents thrust at me—polite, agreeable, and entirely without spark.
At least the women at Madame Radley’s had a little fire in them.
“Get a wife for the sake of an heir. You may dabble on the side when you’re in town,” Henry said as my port arrived.
I ignored him. I would marry when I damn well chose to—and not a moment before.
“The meeting was not productive, or he wouldn’t be drinking at this hour,” Ezra remarked.
“I need the port to dull the racket coming from your lips,” I said, flicking the newspaper open.
At last. Blessed silence. I’d begun to think them incapable of it.
? ? ?
My father’s office was always a suffocating place—a chamber choked with dark panelled walls and the stale scent of tobacco. Heavy velvet curtains smothered the windows, muting the daylight to a dim amber glow. Every surface carried his authority: polished mahogany, brass fixtures buffed to a mirror shine, ledgers stacked in ruthless order.
A fire snapped in the grate, but it did nothing to soften the room.
If anything, the heat made it worse—thick, oppressive, fit for judgement.
“You are passing your prime age to marry, Thaddeus,” my father said, settling his portly frame deeper into the grand leather armchair that had moulded itself to his shape over decades. He lifted his pipe to his lips. The ember glowed, then a plume of smoke unfurled toward me like a contemptuous hand waving me into obedience.
Twenty-seven was hardly old.
“You need someone with social standing and an advantageous dowry,” he went on, shaking his head as if I were a hopeless case.“Turning down Lord Upton’s daughter is a mistake. Our estate needs that capital.”
The harvest had been poor this year, yes—but I had seen the accounts. We were nowhere near the poorhouse, despite his theatrics.
