Chapter One
1816
Miss Priscilla Carmichael made a lovely bride. Her dress of champagne satin caught all the light and haloed her, making her blond curls gleam and her eyes look as blue as a summer sky. The Honorable Harry Winlock was more than a little awestruck as he promised all his worldly goods to her endow, and grinned outright when she in turn promised to serve and obey, so long as they both should live. Their hands held sure and steady while the groom slipped the wedding band onto his bride’s finger.
It was Lucy Muchelney, in the front pew, whose hands were shaking.
She hadn’t wept, though. She didn’t dare. If she started weeping she wasn’t sure she would stop. And it wouldn’t be the kind of weeping the bride’s mother was doing in the pew beside her: ladylike, a-tremble, with gentle dabs of the handkerchief in the corners of her watery eyes. Mrs. Carmichael watered all through the sermon and after, while the newlyweds wrote their names in the parish register.
Lucy, dry-eyed, felt every scratch of the pen as though the point were scraping over her very soul.
One month ago, the banns announcing the match had been read out in this same church. Lucy had frozen with the shock of it, then waited until they were alone to ask Pris why. “I don’t want to spend my life alone,” Pris had explained. Her hands in her lap twined around one another, flexing the way they always did when she was anxious about something.
Lucy had wrapped her hands around Pris’s to still them. “You aren’t alone. You have me.”
“I know,” Pris said, “but Lucy, I can’tmarryyou. My grandmother’s trust only becomes mine upon marriage. I have to think about how I am going to live.”
“You should think about how you’re going to live with a husband—does Harry know that you don’t love him?”
Pris dropped her eyes.
Lucy’s mouth was a bitter twist. “Does Harry know that you love me?”
“Oh! How could I tell him?” Pris cried. “It’s too cruel of you to suggest it. He couldn’t possibly understand.”
And then Pris had started to cry—had buried her face in Lucy’s breast—had tilted her face up and kissed Lucy desperately. But later, when the buttons were rebuttoned and the petticoats smoothed back down, Pris had only said: “Harry and I will be married from Winlock House on the twenty-eighth of March.” As if the past five minutes—or the past five years—had never happened at all.
Pain sent Lucy to her feet, out the door, and down the cliff path toward the sea. The rocky shores along the coast here were strewn with shells of ancient things, and the scene’s steady bleakness had always offered her refuge in the past. But the cliff path looked out over the bay toward Winlock House, and the sight only drove the blade in deeper.
Now she stood on that same cliff, the lingering winter wind tugging her dark hair loose from its pins, watching carriages pull up to Harry Winlock’s home in an endless stream of guests for the wedding breakfast. Even at this distance she could recognize her lover’s slender shape, the green-decked bonnet bent demurely toward the tall, proud figure at her side. Pris put a hand on her husband’s elbow as they walked up the stairs, and for a moment Lucy felt a phantom pressure on her own arm.
She turned her back on all such ghosts and trudged home.
Stephen was just heading out when she arrived, his paint box and canvas waiting on the table in the foyer. “So Priscilla is wed,” he said. “I hope you wished her joy on both our behalves.”
“I did,” Lucy lied.
Stephen nodded absently, then fixed narrowed eyes upon her. “You don’t have any suitors, do you?”
Lucy had to bite her lip a moment before answering. “Not a one.”
“Mmm. Too bad. It’s high time you were settled.” His eyes flicked down to her gray mourning gown to evaluate its presentability, as though she were a landscape by an as-yet-unknown artist and Stephen had to set the opening bid at auction. “I think Peter Violet might be brought up to the mark.”
The idea of marrying any man, especially one of her brother’s friends, was appalling. Lucy grappled for an excuse. “Father’s death—”
“Was six months ago.”
“There’s still so many calculations to be done—”
Stephen snorted. “What calculations? You were an able assistant to Father’s astronomy work, I’ll grant you, but surely you didn’t think you’d be able to just pick up where he left off?” At Lucy’s sullen silence, his mouth went flat. “You did think that. Well, you can stop thinking it right now. We don’t have the money to indulge your self-important whims.”
Lucy bristled. “The star catalogs are of enormous scientific value—”
“They were, when they had Father’s name on them. And it would be different if your work was self-supporting. But we might as well sell that telescope at this point—nobody is going to employ a woman as an astronomer, are they?”
Lucy ground her teeth together to keep from saying something unladylike. It would only make things worse.
Stephen apparently took her silence for assent, because he gathered up his paints and opened the door. “I’m heading up to Yorkshire for a few weeks. We’ll talk more of this when I return.” For a moment, his brown eyes softened with concern. “You’ll be alright on your own, won’t you?”
