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The marriage might be, in a sense, a success. A man so old, so besotted, so doddering and goatish, perversely fixated—she’d be able to wrap him around her finger. If he noticed she wasn’t a virgin, he wouldn’t protest. No, he would pinch and knead to his heart’s content. And she, his wife, his duchess, she would live a life in which luxury offset loathsomeness.

To refuse, to choose dignity—that path led to poverty, to utter abjection. How long would she preserve her dignity then?

Here it was. The solution. The future.

Her lips were glued together. Her arms hung limp at her sides. Cranbrook gripped her forearm, lifted her hand, set the ring box on her palm. The jewels glittered.

At least she was selling dear.

She closed her fingers around the ring box. It felt good to make a fist. To squeeze.

Yes was an impossibility. She nodded and didn’t flinch as he peeled off his gloves, trapped her face with his naked fingers. When he forced his mouth hard upon hers, she heard a click.

Her mother, shutting the door.

Chapter One

Bodmin, Cornwall

One month later

“Your Grace?” The maid at her elbow was young and pretty. All the maids in service to the Duke of Cranbrook were young and pretty. This one—Beth, Bess, something like that—had tried to play nurse in the train compartment. If Lavinia so much as twitched, she brandished the bottle of lime water or leaned in with a dripping cloth. By the time the train reached Reading, Lavinia’s bodice was soaked and she’d declared herself recovered, just to escape the girl’s clumsy ministrations.

She lifted a hand to her tight, inflamed face. She was not recovered. Every step further impressed the fact upon her.

“You’re going in the wrong direction. The carriage is behind you.”

So it was. Lavinia kept threading her way along the crowded platform. Porters trotted back and forth, unloading the ducal luggage. A fat red hen ran over her right foot and a moment later a shrieking young boy in feverish pursuit ran over the left. She stopped short and the maid trod on her heel. Too much. Lavinia wheeled about.

“Give me space.” Her voice emerged as a growl from her parched throat, and the maid fell back a step, a fretful line appearing between her brows.

“Apologies, Your Grace,” she said.

“I don’t want your apologies. I want you gone.” Lavinia felt a familiar wave rising within her, hot and heady. Her fits of temper had been legendary in the Yardley household. And extraordinarily effective. Papa had hated to see her cry. Even as a woman grown, she’d found that a storm of sobbing was all it ever took to produce her heart’s desire. Up to a point. There were some things Papa couldn’t fix. She could cry until the end of time, but no one could bring the dead back to life.

“Very well.” The maid rested her chin on her interlaced knuckles, a childish gesture. She was little more than a child, really. Round-cheeked. Blond. If she wasn’t in livery, getting scolded, and Lavinia in a pink silk faille day dress, doing the scolding, onlookers might have mistaken them for sisters.

“Shall I tell His Grace . . . ?”

Tell him to go to the devil.

“Tell him I went to the station house.” Lavinia said it softly, becoming aware of those onlookers. West Country families in homespun clothes gaping or chuckling knowingly. She knew what they saw. A high-handed lady berating her poor, long-suffering servant. How dare they judge her! It wasn’t like that at all. If they only knew the night she’d had . . . that this was her first full day as a married woman and that it was vying to become the most awful day of her life.

The maid persisted. “Are you seeking refreshment? There are still cakes and sandwiches in the basket. I could—”

“I’m seeking the water closet,” Lavinia snapped. “Or do you prefer I call a porter and vomit in a hatbox?”

That silenced her. And produced a guffaw from a pair of market women. A loutish farmer in a smock shook his head. Lavinia tried to strike a gentler note.

“I’ll be along shortly. Thank you, Beth.”

“Nan.” The maid shrugged, blue eyes flicking toward the farmer. He took the pipe stem from between his teeth.

“No water closet,” he called, grinning. “Privy across the tracks, by the brown oak.”

Nan grinned back, then curtseyed to Lavinia, thin-lipped.

“I will tell His Grace you’ve gone to the privy,” she said, and whirled, the spring in her step mildly suggestive of a flounce.