Ravishing the Heiress

CHAPTER 5

The Honeymoon

1888

There was a giant in Fitz’s head, tirelessly wielding a sledgehammer the size of Mount Olympus. He twitched, the floor hard and cold against his aching body.

“Get up!” shouted the giant, his bellow like a nail driven through Fitz’s skull. “For the love of God, get up!”

It wasn’t the giant who yelled, but Hastings. Fitz wanted to tell him to shut up and leave him alone—if he could get up he wouldn’t be on the floor like a common drunk. But his throat seemed coated in sand and grit; he couldn’t push a word past.

Hastings swore and gripped Fitz by the back of his shirt. They were of a similar height but Hastings was brawnier. He dragged Fitz along the floor, the motion making Fitz’s stomach queasy and his head hurt, as if it were being batted against a wall.

“Stop. Goddamn it, stop.”

Hastings didn’t care. He hauled Fitz into something resembling a vertical position then dunked him, fully dressed, into a bathtub full of scalding water.

“Jesus!”

“Get clean, get sober,” growled Hastings. “I can only keep Colonel Clements waiting for so long.”

Colonel Clements can go fuck himself.

Then Fitz remembered, as the sledgehammer came down again, that it was his wedding day. Time stopped for no one, least of all a young man who only wanted to hold on to what he had.

He wiped a wet hand over his face and opened his eyes at last. He was in a bath with peeling brown wallpaper, straggly scum-green curtains, and a dented mirror frame that was missing the mirror inside. His town house, he realized, cringing.

Hastings had no sympathy for him. “Hurry up!”

“Colonel Clements—” He sucked in a breath. It felt as if someone had stuck a fork into his right eye. “He isn’t supposed to be here until half past ten.”

The wedding was at half past eleven.

“It is quarter to eleven,” Hastings said grimly. “We have been trying to get you ready for the past two hours. The first footman couldn’t even make you stir. The second you threw across the room. I managed to get you into your morning coat and you had to eject your ill-digested supper all over it.”

“You are joking.” He had no recollection.

“I wish I were. That was an hour ago. Your morning coat is ruined; you’ll need to wear mine. And if you ruin mine, I swear I will set my dogs on you.”

Fitz pressed damp fingers into his temple. It was quite the wrong thing to do: Barbed wires of agony dragged through his brain. He hissed with pain. “Why did you let me get so drunk?”

“I tried to stop you—you nearly broke my nose.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your behavior last night, Lord Fitzhugh. One of the girls Copley hired ran off, by the way, screaming that she could not possibly perform the unnatural acts you wanted of her.”

Fitz would have laughed if he could. Twenty-four hours ago he’d been a virgin—he might still be one, for all he knew. “That’s impossible,” he muttered weakly.

“It happened,” said Hastings, his expression a mix of impatience, sorrow, and futility. “Enough, you need to pull yourself together. The carriage leaves at eleven—we should have reached the church at eleven.”

Fitz covered his eyes. “Why is this happening to me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Hastings’s voice caught. His hand clamped hard over Fitz’s shoulder. “What can I do?”

What could he do? What could anyone do?

“Just—leave me alone for now.”

“All right. You have ten minutes.”

Ten minutes.

Fitz buried his face in his hands. How could he pull himself together, when his entire life had fallen apart? Not in ten minutes, that was for certain. Not in a hundred and ten years.

Miraculously the groom’s party arrived before the bride’s party, but only by mere seconds. Hastings tried to get Fitz to run into the church, so that he wouldn’t be seen still outside when the bridal carriage drew up. But Fitz could not have broken into a sprint had someone held a knife at his back.

He pushed away Hastings’s hand. “I’m here. What more do they want?”

The church was only ten minutes by carriage from his new town house. He should have been at the church at least an hour ago, cooling his heels in the vestry until it was time to stand before the altar.

And he would have been, God, he would have been, were he marrying Isabelle. He’d have risen with the sun and made ready before any of the ushers. He’d have been the one knocking on their doors to make sure they got up on time and dressed properly. And had there been loose women at the party to commemorate the end of his bachelorhood, he’d have steered them to his classmates—it was not for him to sully his body the night before his wedding.

But here he was, sullied, ill groomed, and late—and for all that, more than good enough for the ceremony that would seal the sale of his name and, eventually, his person.

A relentlessly bright sun made his head pound harder. The air in London was nearly perpetually dirty—sometimes one could taste the grit. But all the torrential rains from his dreary final week of freedom had washed it clean. The sky was a wide-open, cloudless blue, stupidly lovely, perfect for any wedding except his own.

Miles of white organza had been jammed into the interior of the church. Thousands of lilies of the valley, too, their smell thick as incense. His still-fragile stomach shuddered.

The pews were seated to capacity. As he started down the aisle, a sea of faces turned toward him, accompanied by a roar of whispers—no doubt comments on his almost unforgivable tardiness.

Yet as he progressed toward the altar, row by row, they fell silent. What did they see on his face? Revulsion? Grief? Wretchedness?

He could see nothing before him.

Then all he could see was Isabelle, rising from her seat in the pews and turning toward him.

He stopped and stared. Her eyes were red and puffy, her cheeks sharp, her skin pale as ice—and she was beautiful beyond measure.

She gazed back at him. Her lips parted and formed the words Run away with me.

Why not? Let Henley Park rot. Let his creditors stew. And let the Graveses find someone else to shackle to their daughter. This was his life. And he would live it as he pleased.

All he had to do was stretch out his hand. They’d find their own place and forge their own destiny, take life by the horns and wrestle it to the ground.

He lifted his hand an inch, then another. Forget honor, forget duty, forget everything he’d been brought up to be. All they needed was love.

Love would make a pariah of her. She would lose her family, her friends, and all her prospects. And should something happen to him before they both came of age—he’d have condemned her for life.

He dropped his hand.

Hastings gripped his arm. He yanked free. He was the man he had been brought up to be. He needed no one else to drag him to the altar.

His eyes still locked on Isabelle, he mouthed, I love you.

Then, head held high, he marched the rest of the way to his doom.

Not once did Millie look at her bridegroom during the wedding ceremony.

At appropriate times she would turn her face toward him, but behind the veil, she stared only at the hem of her wildly extravagant gown—the beading as heavy as her heart. And when he lifted the veil to kiss her chastely on the cheek, she concentrated on his waistcoat, mist grey with the subtlest weaving of checks.

Now they were man and wife, and would be for as long as they both drew breath.

The congregation rose as they began their walk toward the church door. None of the groom’s friends extended a congratulatory hand to him. No one even smiled at the new couple. A clump of ladies, their heads bent together, whispered and pointed.

Suddenly Millie saw her, Miss Isabelle Pelham, wan, defeated, yet at the same time almost majestic in her pride and stillness. With infinite slowness and clarity, a teardrop rolled down her face.

Shock whipped Millie. Such a public display of emotion was alien to her—wanton, almost.

She could not stop herself: She looked at Lord Fitzhugh. He did not shed any tears. But in everything else—his ashen complexion, his dimmed eyes, his despair of a soldier who’d lost the war—he and Miss Pelham were exact matches, their beauty only made more so by their anguish.

It didn’t matter that Millie had no say in the matter; it did not matter that the devil’s own claws were in her heart. She read the verdict on the guests’ faces: She was the usurper here. The Graveses, with their vulgar fortune and even more vulgar ambition, had rent asunder a perfect, passionate pair of lovers, and destroyed any possibility either had at happiness in life.

She did not need guilt in addition to her misery. But guilt, all the same, wedged itself hard into her soul.

Mrs. Graves attended to Millie’s toilette herself, lifting the leaden wedding gown and laying it aside. Millie felt no lighter; the weight on her heart could not be dislodged.

Her body moved obediently, pushing her arms through the sleeves of a white blouse, stepping into a navy blue skirt of worsted wool. Mrs. Graves held out the matching jacket; she put that on, too.

“You should have a garden, my dear,” said her mother as she unfastened the circlet of orange blossoms from Millie’s hair. “A garden and a bench.”

What for? A prettier place in which to relive the ignominy of her wedding? The wedding breakfast, marked by Miss Pelham’s conspicuous absence, had been no better. And now, instead of changing into her traveling clothes at her new home, she was back in the Graves residence because her husband had claimed that his town house was too dilapidated to host a refined young lady such as herself.

“A garden makes everything better,” said Mrs. Graves softly. “And it will keep you busy, when you need something to do. You’ll be glad of it, Millie.”

Millie kept her head bent. Would a garden make her forget that her husband loved another? Or that she’d fallen in love with the last man who would love her in return?

Mrs. Graves had advocated for a honeymoon in Rome, but Lord Fitzhugh, at the engagement dinner given by his sister, had asked, “Aren’t the marshes around Rome a malarial hazard in summer?” The Lake District, where there was never the risk of malaria, was chosen instead.

Millie met her new husband at the rail station. He was quiet, impassive, but unfailingly civil. With one last hug from her mother, she was entrusted into the care of this boy who had yet to come of age himself.

The rail journey took most of the rest of the day. Millie brought two books to read. The earl stared out of the window. She studiously turned the pages every three minutes, but in the end, she could not have said whether she’d read a chronicle of the Napoleonic Wars or a handbook on housekeeping.

They arrived at their destination late in the evening.

“Lady Fitzhugh will take her supper in her room,” Lord Fitzhugh instructed the innkeeper.

It was what Millie would have asked for: a quick meal in complete privacy. But she sensed that he hadn’t made the request out of consideration for her fatigue, but only to have her out of his way.

“And you, my lord?” asked the innkeeper.

“The same—and a bottle of your best whisky.”

She looked sharply at him—his deathly pallor, had it been the result of too much drink? He stared flatly back at her. She glanced away in haste.

Her supper, she barely touched. She rang for the tray to be taken away and undressed herself—she’d given her maid a holiday coinciding with the duration of the Lake District sojourn, so as not to leak the truth of the “honeymoon.”

In her nightgown, she sat down before the vanity to brush her hair. Her face in the mirror gazed unhappily back at her. Not that she was unsightly: With the right dress and the right coiffure, she passed for pretty. But it was a bland, unmemorable prettiness. Some of her mother’s acquaintances kept forgetting that they’d already met her; even within the family the more elderly aunts routinely mistook her for her various cousins.

Nor did she possess the kind of forceful personality that could animate otherwise unremarkable features and make them compelling. No, she was a quiet, sensible, self-contained girl who would rather die than shed tears in public. How could she ever compete with Miss Pelham’s magnetic passions?

She turned off the lamps in the room. With the dark came a profound quiet. She listened for sounds from Lord Fitzhugh’s room, but could detect nothing, no footsteps, no creaking of bed, no whisky bottle scudding across the surface of a table.

Her window overlooked the inn’s garden, beds and clumps of shadows in the night. A match flared, illuminating a man standing against a sundial: Lord Fitzhugh. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match aside. She did not realize, until several minutes later, when the moon emerged from behind the clouds, that he had not been smoking, but only holding the cigarette loosely between the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

When the cigarette had turned to ashes, he lit another.

And that, too, burned by itself.

She was awake for a long time. When she finally drifted into a troubled slumber, it seemed she’d slept for only a minute before bolting up straight in bed. An eerie silence greeted her. But she could swear that she’d been startled by a loud crash.

It came again, an awful racket of glass on glass.

She scrambled off the bed, pulled on her dressing gown, and flung open the connecting door. In the dim light, porcelain shards and food scraps were strewn all over the floor—the earl’s supper. The mirror on the wall had cracked hideously, as if Medusa had stood before it. A whisky bottle, now in pieces, lay beneath the mirror frame.

Lord Fitzhugh stood in the middle of the wreckage, his back to her, still in his travel clothes.

“Go back to bed,” he ordered, before she could say anything.

She bit her lip and did as he asked.

In the morning the connecting door was locked from his side. She tried the door that led to the passage, and that, too, was locked. She picked at her breakfast, then spent a fitful two hours sitting in the garden, pretending to read.

Eventually his window opened. She could not see him. After a few minutes, the window closed again.

To her surprise, he appeared when she was halfway through her luncheon.

He looked awful, rumpled and unshaven. Unhappily she realized that as unwell as he’d appeared at the wedding, he—or someone else, most likely—had gone to some effort to make him presentable. No such effort had been made today.

“My lord,” she said—and didn’t know what else to say.

“My lady,” he said, sitting down across from her, his face utterly expressionless. “You needn’t worry about the state of my room. I’ve already settled it with the innkeeper.”

“I see.”

She was glad he had taken responsibility for it; she’d have found the occasion too humiliating. What did one say? I am terribly sorry, but it appears that my husband has destroyed part of your property?

“I have also arranged to remove to an establishment twenty miles north where I will have more privacy.”

He would have more privacy. What of her?

“I will be execrable company,” he continued, his gaze focused somewhere behind her. “I’m sure you will enjoy yourself better here.”

One day married and already he couldn’t wait to be rid of her. “I will come with you.”

“You don’t need to do such wifely things. We have an agreement in place.”

“I am not doing anything wifely,” she said, finding that it required great effort to keep her voice low and even. “If I stay here, after my husband demolished his room and left, I dare say I will not enjoy the pity and idle curiosity from the inn’s owners and staff.”

He looked at her a minute, his otherwise beautiful blue eyes entirely bloodshot. “Suit yourself, then. I leave in half an hour.”

The place twenty miles north was beautiful. They were halfway up a steep, densely wooded slope that overlooked a mirror-bright lake. The colors of the hills changed constantly, grey and misty in morning, a brilliant blue-green at noon, almost violet at sunset.

But an establishment it was not. Millie had expected a country estate of some description. Or, failing that, a hunting lodge. What she found was a cottage little larger than a cabin and only two steps removed from primitiveness.

The nearest village was six miles away. They had no carriages, no maids, and no cook. The earl expected them to survive on bread, butter, potted meat, and fruits that were delivered every three days. Or rather, he expected her to live on those. He himself needed only whisky, which came in crates.

Nightly he retired with several bottles. Nightly he brutalized something in his room: plates on the wall, the washstand, the solid oak desk. She cowered in her bed during his bursts of violence. Even though he’d never said a harsh word to her—or even so much as looked at her—every crash shattered her.

Sometimes she left her bed, put on her heaviest coat, and went outside, as far away as she dared in the pitch dark, to look at the stars. To remind herself that she was but a speck of dust mote in this vast universe—and her heartache just as insignificant. Then he would destroy something else, fracturing the silence of the night, and her entire universe would again shrink to a singular point of despair.

He slept during the day. She walked for hours in the hills, not returning until she was exhausted. She missed her mother, her kind, wise, and unwaveringly loving mother. She missed the peace and tranquility of her old house, where no one drank himself into a stupor day after day. She even missed the relentless piano practices—she had nothing to do, no goals to achieve, no standard of excellence to which she could aspire.

She rarely saw him. One day, after the washbasin in his room had departed for the rubbish bin in fragments, she came upon him bathing in the stream behind the cottage, stripped to the waist. He’d lost a shocking amount of weight, his entire torso but skin over skeleton.

Another time, he hissed as she lit the oil lamp in the parlor. He was sprawled on the long sofa, his arm thrown over his face. She extinguished the lamp with an apology and left to her room. On the way she passed his: The wardrobe had been overturned, the chair was now firewood, and, over everything else, razor-sharp shards of God knew how many whisky bottles.

She couldn’t breathe. His misery rose all about her, a dark tide full of undertows of rage. She hated him then: Nothing and no one had ever made her feel so wrong, as if her entire existence served only to tear apart soul mates and turn perfectly promising young men into destructive shadows of their former selves.

All the same, her heart broke for him, into a thousand pieces.

The isolation of the cabin, no doubt excellent for keeping private pains private, was unhelpful in every other respect. Lord Fitzhugh had no duties to perform, no obligations that required him to adhere to a proper schedule, and no friends or family before whom he needed to keep up an appearance of sobriety and normalcy.

There was nothing left to smash in his room—having axed his bedstead to kindling the previous week, he now slept on a pallet on the floor. Millie feared he’d start on the parlor. Instead, he plunged into a deep lethargy. The whisky, at first only a nocturnal friend, was now his constant companion.

Millie was inexperienced in such darker aspects of life. But she had no doubt that he was sliding faster and faster down a dangerous path. He needed help, badly—and soon. Yet when she sat down to compose an appeal, she had no idea to whom she ought to address the letter.

Could Mrs. Townsend persuade her brother to stop drinking? Could Colonel Clements? Certainly no one in the Graves family could be of any assistance. And even if Millie were to swallow what remained of her pride and beg Miss Pelham for help, would Miss Pelham’s family allow her to become involved again in the earl’s affairs?

Via Mrs. Graves’s pragmatic advice, Millie had been equipped to deal with a remote husband, disdainful servants, and a Society wary of yet another heiress breaching its defenses. No one, however, had ever thought to teach her what to do when her husband was determined to shove his youth and vitality down the throat of a whisky bottle and throw it all away.

She abandoned her letter and grabbed her hat. The swollen clouds that blanketed the sky promised rain, but she didn’t care. She had to get out of the cabin. And if she returned a drowned rat, developed pneumonia, and expired before the end of the month, well, so much the better for—

She stopped dead.

Her husband, who had not been outside in days, sat on the front steps of the cabin, staring into the barrel of a rifle.

“What—what are you doing?” she heard herself ask, her voice high and reedy.

“Nothing,” he said, without turning around, even as his hand caressed the barrel.

Slowly, not daring to make a sound, she shrank back into the cabin. And there, for the first time in her life, she clutched her heart. Her throat closed; her head spun.

He was contemplating suicide.

Fitz had lost track of time and he minded not at all. The past was infinitely preferable to the present, or the future. And even better when the boundary of reality and fantasy blurred.

He was no longer anywhere near the Lake District, but at the Pelham home, engaged in an animated conversation with Isabelle, while her mother embroidered at the far end of the room.

She was so interesting, Isabelle, and so interested. Her eyes shone like stars, but her beauty was the winsomeness of morning, bright and glorious, full of heat and verve. And when he looked upon her his heart was weightless with joy, rising to the sky like a balloon.

“I need to speak to you, Lord Fitzhugh,” she said.

Lord Fitzhugh? Lord Fitzhugh was his third cousin twice removed.

“What is it?”

“You cannot go on like this.”

“Why not?” He was bewildered. This was exactly how he’d like to go on, a carefree young man, with the girl he loved by his side.

“If you won’t think of yourself, then please think of your family. Your sisters will be devastated.”

He opened his eyes. Strange, had he been holding a conversation with his eyes closed all the while? And when had the room become so dark, so full of shadow and gloom?

He was lying down. And she, above him, was as close as the reach of his hand. He lifted his arm and touched her face. She shivered. Her skin was softer than the memory of spring. He’d missed her so. It was her. It was always, always her.

Very gently, so as not to startle her, he pulled her down and kissed her. God, she tasted so sweet, like spring water at the source. He slid his fingers into her hair and kissed her again.

It was as he undid the top button of her dress that she began to struggle.

“Shh. Shh. It’s all right,” he murmured. “I will take care of you.”

“You are delusional, Lord Fitzhugh! I am not Miss Pelham. I am your wife. Kindly unhand me.”

Shock spiked through him. He scrambled into an upright position—Christ, his head. “What the—why are you talking to me in the dark?”

“Last time I lit a lamp your eyes hurt.”

“Well, light one now.”

The light came, stinging his eyes, but he needed the prickling, burning sensation. His wife had fled to a far corner of the room. How in hell had he mistaken her for Isabelle? They could not be more different, in height, in build, in voice—in every aspect.

“Perhaps it is time to rethink being so inebriated that you mistake your wife for your beloved,” she said coldly.

He lay down again. The light of the lamp flickered in circles of diminishing brightness upon the ceiling. “It helps me forget.”

“What good is that when you must remember everything anew the next day?”

Of course it was no good. The drink was a weakness—his father would never have countenanced such a show of unmanliness. But then again, his father, at nineteen, had everything to live for. The rest of Fitz’s life stretched endless and barren before him. Only pain was a certainty: His classmates from Eton would receive their commissions as officers; Isabel would marry another man and bear his children.

What did he have to look forward to? Roof repairs at Henley Park? An intimate knowledge of the preservation of sardines? Lady Fitzhugh, with her primly disapproving face, sitting across the table from him at ten thousand breakfasts?

“Continual sobriety is unappetizing,” he said.

Sometimes he was amazed he could even withstand an hour of it.

“You don’t always remember to close your door. I have seen you clutch your head in agony; I have heard you retch. Is it not enough that your heart aches? Must you ruin your health while you are at it?”

“I will stop when I am inclined to do so.”

His hand, by habit, reached for the fresh bottle of whisky by his side, only to encounter nothing at all. Strange, even if he’d poured its contents down his throat, the bottle should still be here.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to stop sooner,” said his wife. “I disposed of the whisky.”

Damned interfering woman. He’d been somewhat thankful that she hadn’t tried to cheer him up or censor his drinking—guess that was too good to last. No matter, she’d emptied one bottle; he still had half a crate left.

Using the arm of the sofa for support, he struggled to his feet. Walking had become hazardous. He’d stumbled and bruised his shoulder the other day—the perils of being a sot. A sot, a lush, a man who drowned his troubles in his cup—or tried damn hard, at least.

He usually had ten or fifteen bottles stocked in the cupboard next to his room. The cupboard was empty. He swore. Now he had to take himself all the way outside.

He lurched and staggered to the shed behind the cabin. He wouldn’t have kept the whisky so far away, but one night, as he smashed things in his room, he’d damaged several unopened bottles. The next day he’d moved the whisky for its own protection.

The crates were neatly stacked in the shed, the bottles dully glistening. His heart trilled with relief. He grabbed one bottle by the neck and yanked it toward his parched lips. Something was wrong—it was too light. The bottle was empty. He threw it aside and pulled up another bottle. Again, empty.

Empty. Empty. Empty.

I disposed of the whisky.

She’d been thorough.

He kicked the stack of crates and almost lost his balance completely, banging heavily into the wall of the shed.

“Are you all right?” said her bloodless voice somewhere behind him.

Was he all right? Could she not see with her own eyes that he’d never be all right again?

He tottered out of the shed. “I’m going to the village.”

He was going to have his drink if it killed him.

“It’s going to be completely dark in half an hour. And you have no idea where the village is.”

He hated her reasonableness, her do-good ways, and her stupid assumption that she was helping him.

“I can’t stop you from leaving tomorrow. And I most certainly can’t stop you from falling on the next delivery of liquor. But for tonight I strongly advise that you stay put.”

He swore. Turning—his heart thumping unpleasantly—he went back into the shed and pulled out an empty bottle, hoping that there might be a drop or two at the bottom. But the only thing left was the sweet, alcoholic fume.

Her voice came again, flat, inexorable. “I know the sky has fallen for you, my lord. But life goes on and so must you.”

He threw the bottle against the back of the shed. It didn’t break, but only thudded against the wall and fell with a plop onto a mound of burlap sacks. He stormed out to face her.

“What the hell do you know about the sky falling? This is the life for which you’ve been preparing for years.”

She raised her eyes to him. It was stunning, the intensity of her gaze set against her practically nondescript face.

“Do you think you are the only one who has lost someone you love because of this marriage?”

She did not bother to explain her cryptic statement, but pivoted on her heels and returned to the cabin.

It seemed all right at first, no worse than the bad heads he’d become accustomed to when he woke up. But as the evening ground on, his headache turned ugly, doubling, then doubling again in viciousness. His hands trembled. Perspiration soaked his nightshirt. Waves after waves of nausea twisted his innards.

He’d never ailed so badly. For the first time in his life, pure physical misery drove everything else from his thoughts—except the lovely amber-hued nectar for which he yearned so desperately. He prayed to be given a glass of it, an inch, a sip. It didn’t need to be top quality whisky: brandy would do, as would rum, vodka, absinthe, or even a dram of common gin, the kind adulterated with turpentine for flavor.

Not a drop of distilled spirit sallied forth to his aid. But from time to time he’d vaguely realize that he was not alone. Someone gave him water to drink, wiped away the beads of sweat from his face, and might have even spread open clean sheets beneath him.

At some point he fell into a trouble sleep, his dreams full of thrashing monsters and forced good-byes. Several times he jerked awake, his heart pounding, convinced he’d just fallen from a great height. Each time there would come soothing murmurs at his ear, lulling him back to sleep.

He opened his eyes again to a dim room, feeling as if he’d just recovered from a raging fever: His tongue was bitter, his muscles feeble, and his head annihilated. Sheets had been tacked to the window, making it difficult to judge the time of day. A kerosene lamp cast a dark orange glow on the walls. And was that—he blinked his sore, crusted eyes—a large bouquet of daisies in an earthenware pitcher? Yes, it was, small daisies, with crisp white petals and yellow centers as vivid as the sun.

Behind the daisies dozed his wife on a footstool, her sandy hair in a simple braid that hung over her shoulder.

Pushing himself up to a sitting position, he saw that next to his pallet on the floor was a tray with a fat-bellied teapot, slices of buttered toast, a bowl of grapes, and two boiled eggs, already peeled, covered under a pristine, white handkerchief.

“I’m afraid the tea is quite cold,” came her voice as he reached for the teapot.

The tea was quite cold. But he was so thirsty it barely mattered. And he was hungry enough that his queasiness didn’t prevent him from eating everything in sight.

“How did you manage to make tea?” A lady might pour tea in her drawing room for her callers, but she never boiled the water herself. And certainly she would not know how to build a fire for her kettle.

“There is a spirit lamp and I’ve learned to use it.” She came forward, lifted the empty tray from his lap, and looked at him a moment, as if he were a shipwrecked stranger who’d washed up before her. “I’ll let you rest.”

She was on her way out when he remembered to ask, “What are the daisies doing here?”

“The chamomiles?” She glanced back at the riotous bunch. “I’ve heard chamomile tea helps one fall asleep. I’ve no idea how to make chamomile tea, so I hope you like looking at them.”

The chamomiles were so bright they hurt his eyes. “I can’t say I do, but thank you.”

She nodded and left him alone.

Night was falling—without quite knowing it, Fitz had slept most of the day away. It was too late to set out, find the village, and secure himself a new supply of whisky. But even if he had plenty of daylight left, he was still far too depleted to make the trip on foot.

Although, had he known that his second night would be as wretched as the night before, he might have made an attempt. The headaches roared back; tremors, palpitations, and roiling nausea, too, returned en masse. An eternity passed before exhaustion overtook him. He slept, holding on to someone’s hand.

His third night was far better, his slumber deep and dreamless. And when he awakened, more or less clearheaded, it was morning, not afternoon or evening as it had been lately.

The sheet still blocked the window. With one hand shielding his eyes, he yanked it off and let light stream into the room. What the sun illuminated was not pretty. All the walls were splattered with gouge marks, some large, some larger, as if a rabid beast with spikes and yard-long tusks had been penned in, desperate to get out. He rubbed his fingers against some of the rougher gouge marks, vaguely surprised that he’d been capable of such violence.

The chamomiles, droopy but no less cheerful, were still there; his wife was not. She had, however, left behind another pot of tea that had gone cold. Since he was well enough to move about on his own, he went out of his self-made prison cell to look for the spirit lamp that she’d mentioned.

He found it, but it had run out of the methylated spirits used as fuel. So he started a fire in the grate, pumped water into the kettle from the pump outside, and put it to boil—the first thing a junior boy learned at Eton was how to make tea, scramble eggs, and fry sausages for his seniors. While the water heated, he set chunks of bread on a toasting fork.

When he had tea and toast both ready, Lady Fitzhugh was still nowhere to be seen.

He found her in bed, fully dressed—walking boots included—sleeping facedown on top of the covers, her arms at her side, as if she’d reached the edge of the bed and simply pitched forward into it.

He hadn’t meant to spy, but as he turned to leave, his gaze fell on an unfinished letter on her desk. It was addressed to his sisters.

Dear Mrs. Townsend and Miss Fitzhugh,

Thank you for your warm missive of last week. I apologize for our late reply: Your letter reached us only three days ago, along with our other semiweekly supplies from the village of Woodsmere.

The weather here remains delightful. And of course the lakes are ever so blue and lucid. I find myself constantly astonished by the beauty of my surroundings, even though it has been weeks since we first arrived.

Lord Fitzhugh had every intention of writing himself but alas, in the last few days, he has been under the weather—due to something he’d ingested, most probably. But he has bravely faced the rigors of his ailment and is now very much on the mend.

To answer Miss Fitzhugh’s question, I do plan to drive out and see Mr. Wordsworth’s house in Grasmere, as soon as Lord Fitzhugh is fully recovered.

With the exception of his intention to write—he hadn’t even known they’d been receiving letters—she’d managed not to lie, no mean feat when this honeymoon must have been some of the grimmest days she’d ever known.

He glanced back at her and noticed that her left hand bore several deep scratches. Alarmed, he approached the bed and lifted her hand for a closer look.

She stirred and opened her eyes.

“What happened to your hand? I hope I didn’t—” He couldn’t imagine he’d harm a woman, drunk or not. But there were some gaps in his memory.

“No, not at all. I cut myself a few times when I was learning how to use the tin opener.”

He’d opened tins for her in the beginning, when he opened tins for himself. But lately, bedridden, he’d forgotten that task altogether.

“I’m sorry,” he said, ashamed.

“It was nothing at all.” She pushed herself off the bed. “Are you better?”

He was still tired and sore, but it was a cleansing fatigue. “I’m all right. I came to tell you breakfast is ready if you want it.”

She nodded, this girl who’d seen him at his very worst, who’d remained a rock of sanity and good sense when he’d nearly given in to a self-indulgent wretchedness. “Good. I’m hungry.”

Over breakfast, he read the accumulated letters, three from his sisters, two from Colonel Clements, two from Hastings, and a half dozen from other classmates. “You replied to all of them?”

“I’m not quite finished with the latest letter to your sisters, but the other ones, yes.” She glanced at him. “Don’t worry, I didn’t say you were deliriously happy.”

There was a mutable quality to her face. Every time he looked at her he was disconcerted: She never quite looked like what he thought she looked like.

“They wouldn’t have believed you anyway.”

“Yes, I know,” she said, her tone calm, matter-of-fact.

Something about her composure defused tension, even when the subject was highly flammable.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Me?” His question surprised her. “Yes, I’m well—well enough at least.”

“Why aren’t you crying over your fellow?”

“My what?”

“The one you had to give up to marry me.”

She added another spoonful of milk powder to her tea—they were out of fresh cream. “It’s different for me. We did not have any history—it was largely wishful thinking on my part.”

“But you love him?”

She looked down into her cup. “Yes, I love him.”

The pain that had been dulled by an excess of whisky came roaring back. “We are in the same boat, then—neither of us can have the one we want.”

“It would seem so,” she said, blinking rapidly.

It was a shock to realize she was holding back tears, even as he adjusted his opinion of her from bland deference to quiet strength: When he’d lost all his bearings, she’d been the one to guide him back from the wilderness.

“You’ve conducted yourself far better than I have,” he said, his words awkward and tentative, at least in his own ears. “I don’t know how you do it, putting up with me when it has been just as difficult for you.”

She bit her lip. “Don’t tell anyone else, but I am secretly a laudanum fiend behind your back.”

It took him a moment to realize she spoke in jest. He felt himself smiling faintly. The sensation was strange: He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled.

She rose. “I’d better finish the letter before Mr. Holt from the village arrives. He will be”—she hesitated—“he will be coming with whisky.”

Millie would have liked to decline the whisky for her husband. But she had told him the day she poured out every bottle—the aggressiveness of her action still astonished her—that the choice was his.

So it must be.

She took delivery of milk, bread, eggs, butter, fruit, and salading. There was a box of tinned sardines, potted meat, and tinned plum pudding—everything manufactured by Cresswell & Graves. And there was the whisky.

“The spirits are no longer needed,” said Lord Fitzhugh.

Millie had become accustomed to the bearded, wild-haired, slovenly drunkard. The young man who stood before the cabin was clean-shaven and sharply dressed. He was still too gaunt and too pale—behind his eyes was a grief as old as love itself. But Millie had to force herself to tear her gaze away: He had never been more striking, more magnetic.

“Very good, sir,” said Mr. Holt. “I’ll carry the rest inside. And—I almost forgot—there is a cable for you.”

Lord Fitzhugh took the cable and opened it. His expression changed instantly. “There is no need to unload anything. If you could wait half an hour or so and take us down to Woodsmere, I’d be grateful.”

Mr. Holt touched the brim of his hat. “Anything, milord.”

Millie followed him back into the house. “What’s the matter? Who sent the cable?”

“Helena. Venetia’s husband has passed away.”

“Of what?” Millie was incredulous. Surely her kind, beautiful sister-in-law could not have been made a widow so young. Mr. Townsend had been in perfect health at the wedding. And in Mrs. Townsend’s recent letters there had been no mention of any illnesses on his part.

“Helena didn’t give the cause of death, only that Venetia is devastated. We must go back and help with the arrange-ments.”

We. It was the first time he’d referred to the two of them as one unit. She couldn’t help a leap of her heart. “Of course. I’ll start packing right now.”

Twenty minutes later, they were on their way. The lurching and swaying of the cart couldn’t be easy on his still fragile person, but he endured the discomforts without complaint.

In some ways, they were not too unalike. They both put duty first. They were both reserved by nature. And they both had a greater capacity to bear private pain than either had suspected.

“Thank you,” he said when they were still a mile from the village. “If you hadn’t disposed of the whisky when you did, I’d be in no shape to be of any use to my sister. I’m glad you had the resolve and the fortitude.”

The pleasure she derived at his compliment was frightful. She looked down at her hands, so as to not betray her emotions. “I was afraid you might do mortal harm to yourself.”

“That would probably need more than a few weeks of drinking.”

She almost could not bring herself to speak of it. “I was talking about the rifle.”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “What rifle?”

“You were staring into the barrel of a shotgun.”

“You mean the dummy rifle I found in the shed?”

Her jaw dropped. “It was a dummy?”

“Very much. A child’s toy.” He laughed. “Perhaps we should introduce you to some proper firearms, so you can tell the difference next time.”

Her face heated. “This is terribly embarrassing, isn’t it?”

Now that he was sober, his eyes were an unearthly blue. “It is, for me: that I should have behaved in such a way as to cause anyone to doubt my will to live.”

“You’d endured a terrible loss.”

“Nothing others—including yourself—haven’t endured.”

He was inclined to gloss over heartbreak and affliction—again, like her.

The road turned. A gorgeous vista opened before them: a wide, oval lake, as green as the emerald peaks that framed it. All along the banks, late summer flowers bloomed, their reflections, white and mauve, like a string of pearls around the lake. On the distant shore stood a pretty village with ivy-covered cottages, their window boxes still aflame with geraniums and cyclamens.

“Well,” she said, “at least the honeymoon is over.”

“Yes.” He tilted his face to the sky, as if marveling at the sensation of sunlight on his skin. “Thank God.”