Ravishing the Heiress (Fitzhugh Trilogy #2)

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.