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.