Now I did feel embarrassed. The only gentlemen who’d ever showed me interest were “socially incongruous,” as Aunt Nora put it. Dislikable. Lecherous. Ancient. But I’d never picked up a talent, like signing or drawing. I was no beauty, like Lucy. I had no flair, like Charlotte. And I’d inherited Miss Coates’s fortune and her tragic past. I knew that men wondered if I’d been damaged by the shipwreck. That others dismissed me simply because I’d survived what sixty men hadn’t. I belonged to the Fairer Sex, after all. Not the heartier one. Then there’d been all the little mistakes in my early days. Young ladies didn’t catch spiders with their bare hands. They didn’t call shoes “stampers” and they never belly laughed. My foibles had been forgotten, but an air of the peculiar hung about me. My stolen fortune and family name may have hammered me firmly into society—but I hadn’t been driven in flush.

“Situations like yours call for a little intervention,” Uncle Henry continued. “Before the door closes, so to speak.” He glanced at Lucy. She was twenty-two, really was, but hadn’t yet drawn the interest of any men of quality. “To get ahead of any trouble, I have made some discreet enquiries and landed on a good solution indeed.”

Trouble. Solution. I sounded like something broken. “So…he’s going to be my husband?” I couldn’t even remember the gentleman’s name. “I have to marry him?”

Uncle Henry took my hands. His felt damp and cool, like raw meat. “I should very much like you to come to this at your own will. ’Tis the best thing for you. Tomorrow, you will meet him.” He patted my hands. “This is a gift. Soon enough you will see it for yourself. Happy birthday.”

Chapter 11: Own Will

I rose before the sun the next day, tired and tense from a sleepless night of feeling like I was drowning in my own bed.

Tonight, at a garden concert, I’d meet a stranger whom I was meant to marry.

At your own will, Uncle Henry had said. But my own will felt like it didn’t matter at all.

Of course I’d always known I’d have to marry—it was expected of me and the promise I’d given Mama—but I hadn’t lived in the darkness of a man’s shadow for a long time and I had a terror of it happening again. All night, I’d dreamed that I’d found Sewel awaiting in a flowering garden, his grin like a shark’s, full of jagged teeth.

I rubbed my eyes, pushing away the image, and pulled on my brown jacket and ocher quilted petticoat in the darkness. Then I hurried downstairs, quietly shutting the kitchen door as I stepped into the back courtyard.