“Lady Arundell claims it’s haunted,” she informed him. “And she’s not the only one who’s said so.”

A scowl darkened his brow.

Julia was undeterred. “Is it true?”

“It’s true that the Hall has a reputation.”

She looked at him expectantly.

He grudgingly continued, “It was originally owned by a family of Royalists who were executed during the Civil War. According to local superstition, some of them still walk the grounds.”

“Have you ever seen them?”

“Are you asking me if there are ghosts living at the Hall?”

Her mouth tipped at one corner. “Are there?”

Jasper surprised her with his answer. “Goldfinch Hall is haunted. But not by the kind of ghosts you imagine.”

Her attention was captured as surely as if he’d unveiled a new chapter in a serialized sensation novel. “What do you mean? What kinds of ghosts?”

“Old sins cast long shadows,” he said. “If the atmosphere at the Hall is unsettling, you can attribute it to that, not to any spectral presence.”

Her rapt expression faded. He wasn’t tempting her with a ghost story. His bleak sentiments were all too real. She regarded him with bewilderment. “You make it sound as though you’re unhappy there.”

He looked back at her steadily, his stern countenance belied by a gruff admission: “I’m not unhappy. Not now you’re coming home with me.”

His words settled inside her breast, glowing warm and bright, like a coal fresh from the fire.

Her smile returned slowly. “I do believe you mean that.”

“You can believe it,” he said. “If nothing else.”

“It isn’t only my dowry, then?”

He gave a humorless laugh. “If it were, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Wouldn’t we?” Julia’s smile turned quizzical. “I thought that was the most important quality in your prospective wife—the size of her dowry.”

“The size matters little if your father refuses to grant it to me.”

She stared at him. “My father refused you?”

“I told you he did. We discussed it yesterday.” He scanned her face, frowning with concern. “Don’t you remember?”

“Of course, I remember.” She hadn’t been that ill. “You didn’t say anything about my dowry.”

“I assumed it was obvious. Without your father’s permission, there’s no money at all. ‘Not a farthing,’ I believe is the way he put it.” Jasper grimaced. “Not the most flattering experience of my life. But his meaning was quite clear.”

Julia recalled Jasper’s question to her yesterday as she’d lain propped up in her bed. “What if there were no money?” he’d asked. “What if there was only me?”

She hadn’t taken him seriously. She’d long accepted that she had nothing but her dowry to recommend her. That she wasn’t good enough or worthy enough on her own. It had seemed an incontrovertible fact. In response to it, she’d constructed three failed seasons’ worth of defenses.

The truth finally began to penetrate them.

She didn’t dare believe it. “Do you mean to say that . . . you married me with no hope of receiving my fortune?”