How strange it was now to think of the excitement with which she had walked down the aisle on that January afternoon. Eustace had been so attentive and charming to her throughout the day. Everyone was so admiring, and her family was so delighted, and her entire world became a glow of delight. When she walked through the front doors of Raven Hall as its mistress for the first time, she could barely breathe. There were only thirty dukedoms in the whole country, and she had managed to capture one! Of course she did not love Eustace, but then she had never expected to. She liked him, and he seemed to like her, and that was enough. Plenty of marriages had been built on far less.

‘You mustn’t expect too much from a new husband,’ Rosa’s mother had counselled on the day of her wedding. ‘Especially when it comes to considering your various wants and whims. In all likelihood, this will not even occur to him. You should try to think of him as an egg – so full of himself that he is incapable of holding anything else.’

Rosa seemed unable to find common ground with her mother on most things, but she thought this sound advice. And she did not mind in the least. After all, their marriage was a business arrangement. She had signed over her wealth and fortune, and in return she had received the title that she coveted so fiercely, as well as a place in the history books and the right to call a grand ancestral hall her own.

Rosa had been slightly nervous about the wedding night, but she knew the facts of ‘the unfortunate side of marriage’, thanks to a rather scandalous book she had found during a trip to New York, and her hands only trembled a little as she changed into her new silk nightdress and slipped between the sheets.

But when Eustace came to her bedroom, the golden bubble burst as soon as he touched her. Rosa didn’t think that he particularly intended to hurt her, it was more that he simply didn’t think of her as a person at all during those moments. When it was over, he rolled away from her without a word, and suddenly Rosa no longer wanted to stay in the same bed with him, so she got up and slipped into her dressing room.

She was afraid he might follow or object, but there was only silence and stillness from the bed and she realised he didn’t care where she went, or what she did, or how she was feeling. She wrapped herself up in a rug and fell into a fretful sleep upon the chaise longue.