"She does have a point there, you know," commented Amy.

"ARGH!" Richard roared, driven beyond speech. "I am not being — "

"Ridiculous and loud."

"Go ahead," Richard clipped. "Marry him. Marry him tomorrow, for all I care. But I don't want to see that" — he jabbed a finger in the direction of Miles — "under my roof ever again."

Miles shrugged into his coat and stepped forwards. "Fine," he said quietly, but with an edge of steel beneath his voice that made Henrietta instinctively stiffen. "We'll be married tomorrow. If you'll excuse me, I have a special license to acquire."

With a nod of the head to Amy, and a swift kiss placed somewhere in the vicinity of Henrietta's hand — she could feel the tingle of it all up her arm — Miles turned and strode off towards the stables.

Richard didn't bother to respond. He didn't say anything to his sister. He didn't follow Miles. He turned on his heel and stalked furiously in the direction of the house. Only the crunch of boots on gravel, receding in opposite directions, invaded the uncomfortable silence that followed. Henrietta stared after Miles's retreating back, grappling with the ramifications of what had just passed.

Tomorrow. Henrietta pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. A special license. Miles hadn't just said they were to be married tomorrow, had he? He couldn't have meant it.

Recovering her powers of speech first, Amy smiled reassuringly at Henrietta. "Richard will come around," she said confidently. "You'll see."

From the house came the ominous sound of a door being slammed. Twice.

Amy swallowed hard. "Eventually?"


By noon the next day, the Honorable Miles Dorrington and his new bride were well on their way back to London.

Henrietta glanced surreptitiously down at the ring on her gloved finger. She hadn't asked where Miles had acquired it, or what manner of skullduggery he might have engaged in to procure a special license on such short notice. In fact, they had had no chance to speak at all. By the time Henrietta had awakened that morning, with the vaguely headachy recollection that something of great moment had occurred and it really might be better to just stay under the covers until the world realigned itself, the household was already bustling with wedding preparations, and Henrietta found herself swept towards matrimony with very little notion of how she had gotten there.

Henrietta had always imagined that she would be attended by Penelope and Charlotte, Charlotte misty-eyed with romance, Penelope grumbling. Instead, Amy helped her to dress, fussing excitedly with flounces and curls, while Mrs. Cathcart calmly rearranged everything as soon as Amy had bustled on to the next task. Amy offered her own wedding dress, but since her sister-in-law was a good four inches shorter than she was, and rather differently proportioned, Henrietta declined with thanks, and donned the evening gown she had worn the night before. There was a fitting irony, considered Henrietta, to being wed in the same gown in which she had been compromised.

Miles had acquired not only a ring and a license, but the bishop of London, who wore his second-best vestments and the irritable expression of a man who has been dragged out of bed at an hour more commonly used for slumber. A makeshift altar had been constructed in the Long Drawing Room, and chairs set out on either side of the room, which Amy had draped with ribbons and flowers with more enthusiasm than grace. In contrast to their gay decorations, the long rows of chairs looked painfully empty. Instead of the friends and family members who should have filled them sat the two Tholmondelays, looking confused but game, and Mrs. Cathcart, single-handedly doing her best to throw a mantle of respectability over the whole hurried affair.

It should have been her father beside her, escorting her down the aisle, not a brother poised for murder rather than matrimony. Her mother should have been at the front of the room, sporting an outrageous hat, beaming proudly, and* ordering everyone about. Her parents. Oh, heavens. What would they even think when she told them she was married, and without their presence or consent? Henrietta was quite sure they would have no objections to her marrying Miles, but the manner of her doing so was designed to enrage even the most tolerant of parents. It was something that didn't bear thinking about.

Henrietta didn't have time to dwell on the absent faces. While Miss Grey plucked out the processional with more precision than passion, Henrietta spent most of her walk down the aisle trying to convince her brother not to murder her bridegroom. After several yards of fruitless argument, she finally succeeded in silencing him by pointing out that he was merely lucky that Amy's brother hadn't been the dueling sort. Since Richard's nuptials had been even more irregular than Henrietta's — performed on a Channel packet by a butler turned pirate — she had him there, and he knew it.

"I'd still rather skewer him," muttered Richard. "Kindly strive to contain your excessive rapture at my nuptials until after the ceremony," Henrietta hissed back, winning a glower from the bishop and an anxious look from Miles.

Was he anxious that she wouldn't go through with the wedding — or that she would ? Henrietta filed that thought away as yet another on the steadily mounting list of things that didn't bear thinking on.

After an undignified tussle when the bishop asked, "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man" (resolved only by Amy stamping on Richard's foot), the rest of the ceremony passed with unseemly haste. Henrietta suspected the bishop had deliberately truncated the ritual, but in her distracted state, she couldn't be entirely sure. In fact, she couldn't be sure about anything. The entire ceremony flitted past her with nightmare vagueness, colors blurring, voices melding, everything blending in a horrific carnival of unreality. The pronouncement that Miles was man to her wife took her by surprise, and she received her new husband's fleeting kiss, which bore absolutely no resemblance to the passionate embraces of the night before, with a certain amount of doubt as to whether what had passed could possibly be binding.

If it weren't for the ring on her finger, Henrietta would have been quite convinced that none of it had happened at all.

After the ceremony, she and Miles fled to his curricle, leaving the Tholmondelays to do justice to the hastily prepared wedding breakfast. "Lobster patties, Fred!" she could hear Ned exclaim enthusiastically to his brother, as Miles handed her up into the carriage. At least someone was enjoying it, thought Henrietta philosophically. Richard looked as though he would rather chew his way through a plate of nettles.

As for Miles… It was very hard to tell what Miles was thinking. Henrietta snuck a glance at Miles, who was tooling the ribbons as if he had no other concern in the world but to negotiate his horses around a large rut in the middle of the road. Ever since they had departed from Selwick Hall, Miles had been treating her with unfailing courtesy. He had spread a lap rug over her legs, apologized for the necessity of conveying her to London in an open vehicle, offered to stop for refreshment, and even gone so far as to comment on the weather.

Miles was being polite. Too polite. It made Henrietta nervous.

She darted another lightning look at Miles, only to see his eyes hastily scoot back to the road. Henrietta looked away, but couldn't keep her eyes from slowly sliding back in his direction from under the rim of her bonnet. Miles's scooted the other way, like two characters creeping around walls trying to avoid each other in a Mozartian farce.

If only they had been given time to speak before the wedding! Henrietta wasn't entirely sure what she would have said. Was there ever a delicate way to phrase, "You don't have to marry me if you don't want to"? Of course, even if she had found a way to say it, she knew as well as he that it was pure nonsense. He did have to marry her. She was compromised, ruined, fallen, sullied, soiled. Henrietta was running out of adjectives, but any one of them would have served the purpose.

There was an alternative. Henrietta probed the option delicately, like a sufferer of toothache exploring around the rotting tooth. She would only be ruined if the story escaped the confines of Selwick Hall. Richard and Amy surely wouldn't repeat it to anyone, and Mrs. Cathcart could be counted upon to remain discreet, if not for Henrietta's sake, then for her mother's. As for Miss Grey, she never spoke when she could remain silent. The only danger remaining was the Tholmondelays, and while they didn't possess a brain between them, Henrietta had no doubt either Miles or Richard could instill through fear what might be lacking in intelligence.

Annulment. There, she had said it. They could procure an annulment and then Miles would be free, and no one would ever know what had happened except the parties concerned. Miles could drive in the park with dark beauties, flirt with mysterious marchionesses, and acquire opera singers without the unwanted encumbrance of a wife.

Henrietta made a wry face to herself. She had lived in society long enough to know there was no possible way to keep scandal a secret; it traveled mysteriously through the air, like bubonic plague. Besides, Henrietta wasn't quite sure exactly how one went about obtaining an annulment, but she had no doubt that the process would be lengthy, and involve lots of paper, which would invariably come to the notice of someone who would inevitably tell someone else, and before she knew it, respectable women would be sweeping their skirts away from her in the streets.