“A garden makes everything better,” said Mrs. Graves softly. “And it will keep you busy, when you need something to do. You’ll be glad of it, Millie.”

Millie kept her head bent. Would a garden make her forget that her husband loved another? Or that she’d fallen in love with the last man who would love her in return?

Mrs. Graves had advocated for a honeymoon in Rome, but Lord Fitzhugh, at the engagement dinner given by his sister, had asked, “Aren’t the marshes around Rome a malarial hazard in summer?” The Lake District, where there was never the risk of malaria, was chosen instead.

Millie met her new husband at the rail station. He was quiet, impassive, but unfailingly civil. With one last hug from her mother, she was entrusted into the care of this boy who had yet to come of age himself.

The rail journey took most of the rest of the day. Millie brought two books to read. The earl stared out of the window. She studiously turned the pages every three minutes, but in the end, she could not have said whether she’d read a chronicle of the Napoleonic Wars or a handbook on housekeeping.

They arrived at their destination late in the evening.

“Lady Fitzhugh will take her supper in her room,” Lord Fitzhugh instructed the innkeeper.

It was what Millie would have asked for: a quick meal in complete privacy. But she sensed that he hadn’t made the request out of consideration for her fatigue, but only to have her out of his way.

“And you, my lord?” asked the innkeeper.

“The same—and a bottle of your best whisky.”

She looked sharply at him—his deathly pallor, had it been the result of too much drink? He stared flatly back at her. She glanced away in haste.

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.

But an establishment it was not. Millie had expected a country estate of some description. Or, failing that, a hunting lodge. What she found was a cottage little larger than a cabin and only two steps removed from primitiveness.

The nearest village was six miles away. They had no carriages, no maids, and no cook. The earl expected them to survive on bread, butter, potted meat, and fruits that were delivered every three days. Or rather, he expected her to live on those. He himself needed only whisky, which came in crates.

Nightly he retired with several bottles. Nightly he brutalized something in his room: plates on the wall, the washstand, the solid oak desk. She cowered in her bed during his bursts of violence. Even though he’d never said a harsh word to her—or even so much as looked at her—every crash shattered her.

Sometimes she left her bed, put on her heaviest coat, and went outside, as far away as she dared in the pitch dark, to look at the stars. To remind herself that she was but a speck of dust mote in this vast universe—and her heartache just as insignificant. Then he would destroy something else, fracturing the silence of the night, and her entire universe would again shrink to a singular point of despair.