He tossed aside his sledgehammer. “Is there anything to eat?”

“We’ve a sponge cake and a beef pie in the larder.”

They made their way together to the kitchen, where several stock pots sat simmering. He filled a pot with water, stoked the fire, and set it to boil. She, meanwhile, found some plates and silverware, and located the sponge cake and the beef pie.

“Missing your fellow?” he asked after he’d finished his portion of the beef pie.

She raised an eyebrow in question.

“That was why you were wrecking the fireplace, wasn’t it?”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

He felt a pang of sympathy for her. He could always find someone willing to give him a few hours of oblivion. How did she cope?

“How was London?” she asked. “Did you enjoy it?”

He caught an undertone in her words. Goodness, she knew precisely what he’d been up to in London. The girl was not as prim as he’d made her out to be. “It was all right.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad.”

He caught something else to her tone. “Are you?”

She looked directly at him, all maidenly innocence again. “Why wouldn’t I want you to have a good time?”

He had no answer for that. So he gave her Colonel Clements’s letter. “The colonel is coming to visit.”

She scanned the letter. To her credit, she didn’t turn a hair. “Well, we’d better annihilate some more of the north wing after tea, ought we not?”


Ready?” Fitz asked, as the brougham carrying Colonel and Mrs. Clements pulled into view.

Lady Fitzhugh nodded. She had on her most somber dress, her hair in a chignon again—this time Fitz approved. They were two minors going up against a formidable man and this was no time for her to look her age.

“Are you ready?” she murmured.

“I must confess: I’m rather looking forward to this.”

“I came, I saw, I smashed,” she said drily.

“Precisely.”

The carriage came to a stop before the house. As the drive had been repaved after the building of the north wing to show it off during the approach, the colonel would have already seen its absence.

And indeed, before they could utter a welcome, the colonel barked, “What happened to the manor, Fitz?”

“Colonel,” said Fitz, “Mrs. Clements, so delighted you could join us.”

“What a lovely brooch, Mrs. Clements,” chirped his wife. “Please, come in.”

Colonel Clements was not so easily distracted. “You will answer my question. What happened to the manor?” he bellowed as they entered the manor.

Fitz felt himself perspiring. “We are in the midst of repairs still, sir. Please excuse the state of the house.”

“Repairs? Half of the manor is gone.”

“Sometimes repairs involve unanticipated results.”

“Such results are unacceptable. You will rebuild the north wing.”

“Of course we will put the manor to rights. But that is not what we are about to do tonight,” said Lady Fitzhugh, with a confidence and a skill that belied her years. “Tea, Mrs. Clements?”

Colonel Clements would not let the subject drop. “I cannot believe you countenanced this destruction of your home, Lady Fitzhugh.”

Fitz sucked in a breath. To pretend Colonel Clements was overreacting was one thing, to be subject to his direct ire, quite another. Lady Fitzhugh, however, was not the least bit intimidated. “Countenanced it, sir? No, I encouraged it. It was my idea.”

She didn’t just have audacity. She had enormous balls.

Colonel Clements sputtered. “Explain yourself, young lady.”

“Had the north wing been better built, Lord Fitzhugh and I would have endeavored to rehabilitate it. However, it was ill conceived and badly executed. Even if we restored it today, we still must keep restoring it forevermore, committing infinite outlays of funds so that it does not once again fall into disrepair. And since no one is possessed of infinite funds, we chose to have a more modest house that is within our means of upkeep.

“The other choice is to someday sell my future firstborn son on the marriage mart. And that I absolutely refuse to even contemplate. Lord Fitzhugh had to submit to such a fate; that was enough. It will not happen again, not while I have a breath left.”

Her tone was eminently reasonable and she maintained a friendly smile throughout. But there was no mistaking the underlying vehemence of her words. Colonel Clements was rendered momentarily speechless. And Fitz—it began to dawn on him that he had married no ordinary girl.

Tea was brought in. Lady Fitzhugh poured for everyone.

“This is excellent tea, Lady Fitzhugh,” said Mrs. Clements.

“This is utter heresy.” Colonel Clements found his voice. “The house is entailed. You cannot—”

“Colonel, you will not upset our hosts. Why don’t you have some of this lovely sandwich?” said Mrs. Clements firmly. “Now, Lady Fitzhugh, tell me how you are finding Somerset.”

And that was that.

At the end of tea, with the Clementses shown up to their room to change for dinner, Fitz approached his wife and squeezed her hand. “Well done, old girl.”

She looked at him, surprised by his gesture. Then she smiled—she was a pretty girl after all, with nice, even teeth. “You did very well yourself. Now make sure you are amenable to everything the colonel says for the rest of their visit.”

He nodded, understanding her perfectly. “I will be most abjectly agreeable.”


Not all the north wing was smashed. Much of it was carefully preserved: The glass panes of the conservatory were earmarked for the rebuilding of the greenhouses, the stones of the wall for a later restoration of the kitchen, and the roof tiles for the chicken coop, the dovecote, and the mushroom house.

More curiously, however, Lord Fitzhugh had left a fifteen-foot-long section of wall standing. When Millie asked him why the wall had not been knocked down along with everything else, he’d said lightly, “For those days when we are again in the mood to smash something.”

The first of such days came a week after the first anniversary of their marriage, which passed unremarked.

She heard the sound of the sledgehammer from her sitting room, early in the morning. The answer to her question was found in the Times. Miss Pelham’s mother had announced the betrothal of her daughter to a Captain Englewood. The name was somewhat familiar. She dug up the guest list from her wedding and there was a clan of Englewoods. Captain Englewood, it seemed, was either an Eton classmate of Lord Fitzhugh’s or the elder brother of a classmate.

At noon she took a sandwich and a flask of tea to him. In his shirtsleeves, he sat on an empty windowsill, his head resting against the frame of the wall, Alice in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. It hurt her to see him in pain.

He shrugged. “It was always going to happen.”

“But you would have preferred that it happened later—or not at all.”

“I won’t deny there is a part of me that never wants to let go of her. But I don’t wish her to go through life alone; it would be far better for her to marry. If only the thought of it didn’t make me so—”

He looked up at the sky. “I haven’t kept up with her news—when we married, I resolved to remove myself from her life entirely. So I don’t know the circumstances surrounding her engagement. On the one hand, I’m worried—terrified—that she said yes to Captain Englewood simply because she could no longer stand to be alone. On the other hand, she could be in love with him and he could very well turn out to be a wonderful husband to her. And does this thought make me glad? Not at all. If she is miserable, I am miserable. If she’s happy, I’ll still be here, taking a sledgehammer to a wall.”

Millie didn’t know what to do. Or what to say. Tears welled in her eyes and she let them fall. What was the point of not crying? His pain and her own seemed one strangely whole entity: a longing for what could not be regained, or gained in the first place.

She wiped away her tears before he could see them.

“Anyway,” he said, “thank you for my lunch. I’m sure you have much to do around the house.”

In other words, he wished to be alone now.

“I can—I can do those things tomorrow,” she ventured.

He shook his head slightly. “It’s very kind of you, but it’s hot and dusty out here.”

“Right,” she said. “I’ll go back inside, then, where it’s much nicer.”

He did not look at her. He had eyes only for Alice, his beloved Alice.

When would she remember that their pain was not the same? That while she would welcome any opportunity to be close to him, even if it was to hear of his love for another woman, he, on the other hand, sometimes simply could not bear the sight of her.

That although occasionally she proved herself an ally, always she was—and always she would be—the personification of all the forces that had kept him from the happiness that should have been his.


Millie resolved to fall out of love with her husband.

She didn’t know why she didn’t think of it earlier. Somehow, when she’d fallen in love, she’d accepted it as a chronic condition, something that must be endured for as long as she lived.

Such could not be true. She must recognize this: There was nothing special about her love. She was simply an ordinary young girl, dazzled by the good looks of an equally young man. What was her love but a desire to possess him? What was his love but a similar drive to own Miss Pelham body and soul?

Some things in life were truly difficult. Finding the source of the Nile, for example. Or exploring the South Pole. But falling out of love with a man who never looked at her twice, why should that prove an insurmountable challenge?