Mrs. Graves’s visiting, however, continued for another hour. Millie was glad for the excuse to turn her back on the game. But everywhere they went, there seemed to be a young boy nearby, a cricket fanatic who pestered his mother and sisters to watch the goings-on. The earl’s name came up all too often.

Did you see that? Fitzhugh just sent one clear over the boundary. That’s six runs! shouted an Eton enthu-siast.

No, not another one out of bounds! At least it touched ground, so only four runs, grumbled a Harrow supporter. Fitzhugh already scored ninety. When is he going to be dismissed?

At last they returned to their landau and ate their picnic luncheon.

“Shall we go now?” Millie asked Mrs. Graves.

“Of course not,” answered Mrs. Graves. “When the match breaks for tea, we will go to the Eton pavilion and have your fiancé present his friends to you.”

His mates had to know how he truly felt. They’d probably already commiserated with him. Should Mrs. Graves begin to express her great delight, oblivious to the earl’s distaste for his imminent trip to the altar—Millie could well imagine the snickering.

“But we have not been invited to approach the Eton pavilion and we—”

Mrs. Graves placed her gloved hand over Millie’s. “My dear, you must not feel apologetic about this marriage. Never forget all that you are bringing to the marriage and never consider yourself inferior simply because he is young and handsome. He is getting the better bargain here. Do you understand?”

The real question was, did he understand?

He did not. And he would not.

Mrs. Graves touched Millie’s cheek. “I love your father dearly, but how I wish he were not so needlessly stubborn on the matter of your marriage. You should have a husband who treasures you, for no man can possibly be more fortunate than the one who has your hand.

“But reality being what it is, I have brought you here today. Do not hide, my love. And do not retreat. I know it will not be easy for you. But it will only be worse if you lock yourself in a cupboard. Hold your head high. Stake out your ground. So he hasn’t invited us when he should have. That means it is up to you to make your presence felt, to compel him to publicly acknowledge your position in his life.”

She couldn’t. She had nothing in her to compel anyone. She only wanted to disappear.

“Yes, Mother,” she said.

“Good.” Mrs. Graves patted Millie on her shoulder. “Now let me close my eyes for a moment. Then we will show our magnificent selves to Lord Fitzhugh. And he’d better be properly awed and pleased.”

Mrs. Graves napped. Millie wrestled with her handkerchief. The boy in the next-over carriage narrated the general goings-on, thankfully not bothering with the names of the individual players.

Abruptly the boy fell silent—midsentence. Millie glanced his way, wondering whether he’d choked on something he was eating. But the boy only stared ahead, his jaw halfway to the ground.

He was not alone. The other occupants of his carriage—parents, a sister, and a brother—wore similar expressions of frozen astonishment. Around them, other people in other carriages also stopped what they were doing to stare in the same general direction.

Millie turned around and beheld the most beautiful woman on God’s green earth. A mythological creature, surely, Helen of Troy reincarnated or Aphrodite herself, down from Mount Olympus to rendezvous with her Adonis.

She probably did not walk, but glided over the ground. Her cream lace parasol shielded a face that was at once flawless in its symmetry and unsettling in some indescribable way that separated the beautiful from the merely pretty. Millie could swear that the clouds, which had shielded the crowd from the sun for the past half hour, allowed one brilliant ray to fall on the woman, to illuminate her singular beauty, because it would have been a discourtesy for such loveliness to not also be perfectly lit.

Impossibly enough, she approached the Graves carriage.

“Miss Graves, is it not?” she asked, smiling.

Her smile was so stunning that Millie nearly tumbled backward. She had to fish around for her voice. And was she Miss Graves?

“Ah…yes?”

“I know it is rude to introduce oneself, but seeing as we are going to be family soon, I hoped you wouldn’t mind terribly.”

Millie had no idea what the stranger was talking about. In fact, she barely heard any words, her attention entirely taken by the movements of the woman’s lips. But she was sure of one thing: No matter what the woman wanted, no one would ever, ever mind.

“No, no, of course not.”

“I am Mrs. Townsend. And this lovely young lady is my sister, Miss Fitzhugh.”

Until Mrs. Townsend introduced her companion, Millie hadn’t even noticed that there was anyone with her. Indeed there was, a tall, slender redhead who was quite pretty in her own right.

“Very pleased to meet you both, I’m sure,” said Millie, still agog at Mrs. Townsend’s beauty.

“You are engaged to marry my twin,” said Miss Fitzhugh, who had noticed that Millie had lost all powers of reasoning.

“Oh, of course.”

He had sisters. Millie knew that. And now that she’d been jolted out of her daze, she even remembered that the sisters had been abroad, Miss Fitzhugh at school in Switzerland, and the incomparable Mrs. Townsend in the Himalayas, on safari with her husband.

“Mr. Townsend and I started back as soon as we learned of the previous earl’s passing. We traveled as fast as we could, but we crossed the channel only yesterday,” explained Mrs. Townsend, “after retrieving Miss Fitzhugh from Geneva.”

At first Millie had thought Mrs. Townsend as ageless as a goddess, but the latter was actually quite young, barely over the cusp of twenty.

“And I am glad we hurried,” continued Mrs. Townsend. “It was not until we landed that we learned the date of the wedding had already been set.”

Mr. Graves, not wanting to lose another potential son-in-law to the vagaries of fortune, had demanded that the wedding take place as soon as the financial agreements had been reached. But Lord Fitzhugh refused absolutely: He would not marry while he was still at school. The ceremony had therefore been scheduled the day after the end of summer term, a little more than two weeks away.

“Our brother is a very fine young man—the finest there is,” Mrs. Townsend went on. “But he is a man and as such can be relied upon to know nothing of what needs to be done in case of an engagement and a wedding. Besides, he can’t orchestrate anything from Eton. But now that I am back, we shall proceed apace, beginning with a garden party to introduce you to our friends, a dinner to celebrate the engagement, and of course, when you have returned from your honeymoon, a ball in your honor—a country ball, that is, since London will have emptied by then.”

Millie had thought herself completely disillusioned. It was not true; there had been one last barrier of hope around her heart: A belief that at least some of Lord Fitzhugh’s disdain had not been his own, but a reflection of his family’s aversion at the kind of marriage he must contract to keep their fortunes afloat.

Now that his sisters had shown themselves to be kind and helpful, Mrs. Townsend offering to throw her weight behind Millie’s entry into Society, Millie had no more excuses to turn to.

This marriage would crush her.

She could not run. She could not hide. And the wedding was in two weeks.


When the idea came, it was as fully formed as Athena, leaping out of Zeus’s forehead. Millie only wondered that she hadn’t thought of it earlier.

Or perhaps she had, in all the days and nights since it became clear that she was going to become Lord Fitzhugh’s wife. Beneath her trying not to imagine the worst, perhaps she had been planning for just that.

Mrs. Graves woke up shortly after Mrs. Townsend announced her plans for the party, the dinner, and the ball. Millie’s participation was no longer needed, leaving her free to examine and refine her plan, while pretending to listen to the discussion.

At teatime, the walk to the Eton players’ pavilion was very long—and all too short.

The introductions to Lord Fitzhugh’s friends were a blur. Millie was grateful for Mrs. Townsend, in whose presence the young men could barely form coherent sentences, let alone remember that Lord Fitzhugh did not want to marry this mousy girl to whom they were being presented.

Then, quietly, she made the request to Lord Fitzhugh for a word. Thanks to the magnetic pull of Mrs. Townsend, all Lord Fitzhugh had to do was lead Millie a few paces away from the eager cricket players trying to impress his sister. The noise of the crowd milling about gave Millie and her fiancé all the privacy they needed.