The silence stretched between them, thick and painful. Lydia could see him fighting with himself, the cynic who had built his life around avoiding attachment and the man beneath who was, she was beginning to suspect, desperately lonely.
“My father,” he said at last, his voice rough. “He loved my mother. Worshipped her, really. She was beautiful and fragile, and he spent every day of their marriage terrified that she would leave him, or die, or simply stop loving him. And in the end, she did die. Consumption. He followed her within a year, not from illness but from grief. He simply stopped living.”
Lydia's anger drained away, replaced by something far more dangerous: compassion.
“So you decided never to love,” she said softly, “because love killed your father.”
Henry turned away, his hands braced on the back of his chair. “I decided that I would not make myself so vulnerable. Attachment is a weakness. Affection is a trap. And yet here I am, married to a woman who sees through me as if I were made of glass, and I cannot decide whether I want to kiss her or run away.”
Lydia's breath caught. “Henry—”
“Do not.” His voice cracked. “Do not say something kind. I do not deserve kindness. I brought you here for my own selfish purposes, and I have been hiding ever since because I am terrified that if I let myself care for you, I will lose you, and I do not think I could survive that.”
The room was very quiet. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the distance, a clock struck nine.
Lydia walked around the chair and stood before him. She reached up and placed her hand on his cheek, feeling the roughness of his evening stubble, the warmth of his skin.
“You are not your father,” she said, “and I am not your mother. I am not fragile. I will not leave you, Henry. Not because I am bound by a marriage contract, but because I am choosing to stay. I am choosing you, the real you, the one you have been hiding from everyone, including yourself.”
He closed his eyes. His hand came up to cover hers, pressing it against his cheek.
“Lydia,” he whispered, “what have I done?”
“You have married a woman who refuses to let you be a coward,” she said, and she smiled. “Now, are you going to kiss me, or shall I have to take matters into my own hands?”
He kissed her.
It was not the gentle, courtly kiss of a polite husband. It was desperate and hungry and full of all the fear and longing he had been holding back for weeks. Lydia melted into him, her arms wrapping around his neck, and for the first time since the wedding, she felt like she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
When they finally broke apart, Henry was breathing hard, his forehead pressed against hers.
“I love you,” he said, the words tumbling out as if he could not hold them back. “I did not mean to. I tried not to. But I love you, Lydia Barnes.”
“Lydia Ravenshire,” she corrected him, and kissed him again.
Chapter 4: The Weight of Truth
They were happy. For three perfect weeks, Lydia woke each morning in Henry's arms, ate breakfast with him in the sunny breakfast room, and walked with him through the Ravenshire Court gardens as the first crocuses pushed through the cold earth. She wrote long letters to her mother and sisters filled with descriptions of her new life.
Charlotte replied with drawings of sheep-shaped clouds and the news that she had finally learned the difference between a simile and a metaphor.
But happiness, Lydia had learned long ago, was a fragile thing.
It began with a letter.
Henry received it at breakfast, his expression shifting from curiosity to cold fury as he read. He set it down beside his plate, his knuckles white.
“What is it?” Lydia asked.
“Reginald Pounce,” he said flatly. “It seems our friend the linen draper has not taken kindly to being disinherited. He has hired a solicitor of his own and is contesting the will. He claims our marriage is a sham, a convenient arrangement entered into solely to circumvent my grandmother's conditions.”
Lydia's stomach dropped. “Can he prove it?”
“He does not need to prove it. He only needs to raise enough doubt that the courts will investigate. And if they investigate, they will question the household staff, Cook, my mother's former maid. They will ask about the nature of our marriage, whether we shared a bed, whether we seemed affectionate, whether there was any genuine feeling between us.”
Lydia thought of the first week when they had slept in separate rooms and spoken to each other like polite strangers. She thought of the way Henry had flinched from her touch, the way she had accused him of being a coward. All of it could be used against them.
“We have been happy since,” she said. “Surely that counts for something.”
Henry shook his head. “The first month is what matters. My grandmother's spies will report that we did not share a bed until the fourth week, that we were distant and formal, that I spent my evenings hiding in the library like a frightened schoolboy.”
Lydia reached across the table and took his hand. “Then we tell the truth.”
He looked up sharply. “What truth?”
“The truth that we were strangers who learned to love each other. The truth that our marriage began as an arrangement and became something real. It is not a scandal, Henry. It is a love story.”
He stared at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, he began to laugh, the real laugh, the one she had heard in the alcove at Briarwood Hall.
“You are remarkable,” he said. “Do you know that? Most women would be panicking. You are planning our defense.”
“I am a rector's daughter,” Lydia said primly. “I have been arguing theology since I was twelve. A few solicitors do not frighten me.”
The hearing was held at the local assizes in a wood-paneled courtroom that smelled of dust and old secrets. Reginald Pounce sat across the aisle, a round, red-faced man in a waistcoat that was too tight. His solicitor, a weasel-faced fellow named Mr. Grindel, opened the proceedings with a blistering attack on the marriage.
“The Viscount and his bride met only once before the wedding,” Mr. Grindel declared. “They exchanged no letters, no tokens of affection. They were married in haste, in a private ceremony with no banns published. This is not a marriage of affection. It is a marriage of convenience designed solely to cheat my client of his rightful inheritance.”