The Regency era wasn't all swirling ball gowns and stolen glances over painted fans. For most, it was a brutal, gilded meat market. You were sold to the highest bidder, or you were utterly invisible. Norah was invisible. So when she saw a man practically dying of thirst in the dirt, while the lords and ladies drank chilled champagne fifty feet away, she didn't see a peasant.
She just saw a human being. She handed him a cup of water. She didn't know she was handing it to the Duke. The heat of July in the year 1815 was not polite. It did not care for the delicate sensibilities of the English aristocracy.
Nor did it respect the imported French silk of the ladies lounging on the terrace of Foxwood Hall. The sun beat down like a hammer on an anvil, turning the air thick, hazy, and suffocating. Norah Hastings sat at the furthest edge of the terrace. She was twenty-three years old, a dangerous age for an unmarried woman with no fortune. In the eyes of the polite society currently fanning themselves on the wrought-iron chairs, she was already a ghost, a spinster, a charity case entirely dependent on the grudging goodwill of her aunt Mildred.
Norah wore a faded muslin gown that had been washed so many times it had lost its original blush and settled into a defeated dusty pink. She didn't mind the dress. It was soft, and unlike her cousin Louisa's heavily boned, jewel-toned silk, it didn't feel like a tailored cage. “Good God, it is entirely intolerable,” Louisa whined, snapping her painted ivory fan shut and tapping it against her knee.
“Why my father insisted we attend a country house party before the Duke even arrives is beyond me. We are roasting for nothing.” Aunt Mildred didn't look up from her embroidery. “We are here, Louisa, because when his grace finally deigns to visit his newly inherited estate, you will already be established as a fixture. Familiarity breeds comfort.
Comfort breeds proposals.” Norah kept her eyes on the horizon. The marriage market. It always came back to the transaction. Flesh, blood, and youth traded for titles, land, and the right to stand on a terrace and complain about the weather.
Norah had failed the market, or rather, the market had failed her the day her father died and left her with nothing but debts. She was grateful for the failure. It gave her a strange, quiet freedom. No one looked at her. No one expected anything of her other than silence.
She looked past the marble balustrade of the terrace out toward the vast rolling lawns of Foxwood. The estate was magnificent, but it was currently a chaotic construction site. The late Duke had let the grounds fall into severe disrepair, and the current steward, a viciously ambitious man named Croft, was desperately trying to modernize the gardens before the new Duke arrived from London. To achieve this, Croft had hired two dozen local men to dig a massive trench for an artificial lake. They were working in the dead center of the lawn, fully exposed to the brutal midday sun.
Norah watched them. The contrast was physically nauseating. On the terrace, silver platters of iced lemon water, cucumber sandwiches, the light tinkling of laughter, and parasols. Fifty yards away, men swinging pickaxes in the hard-baked earth, their shirts dark with sweat, their muscles trembling with exhaustion. One man caught her attention. He didn't look like the other laborers.