"I do prefer my books, Lady Denham," Margaret said evenly. "Books do not gamble away my dowry. And they do not require me to laugh at jokes that are not funny. I recommend the practice."
She did not wait for a reply. She walked away, her spine straight, her chin level, though her heart was hammering with a familiar, exhausting fury.
Twenty years of this. Twenty years of standing at the edges of ballrooms, watching girls half her age paraded past like prize mares while she was quietly filed away under the heading of failure.
Her mother had died believing Margaret's unmarried state was a personal disgrace. Her father, before his own death three years prior, had stopped introducing her to guests altogether, as if she were an inconvenient piece of furniture he had forgotten to have removed.
Margaret had made her peace with it. Or she told herself she had.
She managed her own modest inheritance with a precision most men twice her age could not match. She ran the small charitable hospital near Cheapside that her father had funded and then ignored, and she had turned it, through sheer stubborn will, into the finest institution of its kind in London. She did not need a husband. She had built a life out of the wreckage of other people's low expectations.
And most days, that felt like enough. Most days.
She retreated toward the tall glass doors that opened onto the terrace, desperate for air that did not smell of candle wax and gossip. She pushed through them and stepped out into the cool dark of the garden, letting the door swing shut behind her, muffling the orchestra to a distant, tinny hum.
She was not alone.
A man stood at the far end of the terrace, his back to her, his hands braced against the stone balustrade. He was tall, broad through the shoulders, dressed in unrelieved black but for the white of his cravat. And something about the rigid set of his spine told Margaret he had come out here for the exact same reason she had: to escape.
She recognized him instantly. Everyone in London would have recognized him.
Sebastian Cole, Duke of Ravensmere, was perhaps the most discussed man in the entire ton. Not because of scandal, but because of the maddening absence of one. He was thirty-eight years old, immensely wealthy, unfailingly polite, and had, for the better part of a decade, declined every single introduction to every single eligible young woman society had thrown at him with the calm, immovable patience of a man waiting out a storm.