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This time he had proposed a cousin, Cosmo Colville. At least Cosmo did not seem brutish. He likely would not require her company in London, either. He did not believe it was a woman’s place to play hostess in political circles, and—as he had once told her—he found it becoming that she was no diplomat.
    His estates lay in a rainy, dark stretch of Yorkshire where the wind-scoured soil yielded little of beauty.
    She would rot there until she died.
    She took a sharp breath, forcing her thoughts away from this end, but they strayed directly back to Rivenham.
    A woman is no less than a man, he’d told her once. My mother might have been a general, were wits the main requirement.
    He had worn an unpleasant smile as he’d spoken—one that had made her hesitate to understand his words as a compliment. And I? she’d asked. Would I have been fit for a general?
    His smile had gentled then. Lightly, he had traced the curve of her cheek. I can imagine no alternative for you. You are destined to conquer the world just as you are.
    That touch . . . how fervently he had seemed to believe his words . . .
    The posset was unfurling through her, softening her brain. Misery loosened its grip a little, allowing a new restlessness to come over her. She stretched out her arms, measuring the width of the mattress. The carved oak posters supported a domed canopy of peacock velvet embroidered with golden leaves and scarlet rosebuds. Three men might have lain beneath it, their elbows never touching.
    This, surely, was the sweetest boon of widowhood: to have this space for herself. A hulking man who took up thrice the room his body required; whose heavy limbs fell across hers like weights to suffocate her: where was the comfort in that?
    She reached out to finger the lace that trimmed the bed curtains. Although she had lain with him, she had never slept at Adrian’s side. They had lacked opportunity. He had come to Hodderby as her brother’s guest, which in itself had been extraordinary enough: though their lands adjoined, his family, the Ferrers, were Catholic, and Catholic nobility did not often mix with outsiders. A chance meeting in London had led David to befriend him, after which there was no question but that he must pay a call, for only a day’s ride separated their holdings.
    She had thought him uncommonly handsome at their first meeting, but handsome men had not interestedher. Having watched both her mother and elder sister die in childbirth, she had lived in terror of the prospect of marriage.
    But Adrian Ferrers, a Catholic, was no candidate for wedlock. And so his presence had not called for caution. That first night at dinner, when he had spoken of Continental philosophers, of foreign places and strange sciences, she had eagerly joined the conversation . . . And though David had laughed, Adrian had listened to her; he had listened carefully, and given such charming, thoughtful replies . . .
    Her eyes opened.
    The curtains were drawn back to show sunlight flooding the room, sparkling across the mother-of-pearl inlays in the heavy oak wardrobe.
    For a moment, she was as confused by the sun as gladdened by it. Surely the night had not passed so quickly? She had just closed her eyes. These possets always muddled her wits . . .
    Praise God it would not be another day of rain.
    A shout came through the window. A man’s shout.
    Rivenham . It all came back to her in a moment. She slipped from the bed and rushed toward the window.
    Two men were practicing combat in the packed drive, one dressed in rough-spun wool, the other in a suit with fine embroidery. Steel rang out as their swords crossed; the rough-spun man danced backward, shouting a taunt that ended in a laugh as the dark-haired fop cursed and pursued him.
    When the fop’s face came into view she recognizedhim as Lord John Gardiner. She remembered the boy as a vain, idle creature, always looking down his nose. Shortly before her departure from London, he and his father had sat