CHAPTER ONE
YORK, 1814
Forty minutes.
A woman could learn a great deal about herself in forty minutes at the altar.
The silence of the church wrapped itself suffocatingly around Isadora Fairbourne as she stood alone before the rector, her family gathered behind her. Over the past forty minutes, the church had begun to feel less like a house of God and more like a gallows.
Nathaniel should have been here by now. She had never thought much of his punctuality, but surely when a man agreed to marry a woman, he might trouble himself to attend the wedding.
The late May sun poured through the windows and sent dust motes spinning. Behind her, her aunt fidgeted on the pew, satin rustling. New satin. Flowered, flounced, trimmed in enough lace to appease the Regent himself—commissioned for the occasionof Isadora’s wedding, while Isadora herself stood at the altar in a gown a decade out of fashion.
She smoothed a trembling hand down the slim skirt of her yellow dress. The empire waist was tight just below her bust, embarrassingly high; the color both washed out her skin and made her red hair look an even more abominable shade.
Had she been allowed her mother’s wedding gown, she might at least have been humiliated in something beloved.
Embarrassment prickled her eyes. Her uncle’s pocket watch ticked obnoxiously loudly as he drew it out again to check the time.
Perhaps his horse had thrown a shoe. Perhaps her betrothed lay in a ditch on the Tadcaster road—and she was a wicked creature for beginning to hope so, but at least it was an excuse.
After another round of whispers and a nod, her aunt and uncle rose as one and linked arms. “You may remain a little longer,” her uncle said to Isadora, “but we have other matters to attend to this afternoon.” He waved his cane vaguely in the direction of the rector. “You may marry them with a witness if the boy shows, of course.”
“Yes, sir,” the old rector obliged.
Isadora could have sunk through the floor.
The church door slammed behind them, shutting her inside. Everyone had left, save for the rector and a small freckle-faced boy assisting him.
The rector blinked at her from behind his lenses. “My dear, we have a service scheduled in twenty minutes, do you suppose he—”
“He’s… he’s not coming, is he.” The words were numb in her mouth.
Mr. Nathaniel Windham had left her standing at the altar. She would not be married. After all this hope that she might finally have a life that could be hers, away from society’s gossip, away from callous relatives who saw her only as a burden, it had come to nothing. No doubt something better had come along for him. When it came to Isadora, something better always came along.
“Perhaps a drink to refresh you?” The kind rector motioned to the boy, who disappeared into the rectory and returned, bringing some wine in a goblet—the one they usually used for communion. “Not to worry,” he said with a gentle wink, handing it to her. “I expect God will turn a blind eye, just this once.”
Isadora sipped, the wine sour on her tongue. In a few minutes, she would have to leave the church and venture back home, and by suppertime, every drawing room in York would have her name on its lips.Jilted. Four-and-twenty and jilted at the altar.
How could she ever show her face again?
Worse, her aunt and uncle may well cast her off entirely. At her age, with no husband or prospects, she was less a niece and more ahouseholdafflictionaccording to them.
“I—” Isadora lowered the goblet, now empty of its wine. Her humiliation had left her dizzy, the ache in her chest so large she felt as though it might swallow her whole, but new determination left its mark, too.
She would not allow her cousins to cast her into a corner again.
“I think…” she murmured as the rector carefully carried his Bible back to the glass case on the wall where it belonged, “I think I will go to London.”
He twisted and peered at her over his spectacles. “Is that so?” The rector was an ancient man, perhaps in his seventies, a little stooped with age, but with kindly eyes.
“Y-yes. My sister is in London,” she said weakly.
“And how do you propose to get there?”
“I—” Frankly, she hadn’t thought that far. She ducked her head to the garish yellow silk that looked so terrible with her coloring.
It had been beautiful once, for some other woman, in some other decade. Her aunt had crowed over its provenance for a fortnight—a housekeeper’s sale that was a tremendous bargain,a gown that had supposedly once belonged to the late Duchess of Winchester herself—
