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Nasty old goat. You disgust me. You have always disgusted me.

She drew a breath, but before she could speak, she heard a faint squeak. Every hinge in the Rossell Hotel wanted oil. Her mother had cracked the door that separated bedroom from parlor. Her mother was listening. Why didn’t she burst out and interrupt this preposterous scene?

An ugly old lecher, twice widowed, spouting vileness to her only daughter in a tawdry hotel! It couldn’t be borne. Her mother, for all her meekness, would surely charge forward, outrage transforming her from mouse to lioness. Mothers protected their young.

Lavinia waited. A pulse fluttered her eyelid, and she tried to pin it down with the pad of her finger.

“You weren’t meant for such a dreary existence,” continued Cranbrook with a sweeping gesture. “No soirees. No evenings at the theater. Nothing gay. How long can you stay in these rooms? Mr. McCabe is a generous man, but his charity isn’t limitless.”

She started. Mr. McCabe owned several hotels, some grand, some—like this one—decidedly less than grand. Her father had helped him win his election to the Metropolitan Board of Works. How did Cranbrook know that Mr. McCabe had offered up this vacant suite?

“I worry for you, dear Lavinia. I worry for you, and for your mother.”

There. Almost too quick to catch. He’d cast a glance toward the cracked door. Ah. So he knew her mother stood behind it. He knew . . . because they had planned it.

The edges of her vision softened, then everything snapped into focus. Sudden mental clarity sharpened her perception. The dark pores studding Cranbrook’s nostrils. The soot streaked on the ceiling. That smell . . . roses, musk, dirt, lust, desperation, spoilage.

Did it matter in the end, if Cranbrook had approached her mother or if her mother had gone to Cranbrook? They’d arranged this meeting. No doubt they’d already settled the terms. What would those terms be? A June wedding. Her mother would want to move into Harcott House as soon as possible. Or perhaps Cranbrook would set her up in a house of her own. Even better. What else? Could it be that her mother had negotiated for Cranbrook’s intervention on her father’s behalf?

She tried to bore a hole in the door with her gaze, to meet her mother’s eyes. Was this truly the only option? She’d assumed that her mother—pale and calm, even when the bank accounts were emptied, the house seized—was devising some plan, some solution. She’d hoped—foolishly—every day for an unexpected announcement. A distant relative, an American millionaire, had invited them to New York. The queen had commuted her father’s sentence.

Lavinia saw clearly now. She was the plan. She was to be sold like meat.

Breathe. She had to remind herself. Breathe. You can refuse.

Refuse and do what? Wait in the Rossell Hotel for someone to save her? Her mother? That invented millionaire? The queen?

She’d been bred for marriage, nothing else. She could dance, hold a tune, play the piano, speak French, flirt, sulk, decline cakes and pudding at a banquet, appear fascinated while half-asleep. Skills that didn’t possess value beyond the drawing room, the ballroom, beyond her cossetted little world. For most of her life, she hadn’t regretted it. She’d believed she’d marry George. She’d acted on that belief. She’d ruined herself. No one knew. But a husband—a husband would find out. And that meant marriage was no longer an option.

She had no future.

Governess. But who would trust the moral education of their children to the daughter of a convicted thief?

Shopgirl. She’d have to live in a filthy dormitory with real shopgirls who picked their teeth and tinted their hair. And what if someone she knew came up to buy a bottle of scent? Why, she’d die right there, behind the counter!

Parlormaid?

Her eyes were beginning to water. She blinked rapidly. She wondered if her mother was looking back at her, if she would be able to read her expression.

“Lavinia.” Stars above. Cranbrook was reaching inside his frock coat, producing a round ring box. He thumbed it open. One large diamond flanked by sapphires.

“Or should I say . . . Duchess of Cranbrook?”

Her breath exploded. How grotesque, that her destiny should have gotten so hopelessly knotted.

She’d spent years waiting to be styled duchess. Dreaming of the day. Ever since that spring afternoon when she’d run after George, waving his mislaid cigarette case, and he’d reached out to pocket it, then ruffled her curls, smiled, and said, That’s my Vinnie. She, a girl of seven. He, already grown, broad and golden and gorgeous—the infamous Marquess of Stowe. It was more than a decade before anything happened between them, but that afternoon she apprehended everything at once, in a flash.

His Vinnie.

Her George.

Duke and Duchess of Weston.

Then George had died, and he’d taken it all with him. Love. The fairy-tale wedding at St. James’s. The holiday afterward in Paris. The two children she’d already named, a boy and a girl. The title. She’d grieved in secret. Then, for a strange, short interval she’d thought she’d been reprieved. Anthony was the closest she could get to George himself. She might have unburdened herself, confessed her love for his older brother, told him, even, that George had been her lover. He might have understood.

She hadn’t had time. In quick succession, he’d broken the engagement, married his outlandish painting teacher, and ruined her family.

She looked up at Cranbrook’s face, at the greedy, red-rimmed eyes, at the bloated cheeks, permanently flushed by wine, at the abundant jowls and insufficient chin.