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“I will not marry Rodney!” A numbing wave of despair broke over her head.

“You will.” Her mild-mannered father suddenly took on the look of a bulldog. “You’ll do as I say, Philippa. I won’t have you ruining your life, pining after a servant who has a better understanding of propriety than you do. I don’t know whether I’m more appalled that you played the fool enough to ask such a thing of the man, or more grateful that he didn’t lunge at the chance.”

“No, Papa!” Philippa cried. “You don’t understand. You can’t!”

“I can,” he said. He took her arm and began towing her up the stairs. “And don’t think you’re going to run away again. I’ll tell the baronet that you suffered from a bout of sun-sickness. You will marry the fat-bottomed Rodney on the morrow and count yourself lucky. The last of the banns were said Sunday, just as you were flitting around that castle making a fool of yourself!”

“Papa,” Philippa said, her voice catching with tears. “I love Wick. I love him more than—”

“You will forget him,” her father stated. They reached the top of the stairs, and he pushed her directly into her bedchamber. “Someday you’ll look back on this episode as if it were a bout of fever. I always thought you were a sensible girl, Philippa.”

“I am!” she cried. “I loathe Rodney, Papa. I loathe him, and I will not marry him.”

“You will,” he said, shutting the door in her face. She heard him through the wood, his voice only slightly muffled. “Tomorrow!”

A few hours later Philippa heard the front door burst open, and she knew that her father had returned, and not waited for Quirbles to open said door to admit him. She hurried down the stairs, her heart pounding. Her father’s face was gleaming with sweat, his usual rather mournful expression metamorphosed into pure anger.

Without a word, Philippa ran into the sitting room before him. “That bastard!” her father bellowed, slamming the door behind him.

Philippa fell into a chair, judging that the bastard in question was not her beloved Wick. Evidently, Rodney had revealed all.

“He took advantage of you, a maiden, a gently born maiden. And he did so”—her father wheeled and glared down at her—“in a barn? In the straw?”

Philippa swallowed, but honesty made her admit, “I allowed him to do so, Papa.”

Rage twisted the corner of her father’s mouth. “That is irrelevant. Irrelevant! You are a gently born damsel, the only child of my house, and you were deflowered in a barn!” He spluttered to a halt. “Your mother,” he added heavily, “would kill me for this.”

Philippa bit her lip but said nothing.

“Sir George threw his son across the room once that young fool confessed,” her father said, seating himself opposite her. He reached up and pulled at his neckcloth as if it were strangling him.

“He did?” Philippa squeaked. “Across the room?”

“The baronet was as appalled as I,” her father said, dropping his head back on his chair’s high back. “That donkey didn’t even seem to realize what he’d done. Of course you ran from the house. You, a damsel, taken without the benefit of marriage, my daughter—in a barn.” That seemed to be the worst detail. “I shall never recover from this, never.”

“Papa,” Philippa began, hardly knowing what to say.

Her father jerked his head upright. “I want you to know, dear, that Sir George and I understand entirely why you fled. Entirely. It must have been an awful experience for you. Terrible. Like those suffered by women in wartime, I have no doubt. In the Egyptian campaign, for example—” He stopped and shook his head. “Irrelevant to the present situation.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t nearly as terrible as that,” Philippa said tentatively, as her father had never instructed her on the plight of women in wartime.

“No gently bred lady should be introduced to a situation that she instinctively finds distasteful except in the most acceptable circumstances.”

Philippa frowned, and her father frowned back. “In the dark,” he clarified. “In a proper bed, within the sanctity of matrimony, and with the knowledge that your husband respects and admires you, even though the act itself—to wit, consummation of the marriage—is necessarily distasteful to you, if not painful.”

“Oh,” Philippa said. That would have summed up her probable marital relations with Rodney. But it had no relevance for intimacies with Wick.

“As I said, neither of us blames you,” her father repeated.

“Thank you,” Philippa said.

“Your mother would have fled as well.” Her father pulled off his neckcloth and mopped his face with it. “I simply cannot countenance the idiocy of that young man. Idiocy!”

Philippa waited, a sick feeling in her stomach.

“But be that as it may,” her father said, “you have made your bed, albeit in the stables. Did you confide to this Candlewick what happened to you?”

“His name is Berwick, not Candlewick.” But she nodded.