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“Married or no,” he said against her lips. “You will never wear an apron again. I will give you diamonds and pearls. Not as my mistress, Ella, but as the person I care most for in the world.”

Ella flinched at the idea of accepting diamonds—anything of value—from her cousin’s husband. “You will not give me anything.”

“Then what can I give you? What do you want?” He gathered her hands to his mouth and kissed them. “Everything I have is yours.”

She felt as if she were spinning.

After her parents died, it was as if Ella, the Ella that her mother and father had treasured, had died with them.

There was nothing left but a person who had to constantly prove how useful she was, day after day. Even her aunt, who genuinely loved her, never hesitated to ask her to fetch her knitting or order fish for dinner or polish the silver.

When Ella had fallen ill the year before, no one knew of it except Jarvis. To be honest, no one cared.

“I would like you to bring me a pail of warm water from the kitchens,” Ella said, blurting out the truth. “Then leave, because you will be Fulvia’s husband.”

His eyes searched hers. “You want me to marry Fulvia?”

Ella’s temper snapped. “What does it matter what I want? Who I desire? You told all of London this evening that you were marrying Fulvia. You didn’t inform me first, although you had proposed to me.”

“I apologize,” Fiennes said.

“You told me that a gentleman could do no different, though to my mind, a gentleman would inform a lady that he had changed his mind before announcing otherwise in her presence.”

His jaw flexed. “It was an emergency, Ella. In order to—”

“I don’t want a gentleman,” Ella interrupted. “I want a man who will love me more than his reputation. Who will at least tell me before he rejects me for another woman? I want an honorable man!”

Fiennes didn’t answer immediately. In the silence, she heard the morning songs of London sparrows in the tree outside her window.

Then he said stiffly, “More than anything in the world, I want to help you. I deserve everything you say, but I cannot bear to see you in this position, living in a garret.”

“If you honestly wish to help me, you can do so by marrying Fulvia quickly.”

Fiennes dropped her hands and stood. She could see pain in his eyes, but she couldn’t heal his emotion. If she had learned one thing from life, it was that life isn’t joyful.

“Is there nothing that I can do for you?”

“You can bring me a pail of hot water,” she repeated.

The door closed behind him. She jolted awake when he returned carrying two pails of steaming water. He poured them into her tin bath and left without a word.

Ella cried in the bath and went to bed with her hair tangled and wet, more exhausted than she’d been in her entire life.

She didn’t wake until hours later when a scream echoed through the house, so piercing that it reached the attic.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE PRIVILEGES OF ROYAL RANK

Ella threw on a gown and ran down the narrow attic stairs, her heart pounding. That had been her aunt’s scream. Was it the baby? Had her uncle become violent again?

She dreaded another scream, but silence was equally unnerving. As soon as she burst into the second-floor corridor, she could hear tempestuous sobbing coming from the viscountess’s chamber.

Pushing open the door, she found her aunt sitting in a chair clutching a letter, crying as if her heart would break. Rather than menacing his wife, the viscount was seated opposite her wearing a magnificent wrapper and a petulant scowl.

“What has happened?” Ella asked, sinking to her knees beside her aunt.

“Fulvia,” the viscountess said in a choked voice, waving the letter. She broke into a sob so profound that she struggled to breathe.