Armand was in the process of opening the letter Phillips had handed to him, but when Lady Prior spoke, his finger slipped on the edge of paper he was tearing, causing a short, painful cut. “I beg your pardon,” he said, blinking at the incomprehensible woman.

“Rev. Fallon is ready to perform the wedding immediately,” Lady Prior repeated, adding a self-satisfied giggle at the end.

Armand glanced to Lavinia, his nerves bristling. But rather than finding a hoped-for expression of outrage and a determination to put a stop to things, Lavinia’s initial expression of shock was fading quickly into morose acceptance.

She met his questioning gaze with a barely perceptible shrug. “When Mama sets her mind to something, it is impossible to get her to budge an inch.”

A swell of irritation turned Armand’s stomach. Shades of that moment he’d been told he was a viscount and his medical practice as he knew it was over gripped him once again. “Marriage is not something to be entered into lightly,” he said, trying to quell his anger by focusing on Lavinia alone and reminding himself she was as much a victim as he was. “Rev. Fallon will say as much when he performs the ceremony.”

“You can’t get out of things now, Lord Helm,” Lady Prior scolded him, using the title he hated.

“Might as well get it over with,” Malcolm said with a sly wink.

“Don’t worry, you won’t have to stand up alone,” Peter added.

Armand glared at his friends. The only glimmer of hope and help in the room came from Alex. “Our letter to Gladstone has gone missing and the telegram you send informing me of the fact never arrived?” he said to Phillips. “Something is terribly wrong here.”

“Yes,” Armand agreed. “We should get to the bottom of this foul play instead of worrying about weddings.”

“But if you take an hour to relocate to the church so that the ceremony will be performed, you will have one less thing to worry about,” Lady Prior argued. She stepped toward the door, gesturing for Lavinia and him to follow. “Come along.”

Armand didn’t move. “It’s most likely that Miller had something to do with the letter’s disappearance.” He tried in vain to focus the room on what really mattered.

“I half suspected as well,” Phillips said, clearly suffering with responsibility for everything that had gone wrong. “I attempted to search his belongings, but I found nothing. And once we reached London, he vanished before I could question him further.”

“Miller is certainly involved then,” Alex said in a menacing voice.

“Yes, well, Dr. Miller is not present,” Lady Prior said, growing annoyed. “Mr. Phillips has brought your special license, and Rev. Fallon is waiting. Hurry along.”

“Mama, please,” Lavinia hissed, marching to her mother’s side. “The gentlemen have matters of vital importance to deal with. This is no time to push your plots.”

“My plots?” Lady Prior burst with indignation. “Lavinia, do you not remember the way this horrid man desecrated your honor not three days ago?”

“My honor was not—”

“Are you willing to stand by and let the scoundrel get away with debauchery?”

“It was a misunderstanding. No one was—”

“Justice must be served, and it must be served immediately.”

“Mama, please stop.” Lavinia seemed near tears.

Armand sighed. He was cornered, captured, and conquered. The least he could do was to make things easier for his bride.

“Very well,” he said, sending a preemptive glare in Malcolm’s direction. Sure enough, his friend was grinning shamelessly over the scene. Armand crossed to Lavinia, offering his arm with an apologetic look. “Since your mother appears unwilling to give you a moment’s peace until we stand before the vicar, let’s get it over with.”

“How romantic,” Malcolm muttered behind him.

It wasn’t romantic, not in the least. Ladies as young and sweet as Lavinia deserved romance and sentiment in their marriages. He had barely begun, and already he was failing miserably. Worse still, Lavinia seemed resigned to her fate, and not in a contented way. She took his arm without looking at him and let him lead her into the hall, following her giddy mother as she practically sprinted for the front hall and the door.

“I’m sorry,” he said when her mother skipped far enough ahead of them not to hear.

“No, I’m sorry,” Lavinia answered in a hollow voice. “I’ll never forgive her.”

The comment stirred something completely unexpected in Armand’s chest. He was reminded of the brilliant ease with which she’d commented on their political machinations minutes ago, before things fell apart. Lavinia seemed so young and innocent by outward appearances. She was demure and perfectly behaved. But a few times now, Armand had seen flashes of something under the surface—backbone, intelligence, cleverness. Though everything else was out of his control, at least he might have the pleasure of discovering who his bride really was.

Word spread through the house like a flood that the wedding was about to take place. Though Lady Prior was so eager to see the thing done that she refused to let Lavinia escape to her room to change into a fancier gown, by the time they made it halfway down the path that led to the road into town, Marigold, Mariah, and Katya, Katya’s daughters, Rupert, and little James Croydon with his nursemaid caught up with them. As they reached the road, Marigold’s maid, Anne, sprinted to meet them with a bouquet of orange and gold flowers. They made such a scene walking into town that several of the people whom they passed on the road dropped what they were doing to follow.

By the time they reached the small parish church, a trail of two dozen people stretched behind them. As Armand suspected, Rev. Fallon wasn’t quite as ready to perform a wedding as Lady Prior had led them to believe. He was, in fact, up to his elbows in soil as he worked in the vicarage vegetable patch. His twin toddlers rolled around in the mud with him while his tall and decidedly pregnant wife hung the washing on a line nearby.

Rev. Fallon flinched at the sight of the mob that had invaded his lawn and pushed himself to his feet. “Good gracious, what’s all this?”

Lady Prior charged to the front of the pack before Armand could open his mouth to apologize. “We are ready for you to perform the wedding, Rev. Fallon.”

Rev. Fallon blinked, glancing from Lady Prior to Armand and Lavinia, and then to his wife. “When you said to be ready to perform the ceremony on a moment’s notice, I had no idea you meant a moment’s notice.”

“What else would you think I meant?” Lady Prior asked as though he were an idiot.

Armand clenched his jaw. Was there no end to the woman’s rudeness? He cleared his throat and addressed Rev. Fallon directly. “If it is too much trouble for you to throw together a marriage ceremony without preparation, we understand.”

To Armand’s disappointment, the man shook his head, still baffled, and said, “No, no. The particulars of the marriage ceremony are fairly standard.” He glanced to Lady Prior. “You said something about there being a special license?”

Armand held out the envelope that he still hadn’t fully opened. As Rev. Fallon took it, Armand, yet again, glanced toward Lavinia apologetically. She returned his look with a tiny shrug of her shoulders and an attempt at a smile.

Rev. Fallon opened the envelope and took out the certificate it contained. He glanced over it quickly, his brow shooting up. “Surprisingly, this is all in order, down to the parish and the priest. Well done, whoever obtained this.”

Of all the ways Gilbert Phillips could have sought to prove that he was, in fact, highly competent, in spite of losing their letter to Gladstone, it had to be this.

“Move along, then,” Lady Prior said, shooing Rev. Fallon toward his church.

It was ridiculous. The whole thing was a farce. Lady Prior barely gave Rev. Fallon time to wash his hands and don his vestments. Mrs. Fallon rushed to help him prepare, but that meant she had to bring their twins into the church so that someone could mind them. The twins weren’t happy about leaving their sunshine and mud, and cried during the entire thing. It didn’t help that Malcolm and Peter whispered back and forth throughout the entire ceremony, making jokes at Armand’s expense. In fact, the only time when the church fell completely silent was when Rev. Fallon asked if anyone knew of any impediment or reason why Armand and Lavinia shouldn’t be married. Not a soul said a word.

“Do you, Armand Nathaniel Pearson, Lord Helm, take this woman, Lavinia Charlotte Prior, to be your lawfully wedded wife?” Rev. Fallon asked at last.

Armand’s gut roiled. How had he landed in this position, stripped of his medical practice and everything he loved, punished with a title he had no idea what to do with, and maneuvered into a marriage with a beautiful but hapless younger woman that he’d never asked for by a woman with ambitions that outstripped his own by far? The only thing that stopped him from calling an end to the entire thing and marching out of the church and straight down to Exeter to find Dr. Maqsood and beg him to depart for India immediately was the sudden fear and tender hope in Lavinia’s eyes as she waited for his answer. He couldn’t let her down. This wasn’t her fault.

“I do,” he said with as much strength as he could manage.

Malcolm and Peter did a terrible job of hiding their school-boy-worthy sounds of glee. Katya made a sound of disgust, and Armand caught her rolling her eyes at Malcolm out of the corner of his eye.

Rev. Fallon smiled benignly and went on. “And do you, Lavinia Charlotte Prior, take this man, Armand Nathaniel Pearson, to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do,” Lavinia answered, almost too softly to be heard. In fact, Rev. Fallon had to lean in and glance at her questioningly to make sure he heard. “I do,” Lavinia repeated with a little more strength.

“Good.” Rev. Fallon stood straight again, nodding. “Then by the power invested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife.”

It happened so quickly that Lavinia barely believed it had happened at all. She floated through the wedding ceremony as though she were watching someone else’s life from a distance. It certainly couldn’t have been her life. She was meant to be a woman who stood on her own two feet, who devoted her life to her friends and to the causes she believed in, not a wife.

The full truth of the situation came home to her when Rev. Fallon attempted to omit the first kiss and to end the ceremony.

“No, no, no,” her mother protested. “They must kiss to ensure the union is sealed properly.”

Lavinia snuck a sideways peek up at Dr. Pearson, her husband. He returned the look with a wry grin and, if she wasn’t mistaken, the slightest roll of his eyes. That ironic expression was all it took. A ghost of a laugh slipped out of her lungs, and with it, far more of the burden of misery she’d carried with her to the church than she would have expected. She might have been molded and twisted into the form of femininity that her mother approved of, she may have been manipulated into a marriage she didn’t want to a man she barely knew, but now that she was married, her mother couldn’t rule her anymore.

Dr. Pearson—she supposed she would have to get used to calling him Armand now—cleared his throat as she turned toward him. She did her best to meet his kiss bravely, tilting her head up to let him know she could bear it. To her surprise, his lips were soft on hers, and rather than feeling invaded and overrun, as she’d expected to, a thrill of promise swirled through her. It couldn’t be all bad if his kiss made her feel like that, could it?

“At last,” her mother breathed, far too loud to be anything but gauche. Lavinia jerked away from Armand, too angered by her mother’s declaration of victory to enjoy the moment. “My dearest daughter, married at last. And to a viscount, no less.” She added a squealing giggle to the end of her pronouncement and clapped her hands. “We must return to the house to celebrate.”

Lavinia glanced once more to Armand with an apologetic knot in her gut that was becoming far too familiar to her. How could a man who had been forced into marriage ever be happy with his wife? She let him escort her back through the church and outside, knowing she had her work cut out for her.

Much to her mother’s disappointment, once they reached Winterberry Park, Mr. Croydon refused to let the swollen crowd of curiosity-seekers who had attended the wedding stay to have a party. He and Mr. Phillips had chosen to stay behind in an attempt to mentally retrace Phillips’s steps to figure out what happened to the letter to Gladstone. Both men were in a foul mood when the newlyweds returned. Lord Malcolm and Lord Dunsford seemed to put aside their high spirits and their teasing to focus on business, escorting Rupert Marlowe down the hall as though explaining the situation to him, and, unsurprisingly to Lavinia, Armand joined them.

“I’m probably the last person you want to waste your afternoon with anyhow,” he told her with a wry, tired grin as they paused in the hallway.

Marigold and Lady Stanhope had taken James out to the back lawn, the Marlowe girls had run off into the garden, and Mariah had gone to the nursery to fetch little Peter so he could join them. Her mother was attempting to bully Mrs. Musgrave into putting together a wedding feast. Lavinia felt at loose ends.

“Go on,” she said, trying to smile. “It’s far more important for you to deal with business right now.” She paused, then added. “I’m deeply concerned about this letter of yours. Did it contain anything that could be used against you or the Liberal Party?”

Armand sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I must confess, I didn’t see the final draft.”

“You didn’t?”

“I…I haven’t been paying as close attention as perhaps I should.” He shuffled his feet, making Lavinia wonder what was eating at his conscience. “I’ve had other things on my mind.”

“Then go,” she said, managing a smile at last. “We’ll see each other again at supper.”

He took her hand, raising her knuckles to his lips as a goodbye. A flutter hit her stomach at the sentimental gesture, and she turned to head out to the garden to join her friends, feeling as odd as though she’d slipped through Alice’s looking glass.

She had barely seated herself in one of the wicker chairs out where the children were playing when her mother barged into their midst, grabbing Lavinia’s wrist and attempting to wrench her out of the chair.

“What are you doing idling here?” her mother demanded. “You have much to do.”

“Unhand her,” Lady Stanhope stood and rounded on Lavinia’s mother.

“I beg your pardon,” her mother snapped, eyes wide.

“Lady Helm deserves far better than to be manhandled by a mere baroness.” Lady Stanhope fixed her mother with a look so full of righteousness that it made the handsome angles of her face seem almost demonic.

Lavinia’s mother gaped, her jaw flapping, speechless, for a change. It took Lavinia a few seconds more to realize that “Lady Helm” referred to her. “Good Lord,” she gasped as it hit her. She outranked her mother by a great deal now.

“I’m simply attempting to guide my daughter through her new duties,” her mother finally managed to say. She turned to Lavinia. “You need to direct a maid to gather and pack your things and to move you from your current room into Lord Helm’s room.”

“Good Lord,” Lavinia exclaimed again, her eyes growing rounder. Was that what Armand expected of her?

“There’s no need to worry,” Marigold intervened, pausing in her play with James. “As it happens, Lavinia’s room is only two doors down from Armand’s. She can keep her things right where they are and use her current room as a dressing room.”

Lavinia stared hard at her friend. Armand was just two doors down from her? That seemed highly irregular for a house party. Almost as though her friend had hoped something would happen. She’d walked into a larger trap than she’d thought.

“I think I need to lie down,” she said, rising. She started for the house, but her mother stopped her.

“We have important matters that need to be discussed,” she said, fixing Lavinia with a peculiar look. “Matters of an intimate nature.”

Lavinia winced, the headache she was about to fake coming on for real.

“Perhaps there are better people present to have that particular conversation with the viscountess,” Lady Stanhope said, her lips curling into a wicked grin.

“Do you mean a harlot who has opened her legs for more men than even Her Majesty’s Exchequer can count?” Lavinia’s mother snapped.

Marigold clapped her hands over James’s ears and cleared her throat, staring angrily at both women in turn.

“Better that than to receive a horrific miseducation from a woman whose fruit has withered and died on the vine,” Lady Stanhope fired back.

Lavinia’s mother shrieked in offense. “Why you vile, disease-riddled, barely better than a common—”

“Say it,” Lady Stanhope dared her, crossing her arms and grinning as though she’d scored game-winning points.

Lavinia’s mother pressed her lips together, her round, red face and her high-pitched hum making her look and sound like a kettle about to boil. At last, she squeaked, “Whore.”

“I’m leaving,” Lavinia burst, turning and fleeing before anyone else could stop her or use her as a pawn in their own wars and nonsense.

She’d made it back into the house before realizing Mariah had come with her, little Peter in her arms. “This hasn’t been the best of days for you, has it?” she asked.

“No,” Lavinia sighed, turning a corner to mount the stairs that led to the hall where her—and Armand’s—room was.

“Well, allow me to help you by saying this much,” Mariah went on, reaching Lavinia’s side. Her lips twitched slightly, and she rushed on with, “Men are turgid and women are viscous, and if you let it, the marriage bed can be the greatest adventure of your life.”

Lavinia paused on the landing to stare at her friend, utterly baffled. “I beg your pardon?”

Mariah giggled, her cheeks going pink. “It’s what my mother told me before my wedding,” she said as they continued up the next flight of stairs at a slower pace. “She described the male member as ‘turgid’ and the corresponding female parts as ‘viscous’ when advising me what to expect on my wedding night.”

Lavinia blinked rapidly. “Well, that’s…certainly…interesting.” They reached the hall and continued on toward Lavinia’s room. She shook off her bafflement at the description of marital relations and said, “Elaine has been writing to me all summer long with shockingly explicit details of how much she enjoys married life. She’s rather prone to indiscretion, I’m afraid.”

“Is she?” Mariah laughed. “I only met her briefly on a few occasions, but I can certainly see how that would be true.”

“So none of you need fear that I am completely ignorant about how a man and a woman make love.” She paused in front of the door to her room, her cheeks flaring hot. “I’m going to have a difficult time looking Lord Waltham in the eye next time I see them.”

“At least someone has been honest with you about things,” Mariah said, shifting her baby in her arms.

Lavinia shook her head. “Knowledge is one thing. Knowing how to apply it to a situation in which you are expected to do—” she swallowed, “—those things with a man you barely know, a man who likely resents the way in which you ended up in his bed in the first place….”

Mariah rested a hand on Lavinia’s shoulder. “I’m sure if you asked, Armand would put off consummating the marriage.”

“What’s the point?” Lavinia sighed. “If my mother suspects everything is not exactly as she wants it to be, she’d likely bring a chair into our bedroom and watch to be sure an heir to the coveted viscountancy is conceived post haste.”

Mariah made a squeamish sound and exchanged a horrified look with baby Peter, who chose just that moment to raise his head and look at his mother. The timing was almost comical enough to make Lavinia smile.

“No,” Lavinia repeated with a resigned sigh. “I’ll go to my husband’s bed tonight and do what British wives have been required to do since William the Conqueror claimed England as his own. And in the morning, I’ll pick up whatever pieces are left of my dreams and figure out how to piece together a future.”