After the wedding, there was nothing to do but leave. Adrian and his new non-bride weren’t offered so much as a room for the night—no surprise there, Adrian supposed—just directions to an inn and their things, already packed for them.

The inn was miles away and it was already dark.

The night air was cold, and Adrian fell into a rhythm, walking and thinking, trying to decide on his plan of attack.

When he had been young, he’d visited his father’s family in Maine, where he’d met his great-great-uncle.

His great-great-uncle John had been born into slavery and had lived to see it undone. He lived still—or had the last time Adrian had heard.

He had sailed around the world. Nowadays, he stayed home, tending his garden, with great-great-uncle Henry.

There is no point getting angry at a bad hand, he had used to say. Especially if the dealer cheated when distributing the cards. Anger leads to mistakes.

Don’t get angry; that’s what they want. Get calm. They’ll never expect you to do that.

Don’t get angry; get creative. Take the hand you have and see whether you might not be holding something your enemy has overlooked.

Don’t get angry at the cards; get the dealer out of the game.

Easy to say when it was something other than the entire rest of his life at stake. All the more important to remember it now, when calm, creative plans seemed as distant as his parents, back in Maine with John and Henry.

Adrian had always found walking calming; he focused on it now, one step after another claiming the road until he felt his fury bleeding into resolve. Until the anger clenching his heart slowly started to loosen and he could feel the cold of the wind against the back of his neck.

Then he remembered that he had to return to Harvil in five days, that the designs for the china plates were unfinished, and that he was now married and stuck in a tangle with no easy way out.

He stopped walking. “Fuck.” That was when he became aware of something else—footsteps behind him. That noise, that swift scuffle and slide behind him, was Miss Winters. If he could call her that any longer.

He always walked fast; being angry had made him swifter still. He had a good eight inches on Miss Winters, and he had only a small satchel.

He’d been so angry he’d not really thought of her, scrambling after him with her luggage. She must have been half-jogging to keep up.

He stopped in the road and turned to the woman who had been forcibly joined to him in holy matrimony. In his anger, he’d allowed himself to look at her as a thing that had happened to him, but her eyes darted to his, then looked down the road. She wasn’t a thing, and this was why he hated being angry.

She was breathing heavily, and he didn’t think it was from just the exertion. This couldn’t be any easier for her than it was for him. In some ways, it might be worse. No matter how she felt, he seriously doubted she had wanted to be married at gunpoint.

Don’t get mad at the cards, he reminded himself. Miss Winters was no doubt a card, one who hadn’t wanted to be dealt in such a cavalier fashion.

“Mr. Hunter?” she asked. He could hear the query in her voice.

Well. He wasn’t going to pretend he was happy. “I suppose this…is what it is. We’ll have to figure this mess out.”

She said nothing to that, but her jaw worked.

“Do you need any help carrying that?”

Her hands clutched tightly around the handle of her valise. “No, thank you. I can manage on my own.”

Her shoulders were trembling.

“Are you certain?” he asked dubiously. “Because—”

“It’s no trouble at all.” She laughed unconvincingly. “Really, I’m very strong. I don’t intend to be a burden on you, not ever, and certainly not right from the start. I promise.”

“Not to contradict you,” Adrian said slowly, “but you shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep. You are already a burden on me.”

She winced. The moon overhead flirted with a ragged cloud; the dim light flickered patchily across her face. Her head bowed. “Of course you’re right.” Her voice trembled almost as much as her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking when I spoke. I meant only that I didn’t wish to be more of a burden on you. I’m sure you must be worrying about that.”

He reached out and took the handle of her valise. “That’s not what I meant. I had been thinking we were equally a burden on each other.”

Their eyes met for an instant, and he wondered what she was thinking. They were married—not really; he would have to explain—and he had no idea what she expected. Did she think they were going to become husband and wife immediately? Did she expect them to fall into bed? Did she think that she would have to pretend joy for such a consummation when they scarcely knew one another? When she’d been forced as well as him?

She was pretty and he’d liked talking to her, but that would be unthinkable. He felt sick for them both.

Miss Winters looked away first. “That’s very kind of you, but we both know there is no equality here. You had a prestigious position as a valet with a highly respected member of society. I interrupted your employment.”

He didn’t think she was lying. He didn’t think she wished him ill. Grayson would say he was being too trusting again, but the entire point of this exercise had been to demonstrate that trust was warranted. No. If Adrian had failed here, it was by not trusting enough. Just look at what he had thought to himself before—that it was no business of his if maids received full pay, that he’d finish his matters and move on, and never mind what that meant for Miss Winters.

He’d ignored the stirrings of his conscience. Look where that had brought him—to this moment on the road, the two of them not watching each other, not knowing what was going on.

This mess wasn’t going to resolve itself in the next minute. “Have you eaten?”

“There’s no need to worry about that. I’m not hungry.”

“That’s not an answer. I was locked in the basement after the events of this morning with nothing to eat. I’m utterly famished. Did they give you anything?”

A long pause.

“That’s a no, then. Well.” Adrian spoke with a cheeriness he did not feel. “That makes the next hour easy. You can’t make battle plans on an empty stomach, not unless you want to end up attacking a bakery instead of your intended target.”

Her lips twitched in a fleeting smile. “Battle plans? Are we at war, then?”

Too trusting?

No. Grayson had it wrong.

Adrian had not been trusting enough.

“Yes.” He pulled her valise toward him. “I have been for a while, actually. Bishop Lassiter and Rector Miles are our enemies. I’ll explain everything over supper. There’s an inn not far from here.”

She did not let go of the handle. “I—I can’t. My funds are limited, to say the least. I have tried to be careful with my coin, but…”

“But Rector Miles has been underpaying you,” Adrian finished for her, “and you’re only human, and you need shoes and the occasional biscuit and hair ribbon.”

She blinked, and in that moment her grip on the valise loosened.

“I told you he was the enemy.” Adrian eased the luggage from her grasp. “Money is not our problem.” He set her bag down long enough to dig in his waistcoat pocket. “Here.”

He held out his hand; she took the coin from him almost without thinking, and then looked up in him in incredulity. “But—Mr. Hunter, I can’t possibly take this.”

“Yes, you can. In fact…” His mind was already racing ahead to the inn, to the evening, and how everything would have to play out. “In fact, you must. We haven’t any choice, not if we’re going to undo what just happened. I’ll explain everything over supper tonight, but you’ll need your own funds to pay for your dinner and a separate room. People will ask questions if I do it.”

“But—”

“Whatever you do, you mustn’t tell them we are married. We are not husband and wife, understand?”

Her eyes widened. “I—do—you—” She looked flummoxed. “Are you the sort of man who cannot bear to be contradicted? Because I can understand not wanting to think about what just happened, except… You do realize we are married?”

“Contradict me all you like,” Adrian told her. “But that ceremony just now? It doesn’t matter what words they said about us. We’re not husband and wife, not if we don’t want to be.”

She licked her lips. “I don’t think that is how reality works. It doesn’t change because you wish it would. I should know; I’ve tried hard enough.”

“They held a pistol on us, Miss Winters. They may have wanted us married; we don’t have to be.”

“I…” She looked down and sighed. “As you say. It’s late. We haven’t eaten.”

“We have to agree in order to be married,” he said. “Nobody else can agree on our behalf. I’m sure Lassiter and Miles think that we’ll continue to agree after the pistols are no longer pointed at us, but their plan has done us enough harm. We don’t have to continue.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” Adrian said, “that when we are finished, I’m going to feel sorry for everyone who helped this happen.”

---

They arrived at the inn forty minutes later. It was late, but not so late that the place was unlit.

Adrian opened the door to find an entry alcove. A little table, empty but for a bell and a book, stood in front of them. In the room beyond, firelight cast a flickering glow. The rumble of conversation from the other room was distant enough so as not to resolve into actual words.

He set the valise down and gestured for Camilla to enter ahead of him. She did; he followed, and let the door shut behind them.

He hadn’t had time to even ring the bell before the innkeeper came darting to the front.

“Welcome!” She had a smile on her face, one that faltered—slightly—when she caught sight of Adrian. She glanced at him, then at Camilla, then back at Adrian.

If this were America, she’d likely have thrown Adrian out in that first instant. Here in Britain, though, away from London, she probably saw black men seldom enough that she’d not had a chance yet to decide what to do if one threatened to do something so dastardly as to frequent her inn and give her money.

Adrian was used to this dilemma; he made it easy on the woman by making up his mind on her behalf.

“My good woman.” It took a bit of a conscious effort to attempt to mimic his mother, but no more than he’d made to copy the lower-class speech he’d been using up until now.

He made a show of producing his wallet. It was made of fine leather, and he paused to let the innkeeper see the quality of it before withdrawing a coin slowly enough that she could also see that there was far more where that came from.

He flicked the coin to the innkeeper. “For your trouble. I know it’s late to arrive, and we must have inconvenienced you and your staff.”

“I—”

“I will need a room for the night,” Adrian said. His mother would have said require, not will need, but haughtiness never worked for Adrian the way it did for a wealthy white woman.

The innkeeper’s glance shifted to Camilla behind him. “Sir. I… I…” Her chin squared.

Adrian intercepted that thought before the woman could start nattering on about the usual nonsense—respectable establishment and so on.

“Ah, are you referring to Miss Winters? We met by chance on the road; she’s on her way to serve as a governess to the Smiths in Lower Mackford. She had been given ill directions to an inn for the evening after being let off in the wrong town entirely. We’ve only arrived together because I knew where to go and she needed some help with her valise. She’ll be getting her own room, I suppose.”

Camilla’s eyes widened at this speech, but she jolted forward. “Yes, please, if you will. I’m sorry to be a bother.”

The innkeeper took her in—those wide, luminous eyes, the old valise of cracked leather, the cheapness of her dress coupled with the niceness of her speech. Governess was the best Adrian had been able to come up with. The position wouldn’t command much respect, but it would hopefully command enough that she’d be treated as if she were a respectable woman.

“Please,” Camilla said, her eyes fluttering shut, “please, I don’t wish anyone to know. If the…um, Smiths find out I was lost, they’ll wonder if I went astray on purpose, and…” She swallowed. “It’s very late out.”

The innkeeper nodded in decision. “Of course, you poor child. Of course. Let’s get you in and warm you up. But if you don’t want word to get out, maybe eat in the kitchen?” She glanced at Adrian. “As for you, sir…”

“Mr. Hunter.”

The innkeeper bit her lip. “If I send either of you into the common room for dinner, there will be a bit of a ruckus.”

“He can eat with me in the kitchen.” Camilla looked down. “I would have been lost without him. Nobody else would help me—they saw a woman alone, and…” She looked up. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it? If he can’t have a bite.”

The innkeeper let out a sigh. “It doesn’t, does it? Well, I do suppose the Bible says something about kindness to Samaritans and foreigners.”

Adrian did not point out that he had been born in England, or that in the Bible, it had been the Samaritan who was kind. Nobody ever liked facts in situations like this.

“If you don’t mind eating in the kitchen, I’ll serve you there. Cook’s gone home for the evening, but we have soup and cold chicken and bread that she’s left. It’s open enough that there will be no worries for your reputation, Miss Winters, but it’s late enough that you’ll not be disturbed.”

---

It took half an hour to sit down to food. Camilla took her things up to the room the innkeeper provided for her—not large, she supposed, but anything was larger than the space she’d shared with Kitty and Cook for the last eighteen months.

There was a chipped yellow pitcher of water, a sliver of sweet-smelling soap, a basin, and a clean cloth atop a small table. Camilla wanted nothing more than to wash the day off her skin, as if all her heartbreak, fear, and indignation could be scrubbed into nothingness. Maybe she’d awake in her bed back at the rectory to discover it had all been a nightmare.

Instead, she soaked the cloth and set it against her face. The cold shock of water reminded her that she was very awake. Alas.

Her life had turned upside down. No, upside down could not describe what had just happened. Her shoulders trembled still, the way they did when she worked for hours without ceasing. She felt rubbed raw. She couldn’t believe that it had been just this noon that she’d been sent up to change the bishop’s sheets. None of it made sense. They’d been lying, of course. They had to have been lying.

But they’d all seemed so certain that she could not help but doubt her own mind. Maybe they were right. Maybe that legion of devils on her shoulder had pushed her to invent the whole thing with the sheets and the door, because she was the woman they feared, someone so brazen…

So brazen that what? That she’d locked the door from clear across the room and forgotten that she had a key in her pocket?

The entire affair was too painful to contemplate at the moment. She shook her head, abandoning the attempt, and finished her ablutions. Then she went down to dinner.

Mr. Hunter was already there. He had a plate of chicken and potatoes—both cold—and a bowl of soup, still steaming.

Camilla settled for just the soup and a bit of bread. He’d given her money, but who knew how long it would last?

Her first spoonful was heaven. Carrot and celery in a broth made from some indeterminate meat should not have been so good, but oh, God, it was warm and it was food.

“Ohhh.” She could not help but let the syllable loose.

Mr. Hunter raised an eyebrow.

“The soup,” she said. “It practically melts on one’s tongue.”

He blinked. “It’s soup. It’s not melting. It’s already liquid.”

She shut her eyes. Maybe the world would go away. Maybe there would be no ruin, no reputational damage, no husbands if she wished hard enough.

Maybe there would just be soup.

She opened her eyes to see him still watching her.

“I’m sorry.” She had been apologizing to everyone the entire day; she felt as if she could not apologize enough. “But it’s very good soup.”

He prodded the congealing film on top of his cooling bowl with a spoon. “It really isn’t.”

She dipped her own spoon again. Objectively, there was too much broth, too little salt, and almost no meaty bits.

“It’s only edible because we’re both famished,” he told her. “You should eat more than the soup.”

She didn’t say anything. She took a bite of bread instead. It was excellent bread, delicious bread…

Well, technically, it was both dry and chewy all at the same time, as if the loaf had been forgotten in the cellar for a week after being baked. The crumb was almost impossible to tear with her teeth, and the loaf itself was dense as a board.

“Good thing I’m famished,” Camilla said with a little nod of her head. “Or I’d finish the meal far too hungry.”

He shook his head. They ate for a few minutes longer. Every bite she took chipped away at her hunger, bit by bit, and made the food less palatable.

She was still hungry when she gave up on the soup.

He set his spoon on the table and prodded the potato with his fork. It promptly fell into bits, as if it had been boiled into mush. “My brother says I’m too trusting, but…” He shrugged. “I am who I am. It’s not changing. I could sit here and wonder whether I could tell you the truth. I could dance around the issue and keep silent, and you could wonder why I was behaving in a secretive and irrational manner. Or I could tell you everything all at once, hope for the best, and we could work together to get ourselves out of this situation.”

Camilla felt her lips tilt up in a smile. “What an incredibly difficult decision you have before you. You could lock yourself in a cage of your own making. Or you could not. I suppose it’s up to you.”

He stared at her for a moment before his face crinkled into a warm smile. “I like you.”

Well, that made one person. It was one person more than the zero it had felt like an hour before. She took another sip of her soup. “Your voice sounds different.” She wasn’t sure when it had changed, or even how, the shift was so subtle.

“That’s because I’m not trying to fit in with servants any longer. This is how I sound when I’m around family.”

“Do you alter your speech much?”

“All the time. Most white Englishmen are nervous enough around me. The more familiar I sound, the more comfortable they are, and the less likely they are to have the constables come after me on some pretext. It’s not even something I do on purpose most of the time. I’m just very good at fitting in, in every way that I can.”

Camilla thought of her own speech. It, too, had shifted. Once, she’d had a governess who had drilled her on her vowels, slapping her palm with a ruler when Camilla spoke like—what had she called it? “Like a stable boy,” the woman had said. “Speech makes a lady.” Camilla had eaten it up, believing that if only her vowels were perfect enough, nothing bad could ever happen to her.

But no. She wasn’t going to think of her family and the legacy she’d left behind. That version of Camilla was gone forever.

“That makes sense,” she said instead.

“Let me get right to it, then. My name is Adrian Hunter. My mother was born Elizabeth Laurel Denmore, the daughter of the Duke of Castleford.”

Camilla blinked.

“Which is why,” Mr. Hunter said, straightening in his seat, and shifting something about his face, something so subtle she couldn’t even identify it, “I can also talk like this. Do you see what I mean?”

Like her governess. Like the lady Camilla had once thought she would be. She swallowed and looked up at him. “That’s…very good. Bravo!”

“My mother met my father when she was twenty-five and a widow at a meeting of abolitionists.”

She looked over at him. “Before slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire? That was a while ago.”

“I’m the youngest of…” His smile flickered momentarily; he looked away. “Two. I suppose it doesn’t sound so impressive that way, does it? My father was a speaker for the abolitionist cause. Guess where he was born.”

She swallowed. It felt rude to make assumptions, but he had asked. “Africa?”

“Close. Maine, in the United States of America.”

“I didn’t think the former colonies were close at all to Africa!”

His smile flashed out at her. “Not that close, no. I was just trying to make you feel better.”

The conversation felt like it had the first time they’d met. Despite everything that had happened that day, he was easy to talk to. She found herself smiling in response.

“To make a long story short, when my parents married, her father disowned her entirely. If you’ll believe it, my grandmother suggested she could take my father as a lover, but to marry him would be beyond the pall.”

Camilla thought of her own uncle, shuffling her off to distant relations without a hint of embarrassment. “I’ll believe anything of the gentry, really.”

“After tonight? I should say so. In any event, her brother, my uncle on my mother’s side, is the Bishop of Gainshire. He kept in contact with my mother. He’s always been…shall we say, not entirely opposed to the causes my family cares about? We’ve always held out hope that maybe he’d come around. He asked me for a favor, and I thought…” Mr. Hunter looked up and let out a sigh. “Never mind the reasons, really. I am explaining how I came to be impersonating a valet. My uncle believes that Bishop Lassiter has done something wrong, and he asked me to help determine what it was.”

Camilla’s head hurt trying to follow this story. “I…see.” She might, in a day or so, after she’d slept. But even on this, the longest day of her life, when she wanted nothing more than to retire to bed for a week… It wasn’t the most believable story.

“That brings me to you. You seem like a perfectly nice girl, but I don’t wish to be married to you.”

That hurt not just her head, but somewhere just beneath her breastbone. Camilla bit her lip. It wasn’t that she wanted him to swear his undying love. She wouldn’t have believed him if he had. But it would have been nice if he’d been a little bit less blunt about not wanting her at all. It had been lovely earlier, when he had said he liked her.

“Of course you do not,” she said instead.

“I imagine you don’t wish to be married to me, either.”

What was she to say to that? She wished the whole last day hadn’t happened. She knew what she was—desperate, grasping, wanting, so much that maybe she’d hoped that he’d confess over terrible soup that he’d developed an affection for her, something that could blossom into more if they tended it properly.

What luck, that they’d married at gunpoint, she had perhaps hoped he would say.

God, it sounded stupid even admitting it in her head. And his story—she still didn’t understand it. But of course he hadn’t fallen in love at first sight. That didn’t happen, not except in stories, and Camilla knew she wasn’t any sort of heroine. There was nothing to do but pull her bravado about her like a cloak, and let none of her hurt show.

“I do prefer husbands I’ve known longer than a week.”

He nodded, as if this was the answer he’d wanted. Good. She’d made the right choice.

“So, let us make a pact. I know a little bit about how annulments work.”

“Annulments?”

“Yes, annulments.” He leaned across the table to look at her. “You must consent to be married, and saying ‘I do’ at gunpoint is not consent.”

Camilla swallowed. “But—the witnesses, our witnesses. One of them was a rector who knows me exceptionally well. The other was my particular friend.”

She had used to hope Kitty was something like her friend, at any rate. After what she’d said? After the key ring that had appeared in her pocket as if by magic? Obviously, Camilla had been wrong again.

“And we were married by a bishop. Who will believe our version of events?”

“My uncle.” He sounded almost uncertain, but as she watched, his jaw set. “My uncle,” he repeated more definitely. “I told you I worked with my uncle, the Bishop of Gainshire? He cares for me and my family. I know it sounds ridiculous. I know you have no reason to believe that I would know a bishop on such intimate terms, but it is true. If I were lying, I’d come up with a better story. If I can swear to him truthfully that we qualify for an annulment, he will help us get one.”

Camilla bit her lip. “So that’s it, then? We just ask your uncle?”

What would happen to her after the marriage was annulled? She tried not to panic at the thought.

“It’s a bit more complicated than that. There’s this thing called consent after the fact.”

Camilla was tired. The day had been interminable. But that made no sense, no matter how she turned it over in her head. Either one consented or one didn’t. Her nose wrinkled. “That’s a thing?”

“Law,” he said in commiserating tones, making a face similar to hers. “Ecclesiastical law. But it’s not that tricky. We must continue to show that we haven’t started to consent to the marriage until it’s properly annulled. That means we can’t tell other people we’re husband and wife.”

That sounded very convenient for him.

“I see,” she said suspiciously.

“And we cannot, um…” He looked away.

“I’m not a child,” Camilla said. “You can say it. We cannot consummate the marriage.”

He looked relieved not to have to voice the words. “The non-marriage.”

She pulled her bravado about her again. “I have no wish to do either of those things.”

“Lovely. We’re in agreement.”

There was no point wishing that he would say something appreciative at a time like this. It would do no good to idly hope that he would say someone would be lucky or I’d be sorry not to be able to or any of the polite locutions he could have employed to soften the blow of his not wanting her at all, not even in the slightest.

Camilla was used to harboring ridiculous hopes. She pushed these particular ones away and reminded herself of the truth. He didn’t want anything to do with her; that made him like every other person on the face of the planet.

He took a bite of potato and made a face. “Dear God.”

There was nothing to do but put on her bravest face. “You’ve given yourself away. Now I know you’re just finicky. It’s not possible to ruin a potato.”

“On the contrary. Try it.”

“That’s the beauty of potatoes. They’re good mashed, they’re good in soup, they’re good baked. They’re practically a perfect food in and of themselves.”

Wordlessly, he speared a pallid section and held out his fork. She took it, and tasted a bite of… Dear God.

“What did they do? Did they cook it in vinegar?”

“I think they might have tried to pickle it.”

“Pickled potatoes?” Camilla made herself swallow the food. “At least it’s alliterative.” She frowned at the potato. “Wait. Give that here.”

“Be my guest. If you can stomach it, by all means, do so.”

She unceremoniously dumped the potato in her soup.

“What are you doing?”

“There.” She took a bite of the concoction. “It’s not bad. The vinegar of the potato balances the tastelessness of the soup.”

When he raised an eyebrow, she reached across the table and filled his spoon. He took it from her, sipped, made a face, and shook his head.

“Well, I’ve learned something about you. You’re one of those people who can find the good in anything, aren’t you?”

She’d hoped and hoped and hoped for so long, and it had never done any good. Still, she kept on, hoping, tumbling into love for no reason.

She couldn’t protect her heart; she had bruised it too many times to believe she would ever stop. She was going to do it with him, too. She already knew it.

He didn’t want to marry her. He didn’t want to have sexual relations with her. He didn’t want to do anything but break their tepid connection as swiftly as his uncle could manage it.

And still she felt her hope flare, blossoming from the most tepid of compliments. He liked her, a little. That was something. It was a start.

“Yes,” Camilla said, with a nod of her head. “I am. That’s me.”