Wealdgate Village, Sussex
December, 1814
There was no warning, no obvious sign from the heavens that her life would be upended. No deluge. No tremors. No helpful plague of locusts falling from the sky.
Only her mama saying, “I have spoken to Lord Aldridge, and it is all arranged. He has made a proposal for your hand, and I have accepted. It only remains for you to make him the happiest of men.”
“Lord Aldridge?” Lord Aldridge was a severe, older man Antigone knew only as the frosty master of the local hunt—a man who kept tight control of both the hunting field and his prized pack of hounds, kenneled at his estate, Thornhill Hall, some miles from the village.
Antigone had often followed the progress of Thornhill Hunt from a distance, but had never hunted with his field, as ladies—especially brash young ladies on horses faster and more powerful than any other mount in the field—were actively discouraged from participating, if not banned outright. Antigone had never had more than a nodding—or more accurately, a frowning—acquaintance with the man.
Lord Aldridge had not been among the mourners at either the church or the graveyard. While Papa had been a gentleman—a mathematical scholar, a graduate and former fellow of Trinity College at the university at Cambridge, and a member of the prestigious Royal Society—the Preston family had been quite beneath Lord Aldridge’s entirely more lofty touch.
But he had come to their home, and instead of offering his condolences, what he offered, apparently, was his hand.
It is all arranged.
“Please, Mama. Please tell me you’re jesting.” Anything else was too horrible to contemplate.
“Antigone, I am in earnest.” Mama looked tired and tense and pale in her black cap. “How could I be otherwise?”
“Without my knowledge or consent?” She knew her mother was beyond fragile from trying to cope with her own fear and loss, but all the gentleness had been wrung out of Antigone by the events of the day. “What can you be thinking? On the day of Papa’s funeral?”
“Hush! Don’t be cruel.” Mama collapsed into a chair and passed her hands over her face, as if the interview had exhausted her diminished reserves of strength. As if she, and not Antigone, were the one who had just been bartered away to a man she could never hope to even tolerate, let alone come to like. “There is no money. The burial fee to the parish was the last of it. See for yourself if you don’t believe me.” She gestured to the books open on the table beside her.
Antigone had taken only a cursory look at her father’s ledgers while she was making the funeral arrangements, but now she did as her mother bid. And saw what she had not before—that for a mathematician who had always delighted in creating equations full of variables and unknowns to explain natural phenomena, her father had proved to be woefully bad at basic arithmetic.
In his ledgers of the household accounts, the plusses continuously under balanced the minuses. There was only the barest and most haphazard of incomes—throughout the years, every so often a lump sum would appear from some unknown source to keep the books, and thus the Preston family afloat just as it seemed they would be dragged down into the River Tick. But what those sources of income might have been, were never noted.
Antigone pored over the books, looking and looking. But there was nothing.
There was only, as Mama so succinctly put it, “Lord Aldridge or the poorhouse.”
And while Antigone was impulsive and angry enough to want to take her chances in the world, and spit into the face of fate, it was winter, and it was bitterly cold. And even a cold house was better than none.
Yet still, she could not bring herself to reconcile to such a fate—it offended her sense of order and rightness.
“But why, Mama, why?” Antigone begged. “Why should a man as old, and rich, and used to having his way as Lord Aldridge want me, of all people? I’ll warrant the man never looked at me before in his life, except to criticize the way I ride Velocity.”
It was her beautiful but painfully shy older sister, Cassandra, with her dark hair, luminous lavender eyes, porcelain skin and pink mouth, that people had always admired—at least one local would-be poet had been driven to write rapturous odes in her honor. No one had ever been driven to admire Antigone’s sharpness of mind or straightforward character.
But her mother’s anxieties found a new target. “His lordship would not be alone in his criticism,” her mother rejoined with a sniff. “You ride that mare a great deal too fast for anyone’s comfort, especially mine. Half the district is sure you will come to grief in a ditch, and I live in terror that you’ll be killed, and leave me alone. I don’t know what I should do if you were taken from me as well.” She covered her face with her handkerchief, and descended into noisy sobs.
“Hush,” Antigone soothed. “I am not reckless, Mama, I promise you. I am perfectly capable of handling Velocity—I’m as safe on her as if I were in a rocking chair. But if you don’t want me to be taken from you, why have you arranged for that very thing with Lord Aldridge?”
“Did you not hear me? There is no money!” Mama wailed. “Why must you be so quick to turn your nose up? Why must you question such a piece of incredibly good fortune? Why can you not think of someone besides yourself? What of your sister?”
The need to protect and care for Cassandra was an old theme of Mama’s, and doubly unfair, because Antigone did think of her sister—constantly. Antigone had been Cassie’s staunch champion, her buffer against the world for years now—as a scrappy, hoydenish girl she had even bloodied the noses local boys for making fun of Cassie’s stammer.
But now that her sister was in the forefront of her mind, she asked, “Why should Lord Aldridge ask for me and not Cassandra? She is both the eldest and the most beautiful. Not that I would wish for her such a man—his gaze is much too calculating and appraising—but surely such an influential man would want a beautiful wife. Why should he want me instead?”
She, of all people, who was more at home out of doors, riding her prized mare, or tromping through the woods in any weather. She, who had neither beauty—she was no ogress, but Cassandra was the delicate, lavender-eyed beauty of the family, and Antigone’s plainer looks and ordinary blue eyes paled in comparison—nor fortune, nor any family connections from which he might profit in any way. And who was in mourning.
It was all absurd and strange, and completely, utterly impossible.
Mama could only shrug. “I have no idea. He did not ask for her. He asked for you. And Cassandra is meant for better things.”
The careless words were a shocking kick—a horse’s hoof to her chest that left Antigone painfully breathless. “And I’m not?”
Too wrapped up in her own emotions to consider another’s, Mama dismissed her daughter’s bruised feelings with an impatient wave of her handkerchief. “Oh, you know what I mean, Antigone. He would chew her up and spit her out, but you—you’re impervious, and strong enough to withstand him. And with her beauty, Cassandra should have her pick of the highest men in the land, not just our musty corner of West Sussex. She could have her pick of such men, if only they could see her. Do you not see? This is our chance.”
“Our chance for what?”
“To better ourselves! To see that Cassandra marries as well as her beauty and sweet nature demand. This is the first step.”
“Lord Aldridge?”
“Yes! With you engaged to him, we will move in higher circles. We will be invited to Thornhill Hall, and then to the better houses of the district.” For the first time in days, Mama’s eyes were alight with a glint of purpose—there would be no stopping her now that she had the bit between her teeth. “Lord Aldridge’s sister, Lady Barrington, is a very great hostess, of some great influence in society. We must have her to our side and have her sponsor Cassandra. Yes, for a ball!”
“A ball for Cassie?”
Mama stood and grasped Antigone’s hands. “Think! You don’t have to marry Lord Aldridge—you only have to be engaged to him. For a time—for long enough for us to get Cassandra a suitable husband. Six months at the least, but a year if you can manage it.”
“A year?” Such a span of time seemed forever when she was twenty years old.
“Yes. I have told him you are but eighteen, you see, and that you will need some time to accustom herself to the honor.” Mama’s voice was alight with her plan. “And that nothing or the arrangement ought be mentioned while we are in mourning. I said you have been raised as a gentleman’s daughter, but will need to learn a very great deal in order to be prepared to be Lady Aldridge, and manage a household as large as Thornhill Hall.”
Antigone felt some small measure of relief washed in with the guilt of such a duplicitous plan. “So I only have to pretend?”
“Yes. But you must wear the bride gift he left for you.” Mama held out an antique lover’s eye ring—a small enameled depiction of what must been Lord Aldridge’s left eye, made in much younger days when such tokens had been fashionable, and his hair had been brown, instead of silver, and his cheeks far less drawn than they appeared today.
The eye stared up at her from Mama’s palm.
And for the first time in Antigone’s life, she felt entirely unequal—unsettled and uneasy, and at a loss for what to do or say to regain her equilibrium.
“He said he commissioned it some years ago, on the Continent, during my grand tour, and have kept it as a keepsake. Waiting for the right…moment.”
Antigone could only guess at his lordship’s age, but his grand tour must have been at the very least twenty-five, if not thirty-five years ago, as England had been at war with France for one reason or another for the whole of Antigone’s life. The recent peace had only just made travel on the Continent safe again. “It must be very old, indeed.”
“He wanted you to know, that though our agreement needs must remain private, he is nevertheless keeping an eye on us.”
What Lord Aldridge meant, was that he would be watching her.
Antigone felt it then, the full breadth of her repugnance—the chill that skated across her skin like the rime of ice reaching its cold fingers across the surface of a pond, spreading frost over her skin.
Antigone felt upended, as if the rug had shifted beneath her feet and loosened gravity’s grip on her knees. She tried again—she had to try again to make her mother listen. “Mama, Lord Aldridge does not seem to me the sort of man who will stand for being taken so lightly. Do you not think it is wicked to try and use the man so? Not that I care particularly about his finer feelings—thought frankly, I can’t see that he has them—but Lord Aldridge strikes me quite particularly as a man who is not to be trifled with.”
“Then you shall not trifle. You will be all that is proper and good and reticent. Especially reticent—none of your outrageous hoydenish behavior, or frank talk. Can you not see how it shall be?”
Antigone could see. She could see clearly that her mother wanted her to sacrifice her own happiness upon the altar of society so Cassie might marry well.
And though it wounded her deeply to be so disposed of, Antigone Preston knew she would do it. She would do it to make her sister happy.
Mama must have seen the crack in Antigone’s defenses. “You must do this, Antigone. For once in your life, do as you are asked, and don’t try to be cleverer than everyone else. Accept Lord Aldridge’s suit. Accept his gifts, whenever he might give them. Accept your unlooked-for good fortune. You will do this.” Mama’s eyes were aglow with determination. “You will do it for Cassandra, if you will not do it for yourself. You can do no less.”
The words the vicar had spoken less than a hour ago came back to Antigone afresh. I held my tongue, and spake nothing, but it was pain and grief to me.
And as she could not bring herself to agree to so ruinous a plan, Antigone spake nothing.
No. Though her throat was raw and her head ached from the pressure of the tears that did not fall, Antigone Preston did not cry. She wasn’t made for weeping.
She swallowed down the jagged stone of her grief, and set herself to endure.
