be of some comfort to her.
Edith shuddered and looked out of the window as the carriage moved.
“Your so-called friends will not be permitted to see you,” he went on. “And I will know if you defy me. Things will be far worse for you if that is the case. I will call on you at any hour I wish, stay as long as I like, and do as I will. Your funds will be cut off entirely, and only what I give you when I am generous will be yours.”
“That will be a great change,” Edith muttered. “Imagine not having funds.”
Sir Reginald kicked her sharply across the shins. “When I come to call, you will wear what I direct and only that. You will have no guests and no change in your servants. Your own servants may stay, but they also belong to me. Nothing will go on in that house without my saying so. And if your filthy Scottish lover comes around? I will have him beaten to within an inch of his life for daring to touch what is mine.”
Edith smiled faintly to herself, tears still slowly falling. “I would dearly love to see ye try,” she whispered.
Sir Reginald somehow didn’t catch the words, staring as he was out of his own window now.
Edith wiped at her still-bleeding lip, closing her eyes on fresh tears.
Oh, Graham…
She clasped onto the memory of every dance the night before, every moment in his arms, knowing she would never have another like them in her life.
It would be enough. She longed for more, ached deeply for it, but here at the end, she knew it was enough. More than that, it was hers forever.
Not even Sir Reginald could take it from her.
Chapter Twenty
There is nothing so bad as waiting when one would rather do anything else.
-The Spinster Chronicles, 29 May 1817
Agony was a word upon which Graham had been pleased to dwell for the past several days. Even the sound of it was one that seemed to be pulled from the darkest depths of one’s soul. It should have been a more reverent word. Always spoken in a hushed tone. Bearing the weight of its burden at all times. Never used in vain.
Agony was all-encompassing.
He thought he’d known agony, but he was wrong. He had known grief; he had known pain; he had known sorrow, anger, hopelessness, and numbness.
He had not known agony.
Not until now.
For as long as he lived, he would never forget the moment Molly had torn into his study and told him that Edith had gone off with her cousin. A man with cruel eyes and a slender frame, travelling with two larger men who had held Molly while they waited for Edith. That Edith had sent Molly home with one word.
Family.
The weasel was part of her former family by marriage, but even without that word, Graham would have known who had taken her just by Molly’s description and the manner by which the event had taken place. That was not a family.
They were a family — Graham, Molly, and now Edith. There were no legal ties that bound Edith to them, but there were cords of love winding around them all and bringing them together.
She had sacrificed herself for family.
And Graham could only sit here.
Edith was gone. In danger, undoubtedly, and there was no telling what she could be enduring now.
And he was here.
He didn’t have a choice. There was nothing he could do in London that would solve the issue. Or so Henshaw, Ingram, Sterling, and the others had told him when he had gathered them all to discuss it.
He’d hotly reminded them that he could storm her house and be married to her in less than a day, thus giving her legal protection from the weasel.
Ingram, having spent too long looking at the finer details of the law lately, was able to point out that such an act might stop the abuse, but would not get Sir Reginald out of her life.
Nor would it help Graham’s ward when her time to come out eventually came. If her guardian was married to a woman whose reputation was so particularly smeared by ruin, Molly would never be accepted in Society.
Graham had been about to retort that he didn’t care when the next words stopped him.
“…which is why we have to ruin him first.”
An intriguing notion, which was why the group of them had spent the rest of the night and many of the early morning hours discussing their