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linking our names in gossip, and finally, during one particularly painful waltz, Edward smiled down at me and asked me to marry him.
    I thought about it for a week. I considered hard whether or not I even wanted to marry. Father said little, but pointed me to the shelf in his library where he housed John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft and even, shockingly, some Annie Besant. It was highly discouraging. There were few advantages to marriage for a woman. But there were fewer advantages to spinsterhood. I had already grown tired of the careful whispers behind the fans and the avid eyes that followed me. I was certain that they were saying that I was not the beauty my sisters were, that I would not marry as well as they. Those whispers and glances would follow me the rest of my life if I did not marry, speculating on what frightfulness of mine had driven away any potential suitors. I could not bear that. I was already conscious of how much we were talked about, of how amusing we were to society and how closely to the pale of respectability we walked. Only Father’s close association with the queen and the very ancientness of our lineage preserved us from becoming a complete joke. What I longed for most was normalcy—a quiet, average marriage in an unremarkable home where I could raise my perfectly normal children. That notion was more seductive to me than diamonds. And as a married woman I could travel more easily, have male friends without exciting suspicion, have my own home away from a family that was as maddening as they were delightful. A bit of quiet space to call my own, that is what marriage represented to me.
    So I accepted Edward on a chilly night early in spring. Father gave his blessing with the proviso that I spend the summer accompanying Aunt Cressida on her travels. It was the only thing he asked of me, and Edward agreed readily enough. He spent the summer with friends in Sussex while I toured the Lake District with a cranky old woman and her assorted cats. Edward and I were married that December in London. I think I was a happy bride. All I could ever remember afterward were the terrible nerves. I dropped things—my bouquet, the pen for the register—and as I came out of the church, I heard a rooster crow, very bad luck for a bride on her wedding day. For a moment I wondered if it was indeed an omen. But then I looked up into Edward’s smiling face and I realized how foolish I was. Edward was my friend, my childhood companion. He was no stranger to me. How could I fear marriage to him?
    In the end, there was nothing to fear. No great tragedies. Just the small troubles, the little tragedies that can dull a marriage and cause it to fray. We had no child, Edward’s health began to fail, we began to follow our own pursuits and spent less and less time together. Edward was pernickety, something I had noted before, but never considered in the context of our life together. It meant that things must be just so for him to be happy. The decoration of the house, the cut of my clothes, the folding of the towels, the laying of the table. I laughed at first and tried to jolly him out of it, but he grew stubborn, and after a while I realized it was easier to let him have his way. The house was kept the way he liked it, my clothes were ordered from his dead mother’s dressmaker, in colours he favored that I knew suited me not at all. But it made him happy, and I cared so little. It was easy to convince myself that these things did not matter. We had been married a few years by the time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass and realized I did not know my own reflection. I was losing myself a bit at a time, and I did not know how to get it back. My only refuge was my study, where I kept my favorite books and furniture discarded from my father’s homes. In that room I wore an old dressing gown that Edward detested. He learned not to come there, and I learned to lock myself in when I needed to feel like Julia March