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in London.
    The sort of thing she did all the time when romping about with her brothers and sisters in Gloucestershire.
    She missed home. She missed her bed, and her dog, and Cook’s plum tarts.
    She missed her mother, and she really missed her father, and most of all she missed the solid earth beneath her feet. She knew herself in Gloucestershire. She knew what was expected of her. She knew what to expect from other people.
    Was it so much to want to feel like she knew what she was doing? Surely that wasn’t an unreasonable wish.
    She looked up, trying to make out the constellations. There was too much light coming from the party to find clarity in the night sky, but the stars were still twinkling here and there.
    They had to fight through the pollution, Annabel thought, in order to shine. It was a pollution of light, of brightness.
    Somehow that just seemed wrong.
    “Five minutes,” she said aloud. In five minutes she would return to the party. In five minutes she would have regained her equilibrium. In five minutes she would be able to affix her smile back to her face and curtsy to the man who had just mauled her.
    In five minutes she would tell herself that she could marry him.
    And with luck, in ten minutes she might actually believe it.
    But in the meantime, she had four more minutes to herself.
    Four minutes.
    Or not.
    Annabel’s ears pricked at the sound of whispering, and with a frown, she twisted in her seat and looked back toward the house. She could see two people emerging through the French doors, a man and a woman, judging by their silhouettes. She groaned to herself. They must be sneaking outside for an assignation. There could be no other explanation. If they had sought out this side of the garden, and chosen that door, then they were trying to avoid detection.
    Annabel did not want to be the one to ruin things for them.
    She jumped to her feet, intending to find an alternate route back into the house, but the couple was advancing quickly, and there was no way she could go anywhere but deeper into the shadows if she wished to avoid them. She moved swiftly, not quite running but definitely doing something that was more than a walk, until she was at the hedge that clearly marked the edge of the property. She didn’t particularly relish the thought of pressing herself into the bramble, so she scooted off to her left, where she could see an opening in the hedge, presumably leading out to the heath.
    The heath. The huge, wonderful, glorious space that was everything that London was not.
    This was definitely not where she was supposed to be. Definitely, definitely not. Louisawould be aghast. Her grandfather would be furious. And her grandmother …
    Well, her grandmother would probably laugh, but Annabel had long since realized she ought not base any of her moral judgments on her grandmother’s behavior.
    She wondered if she might be able to find another way back from the heath onto the Trowbridge lawn. It was a huge property; surely there were multiple openings in the hedge. But in the meantime …
    She looked out over the open expanse. How amazing to find such wilderness so close to town. It was fierce and dark, and the air held a crisp clarity she hadn’t even realized she’d missed. It wasn’t just that it was clean and fresh—that she’d
known
she’d missed, from the very first day she’d breathed in the slightly opaque gas that masqueraded as air in London. There was a bite to the air here, something cold, something tangy. Every breath made her lungs tingle.
    It was heaven.
    She looked up, wondering if the stars would be any more visible out here. They weren’t, not much anyway, but she kept her face to the sky nonetheless, walking slowly backward as she gazed up at the thin sliver of moon hanging drunkenly above the treetops.
    It was the sort of night that ought to be magical. And it would have been, if she hadn’t been pawed at by a man old enough to be her grandfather. It would have been if