Mary lowered herself slowly onto the matching red velvet that cushioned the window seat. Ordinarily, she never sat at parties. It wrinkled one's dress. Tonight, she couldn't bring herself to care. It felt good to relax into the well-worn velvet of the ancient cushion, good to stare into nothingness and not have to smile and pretend that she didn't mind that her sister had married her best chance at matrimony. Her short, plump, practical, managing little sister. Who had nonetheless learned the secret to catching a man's heart and holding it. Mary had failed to master the holding bit.

With the moon obscured by clouds, the prospect in front of her loomed as blank as her future. It didn't matter that she had been voted Most Likely to Marry an Earl three years running in the betting books at White's. No earl had proposed. Not marriage, at any rate.

What was she to do with herself? For the first time in her life, Mary simply didn't know. Her beauty had always provided both means and goal, ever since her nurse had first leaned over her cradle and clucked, "Eh, she'll marry a prince, that one, see if she doesn't!" But she hadn't. She wasn't going to. The results of three Seasons didn't lie.

Mary rested her elbows on the stone of the windowsill, staring sightlessly through the phantom tracery of her own face. What did it matter if her elbows wrinkled? She had three sonnets to them already. Four would be superfluous.

Behind her, the worn boards of the gallery creaked. Not ghosts, as Geoffrey had promised all those months ago, but a human tread. Someone else had escaped to the quiet of the Long Gallery.

Mary would have preferred a ghost. A specter might be ignored, while a fellow guest would expect conversation, might even try to persuade her back into the discomfort of the Great Chamber. Hadn't she smiled enough for one evening?