Had he lived, she and Mr. Chambers would very likely not have lived separately for the past year. Perhaps they would have made something workable out of their marriage. She had been quite prepared to make it work. Indeed, she had been eager to move away from her mother’s often burdensome influence in order to become mistress of her own home.

And she had fallen in love with Mr. Chambers on sight.

Lady Templar was still bristling with indignation when the ladies withdrew to the drawing room after dinner, leaving the gentlemen to their port.

“Well!” she exclaimed. “Of all the impertinence! I must say I am surprised, Lizzie, that you would stand by and watch your father humiliated by a man very far beneath our touch without uttering one word of protest.”

“Shhh, Mama,” Elizabeth said, mortified, since the words had been overheard by her sister-in-law and by all her cousins and aunts. “This is Mr. Chambers’s own home.” And the man very far beneath their touch was her husband.

“Lizzie!” Her mother’s voice quavered with indignation. “Never did I think to live to see the day when you would tell your own mother to hush. And did you see what happened, Martha? Did you, Beatrice? When I would have stood, as was perfectly proper given my rank and position in this family, to lead the ladies from the dining room, that man had the effrontery to set four fingers on my arm and nod at Lizzie to give the signal.”

Elizabeth was both mortified and distressed. She had never been able to stand up to her mother-not even when informed that she was to be sacrificed in matrimony to a wealthy cit in order to recoup the family fortunes. But Mr. Chambers was her husband, and she owed him loyalty more than she did anyone else-including her mother.

“Mr. Chambers has a right to expect me to be hostess in his own home, Mama,” she said. “I am his wife. It is what all men expect.”