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be—for her, and she knew it. In the summer of 1711, though, love was still a delicious game. Full to brimming, she painted her glory and agony in long letters to her fellow Sister in Affliction, Philippa Mundy. The world glowed with an inner fire when her beloved was present; it lost all savor and color when he was not. Hunts, balls, and races crowded her days, but how dull they all were, she sighed, unless Paradise was by.
    The discovery that her father was negotiating a marriage for her dissolved this flippant ennui. There was nothing particularly wrong with the Honorable Clotworthy Skeffington, son and heir to Viscount Massereene. On the other hand, there was nothing particularly right with Clodworthy Clotworthy either: he cared nothing for poetry or theater, music or dancing. He would rather listen to his dog snore than to a Latin oration, she exclaimed, and he would have a much better chance of deciphering the dog. The heart of the matter was not his middling looks, his middling character, or even his widely different notion of the finer things in life. It was simply that with the sweet touch of Paradise floating in her mind, the thought of Skeffington so much as brushing her sleeve gave off a faint but unmistakable fire-and-brimstone whiff of Hell.
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    2 November 1711
    I am glad, dear Phil, that you begin to find peace in this world. I despair of it, God knows. The devil to pull and a father to drive, and yet—I don’t believe I shall go to Hell for all that, though I have no more hope of Paradise than if I was dead and buried at a thousand fathoms. To say truth, I have been these last ten days in debate whether I should hang or marry, in which time I have cried some two hours every day, and knocked my head against the wall some fifteen times. ’Tis yet doubtful which way my resolution will finally carry me.
    For you, if you do abandon hopes of the pretty Paradise you once placed your heaven in, however, may you find another flowing with milk and honey, as charming, as enchanting, and every way worthy of such a lovely Eve.
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    She paused to stare at the letter that had streamed of its own accord, as it seemed, from her pen. Knowing she would not manage so much as one complete sentence in an interview with her father, she decided to write him a letter as well. Though she wrote to Philippa with the ease of a falcon wheeling in flight, she worked over the missive to Dorchester for days. In what she hoped was just the right tone of submissiveness, she begged to be excused from the proposed marriage. In atonement for refusing his choice, she offered never to marry at all.
    He did not deign to send an answer; he sent for her instead, to explain her impertinence in person.
    Lined by a gauntlet of footmen, the doors to her father’s study yawned open. He was standing near his desk in a golden fall of autumn light. She took a step forward to offer the usual obeisance, but he stopped her with a look. He waved toward her letter, floating alone on the dark gleaming sea of his desk. “What is this aversion you refer to, daughter?”
    She tried to speak, but no sound would rise from her throat.
    Dorchester leapt into movement, pacing swiftly in front of the long windows. Presently, he said, “No doubt you have some other fancy in your head.” He stopped and glanced back at her. “Before you refuse the settlement I have provided for you, daughter, let me be clear: I will never negotiate a treaty with anyone else.” He beckoned to her, and she felt her feet slipping across the floor, dragging her to stand before him. “Especially not with that frozen-souled miser Wortley,” he said softly. “I will not have my grandchildren reduced to beggary.” He bent close; she could smell the cinnamon on his breath and the sweet-sour odor of his body beneath a thick masking scent of musk. “Is it Wortley?”
    She shook her head no.
    He stepped back, his eyes narrowing.