The Drawing Room

Frances Aldwych is twenty-eight, unmarried, and very nearly invisible to the Mayfair drawing rooms her younger sisters now command. She has long since made her peace with the role: she pours tea, she signs cards for her mother, she reads in the window seat that overlooks the square. The seasons come and go without her.

Captain Henry Vaughan returns from the Peninsula with a limp, a small inheritance, and a memory of a quiet girl who once turned the pages of a book for him when he was sixteen. He is not looking for a bride. He is not looking for Frances. He finds her anyway, in the same drawing room, twelve seasons later, and the room is suddenly far too small.