Six scenes, sorted by what they do to you

She stops on the steps and thanks the star

Page 339 · 88 percent

She has just walked out. Not stormed, not wept. Walked, having told him that it is no longer any of his concern where she is going.

Madeline has already had the carriage brought round, because Madeline saw this coming. Felicity takes her wrap and hat and gloves from a footman, steps out into the night, and pauses at the top of the steps leading down to the drive.

And she looks up at the sky. Because the whole thing started on a balcony, on a starry night very much like this one, with a wish she did not believe in.

She finds her star again, and smiles at it weakly, and thanks it.

Then she gets into the carriage, and it is only when the driver asks where she wishes to go that she realizes she has no idea. And realizes, as well, that she does not care.

That is a woman thanking the universe for a heartbreak, on her way out of the house, in the rain of her own composure. It is the best writing in the book and it is over in half a page.

You have forfeited the right to ask

Page 339 · 88 percent

The line just before she goes, and the one the entire title runs on.

She tells him there is nothing more to say. That they do not want the same things. That he wants the freedom to do precisely as he wishes, and she wants him, and more than that, she wants somebody who wants to make her as happy as she wants to make him.

He asks where she is going.

Hold that against the last page of the novel, where he kneels down in front of his own wife because he never actually asked her anything and she deserves to be asked. The book sets the terms here and then pays them off exactly.

The other pleasure in this scene is watching him fail to understand it in real time. He stares at the door in shocked disbelief. She had walked out on him. He was the injured party. His own sister had schemed against him, he had been manipulated, and Felicity had the nerve to leave.

He is completely wrong and entirely sincere, which is the funniest he is in the entire book.

Two people agreeing to a marriage of strangers

Page 299 · 78 percent

They are sitting together with a notebook, deciding which invitations to accept now that they are the Honorable Nigel Cavendish and the Lady Felicity Cavendish. She likes how that sounds. He grudgingly admits that he does too, and privately notes that it sounds, well, right.

Then she says she should hate to interfere with his, and here she gestures vaguely, whatever it is he does in the evenings.

He offers, far too casually, to tell her. Would she like to know what he does in the evenings?

Absolutely not, she says. It is none of her concern. His life is his life. And then, after a pause: as is mine.

He tries again. He would be happy to exchange information. As a gesture of goodwill between them. She looks puzzled and asks whether there is ill will, since she thought they were getting on extremely well.

Then she leans in confidentially and admits she had not expected all this you-live-your-life-and-I-live-mine nonsense to work at all, and in fact she thinks it has worked famously.

He got exactly the marriage he asked for and it is killing him.

Behind his father’s desk. No. His desk.

Page 347 · 90 percent

Ten days after she leaves, Maddy pushes open the library door to tell her brother they need to talk, and stops dead.

Nigel is looking up from documents spread out in front of him on his father’s desk. The narration corrects itself mid-sentence, which is the whole scene in one piece of punctuation: his father’s, no, his desk.

Maddy says she has never seen him sitting behind their father’s desk before. He tells her he has a great deal of work to do.

She sits down in the chair Nigel used to sit in when he was speaking to his father. To the viscount. And now, behind the desk, in the very symbol of that position, sits Nigel. The new Viscount Cavendish.

And he is doing the work. Ten days of it. That is the answer to the question he had been avoiding since he was old enough to understand what he would inherit, and it arrived in the worst possible way.

She is holding a pistol and he is explaining himself badly

Pages 209 to 210 · 55 percent

He has broken into her room at night to retrieve a painting he wagered and lost. She is awake, unimpressed, and armed.

The painting turns out to matter more than it first appeared. It is a portrait of his uncle, who died young, and his father was very close to him, and it means a great deal to his father. Nigel never had the right to wager it. He admits it. He has been honest with her from the start, he says, and she points out that he never mentioned the painting was not his to bet.

And then, in the middle of defending himself, he says the thing that explains the entire novel:

He calls the wager the act of a coward. He says that if he were the father of a son who did that, he would be disappointed in his actions and his judgment. He panicked at the thought of her wanting to marry him and the only solution he could think of was to get rid of her.

She waves the pistol and puts it plainly: he wants her in his bed but not as his wife. He agrees, and then refuses to have her ruin on his head. She offers to share his bed without marriage anyway. He says he could not allow that.

Two people negotiating their way into the worst possible arrangement, one of them holding a gun, both of them technically correct.

The morning after, before anything goes wrong

Page 268 · 70 percent

She wakes without a stitch on and grins about it. She is sore in a way she compares to having ridden a horse across the country, and laughs aloud at her own comparison, and wonders what Eugenia would make of the news that Felicity is now most interested in the ride.

She notes she is happy. Truly, blissfully, extraordinarily happy.

She has been given her own room and has absolutely no intention of sleeping in it. She has clothes she can put on without a maid, a kitchen downstairs with a cook borrowed from his mother, and a plan for furnishing a half-empty house.

And she is not remotely worried about where her husband has got to, because she is confident he cares for her far more than he is willing to admit.

He comes home that evening having successfully stayed away the entire day, and notes privately that it had not been easy. The footman tells him Lady Felicity is waiting in the parlor. Nigel objects that there is nothing in the parlor. There is not. That is rather the point.