What actually happens

She asks the universe for a hero and gets a man being shot at

Lady Felicity Melville has done the arithmetic on her own life and does not care for the answer. She is at the age where offers stop arriving. She has more or less accepted that she will settle for a gentleman of good family, an acceptable fortune and, with luck, a tolerable face.

So she goes out onto her balcony at an hour that is either very late or quite early, and puts in a request. Not seriously. Half a joke, addressed to whatever power handles this sort of thing. A French musketeer would do. D’Artagnan for preference, Edmond Dantès at a push, an armor-clad knight if nothing better is available, although she notes that would make a racket on landing.

Then a pistol goes off next door and a man comes down the neighbors’ ivy at considerable speed.

She assumes burglar. It is Nigel Cavendish, heir to a viscountcy, and he is not stealing anything. He is leaving a married woman’s bedroom while her husband fires at him.

The detail that matters is what Felicity does next. Offered a choice between going inside where it is safe and leaning over the railing to find out what is happening, she leans over the railing. That instinct is the entire character and it decides the rest of the book.

The painting, and the second climb

He comes over her balcony a second time. There is a reason and it is a painting, but the reason is not the point. Felicity raises it much later, in the fight, with considerable asperity: he could have waited until daylight and knocked on the front door like a person and simply asked for the thing.

He concedes it. Calls it a mistake. She observes, coolly, that it was one of several.

Four encounters, only one of them accidental

The book is careful to lay these out in order, because in the fight they get read back to him as evidence.

First a garden party, where he approached her. Then his sister’s dinner, where Maddy engineered matters so the two of them were left alone, and where he could perfectly well have made his excuses and left, and instead danced with her. Then a card game at the Fernwoods’, which nobody engineered at all, and out of which came a wager that was entirely his own invention.

The pattern is the case against him. He was not swept along. He kept choosing it.

The wager was designed to lose her

The reveal is saved for the fight rather than spent early, and it reframes everything before it.

He made that bet to get her out of his life before something irrevocable happened. Not because he did not want her. Because he did, and he did not trust himself anywhere near her.

His stated reason is that he knew his own nature, and she was always there, and always tempting. Which is either the most romantic line in the novel or the most self-serving, and Felicity is not immediately certain which. Neither, to be fair, is the reader.

They marry, and nobody asks her anything

The marriage happens. It is arranged, engineered, wagered over and forced along by circumstance, and at no point in the entire sequence does anybody stop and put the question to Felicity.

She gets a husband without ever being offered a choice. Hold onto that, because the ending is built on it.

The quiet scene in the library that is the actual book

Nigel starts reading the estate notebooks his father gave him. Reluctantly. And he finds them interesting.

The family interests are complicated and would take genuine effort to master, and he discovers he is having very little difficulty following how his father actually runs things. He begins to suspect he could take his father’s place without the whole edifice collapsing.

He is alone in a library when he thinks it. He does not say it to anybody.

He disappears into the work

He spends whole days at Cavendish House doing precisely the thing he had spent his adult life refusing to do: learning the estate, learning his trade, sitting with the work. His father raises an eyebrow at the state of him and says nothing whatsoever, which is its own kind of comment.

Then he goes to his club rather than home, and returns in the evening having managed to stay away the entire day, and notes privately that it had not been easy.

Felicity, meanwhile, is in a half-furnished house with a cook borrowed from his mother, entirely confident that he cares for her far more than he is willing to admit. She is right. It does not help her at all.

She leaves, and thanks the star on her way out

The fight ends with Felicity walking out. Not storming. Walking.

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 beyond that she wants somebody who wants to make her as happy as she wants to make him. He asks where she is going.

Madeline has already had the carriage brought round. Felicity pauses at the top of the steps, looks up, finds the star she wished on in chapter one, and thanks it. It did not turn out as she hoped, but she appreciates the effort, and she would not have missed the adventure for all the stars in the heavens.

In the carriage the driver asks where she wishes to go. She realizes she has no idea, and does not care.

Nigel stares at the door in shocked disbelief. She had walked out on him. He was the injured party. He is completely wrong and entirely sincere.

Ten days later, behind his father’s desk

Maddy pushes open the library door and stops. Nigel is looking up from documents spread in front of him on his father’s desk, and the narration corrects itself mid-sentence: his father’s, no, his desk.

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

The inheritance is what forces the issue. He does not decide to become capable. He is handed the job and discovers, over ten days, that he can do it.

Not as my wife

The fight is one of the better ones on this shelf, and the reason is Felicity. She is icily calm the whole way through it, and notes with some surprise that she had not known she possessed that kind of strength.

She lays the entire sequence out for him, event by event. The balcony. The painting. The garden party. The dinner. The card game. The wager. He defends each one in turn, until he reaches for the thing that ends the conversation.

He tells her he never wanted this. He never wanted marriage. He never wanted

It is the cruellest line in the novel and it is also not remotely what he means. He wanted her enormously. What he did not want was to be a husband, because a husband is a man with responsibilities who can be measured, and being measured is the one thing he has organized his entire life around avoiding.

He kneels down and proposes to his own wife

He comes back having done the reading, in both senses of the phrase.

He tells her he has learned something about himself: that he is not incapable and not incompetent, that his father knew this long before he did, and that he can fill those shoes. Perhaps not as well yet. But he no longer doubts himself or his abilities.

And then, immediately, that he cannot do any of it without her beside him. Not another hour. Not another day. That going over her balcony was the best thing he has ever done, and he had no idea at the time, because he had no idea she existed.

She has to ask him to repeat the part about loving her, because he said it while she was not braced for it. He tells her to say it back. She does, and adds that she always has.

Then he kneels down and proposes. To his wife. To whom he is already married.

She points out that she rather thinks she has already married him. He says yes, but he never actually asked, did he. And she deserves to be asked.

He uses her entire name. He asks for now and for the rest of their days, to be allowed to cherish her, to make her happy, to try to make every day an adventure, and to be forgiven his future sins, of which he cheerfully expects there to be a great many. She asks whether there will be. He says too many to count, and promises that women will not be among them.