“I Will Never Love You,” He Told Me at the Piano — Then He Watched Me Marry Another Man

Part 1

He used my given name for the first time the same afternoon he told me he would never love me.

I should have heard that as the warning it was.

My name is Catherine Hale, and in the autumn of 1847 I believed myself the luckiest woman in London.

For months the Marquess of Ravensmoor had filled my drawing room with flowers, my journal with pressed petals, my head with foolish certainty.

Edmund Hayes had a way of looking at a woman that made the whole room disappear.

My aunt called it a courtship.

Society called it a foregone conclusion.

I called it, privately, the only thing I had ever wanted.

So when my aunt told me he had requested a private audience, I came down the stairs already composing my answer to a question he had not yet asked.

He was standing at the window when I entered, his back to me, which should have told me something.

A man does not turn his back on the woman he intends to marry.

“Society expects us to wed,” he said, like he was reading from a ledger.

“Your fortune would restore my family’s estate.”

I asked him, very quietly, if he was proposing a marriage or a transaction.

He did not flinch.

“We are of the nobility, Catherine.

Sentiment rarely factors into such decisions.”

I had spent half a year mistaking his attention for affection.

It took him eleven words to correct me.

“I admire you greatly,” he said, “but I will never love you.

Not in the way you deserve.”

He said it gently, as if gentleness were the same as mercy.

It was not.

I asked him to leave before my voice could betray me, and to his credit, he did.

I did not cry in front of him.

I waited until the door closed, and then I came apart in a chair that still smelled of his cologne.

I might have stayed broken in that room for a very long time if the butler hadn’t announced another visitor.

The Duke of Brennock had come to call, books in hand, completely unaware he was walking into wreckage.

Henry Wexford took one look at my face and didn’t ask what happened so much as simply sit down across from me and wait.

I told him everything.

The proposal that wasn’t a proposal.

The eleven words.

The years I’d spent assuming a man’s attention meant his heart had followed.

He listened without a single interruption, which I had never once experienced from Edmund.

“He is either a fool or blind,” Henry said finally.

“Perhaps both.”

Then he gave me a book of poems with a ribbon marking one particular page, and asked, almost shyly, if he might call again tomorrow.

I said yes because I had nothing left to refuse with.

What I did not expect was how much I would look forward to that yes.

Word of Edmund’s “honesty” never reached the gossip columns, because gentlemen protect each other that way.

But two months later, a scandal did reach them — Edmund and a married woman, caught by her husband, a duel rumored in every drawing room in London.

I read the letter from my aunt with a strange, cold clarity I didn’t recognize in myself.

Not heartbreak.

Relief.

I had been in Bath for nearly a month by then, sent away by my own request, ostensibly to take the waters, actually to stop replaying eleven words in my head every night.

Henry’s letters found me there anyway — patient, funny, undemanding, three a week without fail.

My cousin noticed before I let myself admit it.

“A duke doesn’t write three letters a week out of pity,” she told me over sherry, one eyebrow raised like a accusation.

I told her it wasn’t like that.

I was lying to both of us.

Then, on an October afternoon with the hills outside Bath gone gold and the wind pulling at my cloak, Henry took both my hands in his and told me he loved me — had loved me since the very first dance, long before I ever looked at him twice.

He asked nothing of me.

He only asked if he might hope.

I said something back to him that surprised us both, something with his name in it and the word “marry,” and the look on his face was the first thing in months that didn’t hurt to remember.

We returned to London engaged, and married before Christmas, and I genuinely believed that chapter of cruelty was closed for good.

It was not.

Because three days after our wedding, a card arrived at Brennock House with Edmund’s seal pressed into the wax, and when I broke it open, the single line inside made my new husband go very, very still beside me.