Her Ladyship’s American Wife

A Victorian Sapphic Historical Romance
by Evelyn Ashcombe

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Standalone
Tropes: Ice Queen, Grumpy/Sunshine, American Heiress, Forced Proximity, Landlord/Tenant, Artist Romance, Class Difference, Wealth Gap, Written Terms, Late Bloomer, Sexual Awakening, Touch Starved, Dirty Talk, Light Bondage, Body Worship, Competence Kink, Only Soft for Her, Found Family

A countess with a leaking house. An American heiress who pays for everything. And the one thing that cannot be bought.

Sussex, 1896. Constance Vale, the widowed Countess of Mereford, has a hundred and seventeen days to find three thousand pounds, or her husband’s nephew takes the only thing she has ever owned: Seabrook, a house on the sea that lets in the Channel through the roof.

Beatrice Alden of Boston has a fortune in her own name, a chisel scar across one knuckle, a mother booking passage home for October, and a standing figure in clay with no life in it. She also has her bare hand on a marble nymph at a London private view when a countess she has never met lies to an attendant on her behalf.

By Tuesday, Beatrice is renting the coach house for eight hundred pounds, paid in advance. Constance has drawn a line through the word gift three times with a ruler. You will pay. I shall decide.

But the connecting door between their rooms has not been locked since the Jubilee. The walls are a great deal thinner than fifteen years of silence. And a woman who has paid for her place in every room she has ever entered is sleeping two inches of oak away from a woman who has never once asked for anything for herself.

Constance could let the American save her house.

What she cannot do is let herself be bought.

Her Ladyship’s American Wife is a standalone sapphic Victorian historical romance with an ice-queen widowed countess, an American heiress sculptor who pays for everything, forced proximity in a crumbling house by the sea, a modelling stand and three hours of being looked at, explicit on-page heat, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA. Dual POV. Approx. 80,000 words.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A widowed countess who has never once said what she wants, and an American who will not touch her until she says it out loud
✅ A connecting door, two inches of oak, and the thinnest walls in Sussex
✅ “You will pay. I shall decide.” A lease, a ruler, and a heroine who strikes out the word gift
✅ A sculptor’s hands, a modelling stand, and three hours of being looked at with nothing on but the north light
✅ An ice queen who learns every filthy word one at a time and uses them in her drawing-room voice
✅ A heroine who pays in advance for everything, learning to be wanted without a receipt
✅ A housekeeper who has not been surprised since 1880
✅ Late-bloomer sapphic awakening at thirty-five, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, no cheating, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including oral sex, manual sex, mutual masturbation through a closed door, overheard sex, sex before a mirror, light bondage with a stay-lace, edging and orgasm denial, bath sex, and a strap-on in the epilogue; all on-page sex is consensual, with “no” honoured on the page), references to a joyless past marriage with dutiful, unwanted marital sex (off-page), a childhood “cure” of left-handedness with a ruler, period attitudes toward women, class, trade and same-sex love, a parent’s disapproval and ultimatum, a heroine who injures her hand punching a clay figure, debt and the threatened loss of a home, a painful separation, alcohol, and strong language. No sexual violence, no dub-con, no cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Constance

“Three thousand pounds,” Charles said, “and I am not a moneylender, Constance. I should like that understood before anything else.”

“You have understood it for both of us. How efficient.”

He smiled. He had decided years ago that she was witty, which spared him the labor of listening to her.

The morning room at Mereford House had been hers for twelve years. His wife had since done it over in a yellow intended to be cheerful, and Constance sat in the midst of all that resolute sunshine in dove-gray silk, her gloves in her lap, with the sensation of visiting her own grave and finding it planted with marigolds.

“The note falls due at Michaelmas.” He turned the paper on the desk to face her, as if she might have forgotten her own signature. “The twenty-ninth of September. I’ve carried it three years without a word.”

“You have carried it three years with a great many words. You have merely said them to other people.”

That landed. There was a small tightening by his eyes. Charles Vale, tenth Earl of Mereford, was eight-and-thirty, well tailored, pleasant to look at and quite impossible to dislike, which was the most tiresome thing about him. He was also her nephew, by marriage, and three years her senior. London had enjoyed that piece of arithmetic for an entire season.

The debt was Edmund’s. She did not say so aloud, because one did not, and because Charles knew it perfectly well. Seabrook had come to her from her godmother, hers alone, the only thing she had ever owned that was not on loan from a husband. In the last year of his life Edmund had raised money on it. He had asked her to sign at breakfast, between the kidneys and the Times, and it had not occurred to her that a wife could decline a thing put so reasonably. The bank called it in the month he was buried. Charles had paid the bank, taken her note in its place, and been gracious about it ever since, in the manner of a man who keeps a lead looped loosely about his wrist.

“I shan’t renew,” he said. “I’d be doing you no service. You have four hundred a year and a house that eats six.”

“I had not realized you had been through my accounts.”

“I’ve been through your house. I called in March, if you recall. You received me in the one room without a bucket in it.” He leaned back. “You don’t live at Seabrook, my dear. You perch there. Two rooms, a housekeeper, and a prayer every time the wind gets into the southwest.”

It was a fair description. She disliked him for its accuracy and for nothing else.

“What do you propose?”

“What I have always proposed. I take Seabrook in discharge of the note and call the matter closed. Not a penny more asked. You keep your four hundred clear, and you come to Mereford.” He opened his hands, a man laying a gift on a table. “Mother has the dower house. Eleven bedrooms, and she rattles in it. She would be glad of you.”

“Your mother has never been glad of anyone.”

“She’d be glad of the company.”

“She would be glad of the audience. It is not the same thing.”

Lady Honoria read sermons aloud after dinner and counted the candle-ends herself. Constance had spent one Christmas under that roof as a bride, and had come away with chilblains and a lasting sympathy for the convict classes.

“You would want for nothing,” said Charles.

“I should want for a door I might lock.”

“Good God, against whom?”

“That you need to ask is rather the difficulty.” She smoothed a glove flat on her knee. There was a darn at the base of the thumb, very fine, her own work. “You are describing a comfortable cupboard. I am to be put away in it with the good linen and brought out for funerals.”

“I am describing a home. With your family.”

“With yours.”

He let that pass. He was good at letting things pass.

“You might marry again,” he offered. “You are a handsome woman still. Fenwick has been a widower two years, and he asked after you at Easter.”

“Lord Fenwick is sixty-three and breeds spaniels.”

“He has nine thousand a year.”

“Then the spaniels are well provided for.” She found she was almost enjoying herself, which was dangerous. “I have been married, Charles. I should not care to make a habit of it.”

He got up and went to the window. He stood with his back to her and his hands clasped behind him, and he looked so like Edmund from behind that for a moment the yellow room was green again, and she was twenty, and waiting to be told what had been decided.

“And Seabrook?” she asked. “What becomes of it, in this arrangement?”

“It would be put to sensible use.”

“It has a use. I live in it.”

“A house on the sea is a liability to a woman alone. There are people who would know what to do with it.”

“I daresay.” She kept her voice level. It was the only thing in the room she still owned. “I have chosen the paper for exactly one room in my life. It is at Seabrook. It is coming off the wall with the damp, and I intend to keep it.”

He turned round. He looked sorry for her, and sincerely so, and she could have forgiven him anything but that.

“I am trying to be kind to you, Constance.”

“I know that you are. It is the only reason I have not been rude.”

She stood. He was obliged to come back across the carpet and take her hand, and she gave it to him gloved.

“I shall pay you at Michaelmas,” she said.

“With what?”

“That is a question for Michaelmas.”

“It’s a question for today, I’d have thought. You have always been so sensible.”

Sensible. It was what people called a woman when they meant she would make no noise.

“Yes,” said Constance. “I have. Do give my love to your mother. She will not know what to do with it.”

She went down the stairs she had once descended in diamonds, past a footman she had engaged herself, who was too well trained to look sorry for her, and out into Belgrave Square with a hundred and seventeen days and not one idea in the world.

The woman had taken her glove off.

That was the first thing Constance saw of her, across the Central Hall of the New Gallery, between a dowager’s aigrette and the potted palms: a bare hand where no bare hand ought to have been.

She should not have come at all. But the card had been sent, the tea was free, and a widow who stops being seen is presumed to have stopped paying her bills. So she had done her duty by the pictures, which this summer ran to knights and damp maidens, and she had twice overheard the joke of the season.

“Another landed at Liverpool on Saturday, with a mamma and forty trunks.”

“One wonders there are any earls left.”

“My dear, they’ll have started on the baronets by August.”

And then the hand.

It belonged to a tall woman in bronze-green silk that had cost a great deal and been put on in a hurry. Dark auburn hair was making its escape from under a hat pinned by someone with her mind on other matters. She had her right glove crushed in her left fist, and her right palm laid flat on the thigh of a marble nymph, life-size, the pride of the room and the work of an Academician.

It was no pat. It was nothing like the furtive dab of a tripper who wants to say she has touched one. She began above the knee and went up the long muscle slowly, with the whole flat of her hand, as far as the hip. There she turned her wrist and came back down with her knuckles. Then her thumb found the hollow where thigh met body, where the stone had been carved to look as though it would yield, and pressed, the way one tries a peach.

Her eyes were nearly shut. She was not looking at the thing at all.

Constance stood quite still.

Something happened beneath her stays that had no business happening at a private view at four in the afternoon. It went through her low and warm and entirely without permission, and her own thigh, under three layers of respectable cloth, seemed to know precisely where that thumb had gone. She had been a wife for twelve years. Nobody had ever put a hand on her as though the surface were the point.

An attendant in the gallery’s livery had seen it too. He was bearing down between the palms with the face of a man who had waited all season to say Madam.

Constance discovered that she had already crossed the floor.

“There you are,” she said, to a perfect stranger. “Well? Have you made up your mind?”

The eyes opened. Brown, and quick. It took them perhaps one second to go from startled to delighted. The hand stayed exactly where it was.

“Pardon me?”

An American. Naturally.

“The marble. I asked you to tell me whether it was worth having, and you have been an age about it.” Constance turned her head just as the attendant arrived, and gave him the smile she had used on bishops. “Lady Mereford. This lady is advising me. I never buy stone I have not had handled. My late husband was once sold a Canova that proved to be chiefly plaster and optimism.”

“My lady, the rule is that visitors—”

“And an excellent rule, for visitors. Shall we trouble the directors with it, or shall you and I simply agree that you were looking at the fountain?”

He looked at the fountain. Then he went and stood beside it.

“Well,” said the American softly. “That is the most beautiful lie anybody ever told on my account. And I don’t even know who you’re pretending I am.”

“Nor do I. You had better tell me, before he returns with someone braver.”

“Beatrice Alden. Boston.” She put out the bare hand, remembered it was bare, and offered it anyway.

Constance took it. It was warm straight through the kid. It had a grip that expected to be met, short square nails, and a thin white scar across the first knuckle. And it held on a full breath longer than any introduction required.

“Constance Vale.” And then, because the attendant had already given her away: “Lady Mereford.”

“Is it ‘Your Ladyship’? I’ve been in London five weeks and I’m told I have mortally insulted a marchioness.”

“‘Lady Mereford’ will do. ‘Your Ladyship’ is for the people I pay, and that is a very select company these days.”

She had meant it to be dry. It came out truer than that. Miss Alden’s glance dropped to the darn at the base of Constance’s thumb and rested there, and then it came back up, and there was no pity in it whatever. There was only attention. It was a most uncomfortable thing to be given. Constance did not move her hand out of sight. She had too much pride to hide good mending.

“Do you make a practice of handling the exhibits, Miss Alden?”

“Only the ones I think are lying to me.”

“And is this one?”

“He’s a coward.” Miss Alden swung back to the nymph with open disgust. “Look at her. No, don’t, that’s the whole trouble, everybody looks. Give me your hand.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’ve told that poor man you’re buying it. You may as well find out what you’d be getting.”

She did not wait to be refused. Bare fingers closed about Constance’s gloved wrist, sure as a doctor’s, and set her palm on the marble knee.

“There. That part’s good. He’s thought about it; you can feel the bone sitting under there. Now come up.”

She drew Constance’s hand along the stone thigh. Through kid there was nothing to feel but cold and polish. All the warmth in the world was in the ring of fingers at her wrist.

“And here he quits thinking and starts polishing. Feel that? There’s no muscle in it. It’s a bolster. A woman sitting like that has her whole weight down this side. She’d spread on the rock. She’d crease here,” and she pressed Constance’s fingertips into the fold at the top of the thigh, “soft, the way a body does. He’s made her out of soap because he was scared to make her out of woman.”

Constance’s mouth had gone perfectly dry. She was aware of the attendant, who was not looking, and of two hundred people who very probably were, and of the fact that she had not taken her hand away.

“I see,” she said.

“You don’t. You feel. That’s my entire argument.”

“You are a sculptor.”

“I’m trying to be one. At home I’m a girl with a hobby. Over here I’m a dollar with a hat on.” She let go, and Constance’s wrist was colder for it. “Hands, mostly. I’m good at hands.”

She was looking at Constance’s as she said it. Then she looked at the rest.

“You keep very still. Did you know that? Everybody in this room is fidgeting to be noticed, and you’re standing there like the only finished thing in it. I’ll bet people tell you you’re serene.”

“Incessantly.”

“Are you?”

“Not in the least.”

It was out before she could dress it. Miss Alden did not laugh. She nodded slowly, as at a measurement that had come out the way she expected.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t think so.”

Constance retreated to the nearest practical subject, as she had all her life.

“Then you will have a studio in London.”

“I had a studio. Chelsea, until Monday. The landlord liked to come up and watch me work. When I told him I’d sooner he didn’t, he said in that case the rent was double.” A shrug. Her shoulders were strong under the silk. “And my mother believes I have spent the month at a dressmaker’s. She means to carry me off to Homburg on the first of July unless I’m respectably engaged elsewhere. Engaged to stay, I mean. She has the other sort in hand as well.”

“What is it that you require?”

“North light. A floor that’ll carry a ton of wet clay. A door that locks. And nobody within a mile who has ever heard of Eleanor Alden.” Her smile went crooked. “By the end of the month, or I’ll be in Boston by Christmas, embroidering something.”

“I have a coach house,” said Constance.

She heard it in her own voice, perfectly composed, as one hears a plate break in another room.

“I’m sorry?”

“In Sussex. On the sea, at a place called Pellingsea, of which you will not have heard. Brick. The doors are on the north side and tall enough for a landau, and there are forty feet of floor that bore carriages for sixty years. No one has kept a horse there in ten.” She seemed unable to stop. “There is a door. I believe it locks.”

Miss Alden had gone still all over, like a pointer.

“And nobody for a mile.”

“There is myself. And a housekeeper who has not been surprised since 1880.”

“What do you want for it?”

A countess does not let lodgings. She could hear it in Lady Honoria’s voice. She could also hear the southwest wind getting in under her slates.

“I ought to tell you that the house it belongs to is letting in the Channel by the roof. I can offer you no comfort at all. You would be dry in the coach house, and very little elsewhere.”

“Then I’ll mend your roof for it.”

Like that. As a man offers to carry one’s parcel.

“You have not seen the roof.”

“I’ve seen you send a grown man backward across a room with two sentences. I’d say the roof and I will come to terms.” Color had come up under her freckles. She had a dusting of them across her nose that no veil had prevented. “It’s a business proposition, Lady Mereford. I pay my way. I always pay my way.”

“You know nothing whatever about me.”

“I know a bad knee when I feel one. And I know a north door is worth a roof.” She dug in her pocket. The gown had a pocket, and there was a stub of pencil in it. She wrote on the back of a card, using the nymph’s maligned thigh for a desk. “Brown’s Hotel. Write to me. Say Tuesday, or say you have thought better of it, and I’ll take either one like a lady. But write.”

She put the card into Constance’s hand. Then she drew on her glove. Constance watched those fingers go into the kid one by one, and it was like watching a lamp carried out of a room.

“My mother’s by the door, counting baronets. If I go now she won’t come over, and you won’t have to lie twice in one afternoon.”

“A pity. I had only just found my stride.”

The corner of Miss Alden’s mouth went up and stayed up.

“Tuesday,” she said, as though it were settled, and walked away through the palms with a stride that silk had never been cut for.

Constance stood beside the nymph with a card in her hand that was still warm. Across the hall the attendant went on studying the fountain as though his place depended upon it.

She had meant to walk and save the shilling. She found she did not altogether trust her knees, and put up her umbrella for a hansom.

Regent Street went by in June light. Constance sat very straight behind the apron and reviewed what she had done, as she would have reviewed a tradesman’s bill.

She had offered house-room to an American she had known for a quarter of an hour. It would be talked of. Poor Constance Mereford, reduced to taking in a dollar. Charles would have it by Sunday and be sorry for her all over again. It would also mend the roof. A roof was not three thousand pounds, but it was the difference between a house and a ruin, and nobody on earth lent money on a ruin. That was a reason. It was a sound and sensible reason, and she turned it over twice before admitting that it had arrived some minutes after the offer.

She unbuttoned her right glove and drew it off.

Her wrist looked as it always looked. There was no mark. She had rather thought there would be.

She had known this before. Once, a very long time ago, and she had been exceedingly careful with it ever since. She was a woman who managed things. She had managed a household of forty, and a husband who came to her bed on alternate Thursdays with the lamp out and went away again inside the quarter-hour, having said nothing and asked nothing. She possessed words for that, most of them out of the marriage service. Not one of them covered a stranger’s hand going up a stone thigh as if it were learning something.

Soft. The way a body does.

The marble had not given under that thumb. It could not. She found that she was wondering, with great exactness and no shame at all, what the thumb did when it met something that could.

That was the indecent part. It was not the nymph. The nymph was only stone, and by Miss Alden’s account not very good stone. It was that a woman had stood in a public room and touched a thing for the plain purpose of knowing it, eyes shut, her whole attention in her palm. And Constance, who had been looked at all her life, and assessed, and found suitable, had wanted with her entire body to be known like that. To be gone over slowly. To have someone find the place where she had been made out of soap.

She laid her bare palm on her own knee. The silk was warm from the sun. Beneath it, beneath petticoat and cambric, there was a pulse where no pulse had ever troubled her, low and thick and patient. She pressed her knees together against it and learned that this did not help in the least. It made matters a good deal worse, and for the length of Conduit Street she let it.

She thought of the scar across that knuckle, and the square nails, and the grip that had expected to be met. Her linen was damp where it lay against her. She had no name for that, either. She sat with her bare hand shut tight in her lap and her face in perfect order, a countess in a hansom at five in the afternoon, and nobody in Regent Street could have told.

The trap opened overhead. “Grosvenor Street, mum.”

At the Alexandra Club she took the corner desk in the writing room and wrote three paragraphs. They explained the train. They explained the house. They used the word propriety twice and contained the phrase I should not wish you to suppose, and when she read them over they sounded like a woman bolting a door from the inside.

She tore the sheet across and took another.

Dear Miss Alden,

Seabrook House, Pellingsea, Sussex. The 10.5 from Victoria; change at Lewes. Tuesday, if you still wish it.

I repeat that you have not seen the roof.

Constance Mereford

It went round to Brown’s by the club’s boy, with sixpence she could not spare.

She did not wait for an answer. She told herself so on the stairs, and again over the cutlet. A young woman who walked out on her landlord would hardly sit in at her hotel of a Thursday evening answering notes. She would be at a dinner, being shown to an earl.

And it would be a refusal in any case. Constance had already composed it on Miss Alden’s behalf, in four civil sentences, so as to be beforehand with it. She had always found a disappointment easier to carry when she had packed it herself.

She read the same page of a novel four times, and went up early, as a sensible woman would.

At ten she was merely sitting on the edge of the narrow club bed in her wrapper, with her hair down her back and the brush idle in her lap, when the maid knocked with the last post.

One envelope. Hotel paper. Her name went across it in a big, forward-leaning hand that had plainly never been rapped over the knuckles for anything, with a blot at the end where the pen had been put down too fast.

Constance turned it over. She was five-and-thirty, a countess and a widow, and her heart was going like a girl’s on the stairs. The thing weighed nothing. A refusal, she thought, would have weighed more. People took such pains over them.

She slit it with a hairpin.

There was no salutation and no signature. There was one line, slanting uphill across the middle of the sheet.

Tuesday. I’ll bring my own ladder.

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Paris, November 1896. A covered arcade, a window full of gloves, and a very small Frenchwoman who says Mesdames and goes into the back room without being asked. Constance pays for it herself, with her own rent money. Then she asks Beatrice for the one thing she has never had back.

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