Here is the reason nobody in four counties would marry her, and it is not her face and it is not her portion.
Hugh Maxwell.
She was promised to him in the autumn of 1817, when she was nineteen. He was twenty-eight. He had four thousand a year and a house near Devizes and a laugh you could hear across a room, and she did not love him and had entirely made up her mind to.
He was drowned at the ford below Craigend on the eleventh of March 1818, coming back from a dinner, at night, in a wet spring.
Andrew Scott.
She was promised to him in the June of 1820, when she was twenty-two. He was one and thirty and he had a place in Somerset and a stammer he was ashamed of, and she liked him a great deal more than she had liked Hugh Maxwell.
He was found in a barn at Kerrsyde on the ninth of December 1821 with his neck broken and a beam above him that four men swore was sound.
There was no inquest that found anything. There never is.
That is the entire nature of that valley and of that county and of that year: two young men die in eighteen months, and both of them are within eleven miles of each other, and both of them had signed a settlement with the Ashcombe name on it, and there is not one single thing that anybody can take to a court.
What there is instead is a sentence.
Georgiana Ashcombe heard it for the first time in the February of 1822 at a house near Marlborough, in a passage, through a door, from a woman she had known since she was nine.
"Well — one is a misfortune."
That is the whole of it. The other half was never said out loud in her hearing and she has never needed it to be.
By the spring of 1823 she was seven and twenty and had refused four offers, and it is worth being exact about who made them, because it tells you everything.
A widower of fifty-nine with eleven hundred a year and four children.
A cousin.
A clergyman with a living in her brother's gift who came to it with a great deal of feeling and no money at all.
And a man from Bath in the autumn of 1822 who made it clear within eleven minutes that he did not intend to live in the county and did not intend her to either.
There were no others.
There would be no others. She had known that since about the March of 1822 and her father had known it since the December before, and it was the only thing in the world the two of them agreed about and neither of them had ever said it.