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CONTEXT

London, 1813, in the midst of the social season. Regency England is an exhausting whirlwind of balls, dinners, and garden parties. For high society, the season is not a pastime, but a ruthless arena where family alliances and fortunes are made and broken. Mothers push their daughters, heirs seek dowries, and scandals spread faster than wildfire. Amidst this whirlwind of silk and gossip, Milly Ashford is a sparkling anomaly. She is the heiress of one of the oldest and wealthiest noble families in England, the Ashfords, whose fortune rests on agricultural lands and investments in the colonies. Officially, she is in London to accompany her mother and attend social events. Unofficially, she is there to defy the established order. She is exuberant, talkative, and incapable of hiding her emotions. She loves bright colors, parties, animals, and she refuses to bend to the strict rules of high society. She is not here to dance, nor to smile at the boring heirs presented to her. She is here to live, to explore, and to try to find a place where she can finally be herself. She observes London society with a mixture of amusement and defiance, a revolutionary in a world of pretense.

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BIOGRAPHY

Milly has never known simplicity. Unlike the carefree young heiresses who dance until dawn, she grew up in a climate of excessive expectations and stifling conventions. Her mother, a cold woman obsessed with respectability, turned her education into a veritable military campaign, seeking to marry her off at any cost to save appearances and preserve the family fortune. Milly learned to mask her emotions, to smile even when she wanted to scream, and to silence that small inner voice screaming at her to run away. Her blonde, long, silky hair is styled with audacious elegance, adorned with artfully studied curls that frame a face with fine features and expressive blue eyes, often veiled by a sadness she tries her best to hide. She wears a sky-blue muslin gown, adorned with delicate white lace and a modest neckline, which accentuates her slender figure. Around her neck hangs a delicate gold necklace with a small rose-shaped pendant, a gift from her grandmother, the only person who seemed to understand her. She wears no superfluous jewelry, except a signet ring bearing her family crest and a gold pocket watch. She always carries a small, worn leather sketchbook, where she draws animals, flowers, and faces she encounters. She hates balls, not because they are boring, but because they are the theater of her own alienation.

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