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“His lordship wishes to speak with you. He is in his study.”

She blinked once, then nodded, closing her journal with deliberate care and stacking her books in a neat pile on the little side table for easy retrieval in the morning.

These endless days of leisure in the earl’s grand house were enough to drive anyone to distraction. Every detail gleamed with genteel wealth—mahogany shelves lined with calfskin bindings, gleaming brass fire irons, even the richly woven Axminster carpet underfoot. Yet she was bored nearly to tears.

Being summoned for an audience was at least a novelty. She found herself welcoming the interruption to the monotony of her London confinement. If only she could have kept treating patients, it might have made the heavy grief of her father’s death bearable. Instead, she was left to idle in this cavernous townhouse, haunted by memories of the life she had lost.

Perhaps the guild would write soon, she thought with a stab of hope. Then she could begin planning her future in earnest.

Dutifully, Audrey slipped her notes into her valise, adjusted her skirt, and set off down the long corridor toward the study. The hall was hushed but for the muffled thump of her footsteps on the thick runner. Wall sconces with smoky glass shades cast flickering light onto gilt-framed landscapes of distant hills and stormy seas.

Lord Stirling had seemed busier than ever these past two weeks. She recalled that dreadful quarrel with Lord Trafford. Howard had even mentioned how rarely the master had been seen since. The earl was always engaged with matters of state, but lately, he had vanished into work like a man determined to forget.

She felt a pinch of discomfort at the memory. She had not realized before that day why Lady Stirling and the daughter had been absent so long. A wave of embarrassment still prickled her skin over the knowledge she now carried, gained by accident while treating the starling outside the study window.

Yet she reassured herself it had been worthwhile. Her patient would soon take flight.

Pausing at a gilt-framed pier glass hanging between the tall doors, Audrey smoothed the linen of her sleeve and checked her hair. She repinned a few stubborn curls that had escaped to rest against her neck, strands that seemed determined to defy all attempts at restraint.

She studied her reflection critically. Once she had been considered an attractive country lass, cheeks browned by sun, hair windblown and free. Here in London, by society’s stifling standards, she felt a disheveled mess. Constant fussing with her appearance had become an endless, weary chore. She longed for the village, where no one cared if a lock of hair fell free while she gathered herbs or comforted a crying child.

She adjusted her locks, decided it would have to do, and exhaled a steadying breath.

Turning, she knocked smartly on the study door.

“Enter.”

Audrey unlatched the door and stepped inside.

Lord Stirling was an imposing peer—tall and broad-shouldered, his dark coat fitting with military precision. There was a warm charm to him that made him well-liked by most, even those inclined to distrust the nobility. Yet Julius Trafford was correct. Over the years the earl’s genial manner had hardened into a forbidding solemnity.

Audrey could recall a time, dim as it felt now, when he had smiled readily and laughed in easy company. She suspected the shift to grimness had grown worse after Lady Stirling’s departure for France.

Not that Audrey had spent much time in their company before her father’s death earlier in the year. But there had been dinners in Stirling and the odd autumn gathering where she had observed them from across candlelit tables. She remembered Lady Stirling’s gentle laughter, and the way the earl’s eyes had softened when they lingered on his wife.

Now that she thought on it, it struck her as almost comical. Lord Trafford’s coats had grown ever more colorful in approximate proportion to his father’s descent into dourness, as if one absorbed all the missing cheer of the other.

She forced the smile from her lips as she cleared her throat softly.

“Good evening, your lordship.”

“Audrey, you look lovely this evening.”

His voice was perfectly polite, but she noted the distracted furrow of his brow, the way his gaze seemed to move past her even as he spoke.

“Thank you, Lord Stirling.”

He stood at the mantel, one arm resting along its carved edge, fingertips drumming slowly on the polished wood. The flames in the grate crackled low, their glow reflecting off brass fire irons and catching on the intricate frame of the portrait above. For a moment, his eyes rose to it, Lady Stirling’s serene painted likeness with pearls at her throat, hair fair against pale skin.

Audrey felt a pang of sympathy for the man who looked at his absent wife as if she might speak to him from the canvas.

“I have some business to take care of on the Continent, which means I shall be leaving at first light.”

Audrey nodded automatically. She had grown used to these abrupt Crown assignments over the past months. Usually, he gave her a day or two of warning, but the tension in his voice suggested urgency.

“Lady Hays is not in Town, so I have arranged to have Lady Astley collect you in the morning.”

Audrey’s heart sank like a stone into her thin-soled slippers.