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“You very nearly married her yourself, if memory serves. I thought there might be some lingering tenderness.”

Ronan parried without looking. “Gregory, I am the happiest man in England. I should like to be a little less so, out of politeness, but I have not managed it. No, I am not jealous.” He stepped back, and his voice, when it came again, had lost a shade of its dryness. “She is a remarkable woman, and I say it as the man who very nearly made her miserable. It was the worst thing I almost did, and I have thanked God every day since that she had the better judgment.”

It was not a jab, but a plain and honest statement, and it landed somewhere beneath Gregory’s ribs where he had not expected to be hit. He lowered his own foil.

“You are trying to change the subject,” said Ronan, watching him.

“I am fencing. I never change the subject, I merely move it.”

“Mm.” Ronan let it be. That was the thing about Ronan; he could see through a man and then decline to look. He picked up a towel, and paused with it halfway to his face. “If there is anything I can do, you will tell me.”

“There is nothing to do,” said Gregory. “All I have to do now is wait for her answer.”

He said it lightly. It was only after Ronan had gone, and the gallery had gone quiet, and the dead Welbys looked down at him with their long disapproving faces, that he understood how badly he had lied.

He was, in point of fact, terrible at waiting.

He had stood in that library last night and looked at a woman in a tumbled gown with her hair coming down at one side and a baby against her shoulder and a face like a small lit window, and had thought: there is someone who has never in her life asked for anything. He had watched her be furious with him, and had watched her be furious with herself for being reasonable, and had watched the exact moment in which she had put a sleeping child down in a basket as though he were made of glass. He had told her to think. It had seemed a generous thing to say.

Of course, thinking was precisely what a sensible woman would do, and a sensible woman, given a whole night and a fine breakfast and her mother’s opinions, would think her way straight to no.

Gregory stood very still in the middle of the long gallery, holding a foil, and considered the matter.

He had told the lady to think about it. He had not, when he came to reflect on it, said anything about giving her time to do it in peace.

He rang for his hat.

CHAPTER 5

“Not a word of warning! Not one! A man of that rank, who has not so much as glanced at our girl in years, and suddenly, before three hundred people..”

“He is a man of rank, my dear, that is the entire point.”

“Which is why I ask if he is to be trusted! What sort of man announces an engagement in a library to a lady he has not properly courted? What sort of man is he? Does he keep his word? Because if he does not, Henry, and the notice is in the papers on Thursday…”

“I have made inquiries. The Duke of Brawnhite pays his debts, keeps his tenants, and has never to my knowledge broken a promise to anyone but his father.”

“The father is dead.”

“Well.”

“And the child?” Her mother had not stopped moving for twenty minutes. She crossed the carpet, turned, and crossed it again, and the plume in her morning cap trembled with each pass. “Where did it come from? He says a nephew. The Duke has no brother, and the sister has not been seen in two years, so I ask you, Henry, what sort of nephew…”

For the most part, Phillipa had gotten very good at dissociating whenever her parents got into an argument with one another. It was a skill that was proving rather useful at this moment.

“Whatever sort he says he is,” said Lord Creighton, wearily, “so long as the ton will agree.”

The Earl of Creighton was not a cruel man. She had never in her life thought so, even in her worst years, and she did not think so now. He was a tired man with a good deal of gray in his hair. He looked as though he had not slept, either. It should have made her softer toward him. It would have, if she had not known precisely where this was going.

“Phillipa.”

She turned her head.

“You have not said a word,” said her mother, halting at last. “Not one word since breakfast. You were in that room and spoke to the man alone. If you know something about this business, I must insist that you tell us.”

Phillipa considered it.

“I would rather not say,” she said.