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“You would rather not?”

“It was told to me in confidence, and is not mine to repeat.” She kept her voice level. “I do not yet know what I mean to answer him. Until I do, I shall not betray what he chose to tell me.”

“Answer him?” Her mother stared. “Answer him? What is there to answer?”

“He asked me to marry him.”

“He announced it to a room.”

“And afterward, alone, he asked me.”

Silence.

Her parents exchanged a look. It was a look she had seen many times and had never once been included in, the look of two people who had been married for thirty years. When they turned back to her, her father had taken his fingers from his nose.

“Whether it is his child or not,” said Lord Creighton, gently, “you must accept.”

Phillipa looked up.

“I do not say it lightly. It is a fine match. It will silence every tongue in London within the month, and put you where no one may hurt you.”

“Father.”

“And you must forgive me, my dear, I know it is hard, but I am going to ask you plainly.” He got to his feet. He was not a tall man, and in the last two years he had begun to look smaller. “Please. Please do not do to the Duke of Brawnhite what you did to the Duke of Ravenhill.”

His words struck her like a blow.

“What I did,” said Phillipa, carefully.

“I did not mean…”

“Did you ever once stop to consider my side of it?”

“Did you ever stop to consider ours?” His voice cracked upward, and he brought it down again with visible effort. “We are not asking for anything we have not asked of one another all our lives. This is what you can offer this family. You know it as well as I do. We all offer what we can, Phillipa, that is what a family is, and each of us gives what is in our power to give. Your brother gives his name. Your mother gives every hour of her days. I give what I have. And you?”

“And I give myself.”

“You give what you can spare.”

She knew, then, exactly how it would go if she stayed. She would be reasonable. She would say the correct things, in the correct order, and in a quarter of an hour she would find she had agreed to something with her hands folded in her lap, the way she had at twelve and at seventeen and at twenty-one. She knew her duty and had never once in her life failed to know it. It was the knowing that was the trouble.

She rose, smoothing her skirts.

“Your place,” she said, and her voice was perfectly steady, “never demanded that you betray yourself.”

Her father opened his mouth but no sound came out of it, and in that moment, in the space of a breath in which he might have said that is not fair or you are right, she saw all the thirty years of it cross his face. Then she inclined her head, just so, the way she had been taught to do when leaving a room, and walked out of it, down the hall and out through the morning room and across the flagged terrace into the garden, and only there, on the far side of the hedge, where nobody could see, did she let herself stop and put both hands over her face.

She stood there for some time.

He is right, she thought. That is the wretched thing.

An engagement to a Duke would answer nearly everything. It would quiet the whispers, and secure her mother’s peace, and put a cushion of rank between her family and the last two years. It was a good match, and a sensible one. If she had been a wiser woman she would have accepted before her tea, and been done.

But she was twenty-two, and she had already stood at the altar of a good match once, and had felt the floor go out from under her feet.

She had the beginnings of a headache. She pressed the heel of her hand between her eyes and told herself: breathe. Bees hummed in the lavender. Somewhere on the street a knife-grinder was calling his trade. It was a fine morning, and cool, and in its way peaceful, and she thought she might sit here until she could stand it again.

The garden gate creaked.