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It was the maid, she supposed, or the boy who did the beds. “I am not to be disturbed, thank you,” she said.

“I do beg your pardon,” said a voice. “Your butler was kind enough to point me here. I understand you have been thinking.”

Phillipa raised her head.

The Duke of Brawnhite stood at the garden gate with his hat in his hand, in a coat the color of a wet slate and a cravat that was, for once, quite straight. He looked as though he had slept about as well as she had. There was a small crease of uncertainty between his brows, entirely at odds with the easy way he lounged against the gatepost.

“Good morning, Duchess,” he said.

CHAPTER 6

“You cannot be here,” said Phillipa.

“I am told I am. Your butler was most persuasive. He seemed to feel that no one who had been announced in the morning papers should be left standing on a step.” The Duke turned his hat over in his hands. “Also, I believe your mother is watching from the morning room window, and she looks very much as though she intends to kiss my hand.”

“I said I would think about it.”

“I gave you the whole of the night and the better part of a morning, which I felt was handsome.” He came forward and stopped a respectful distance from the bench. “I do not mean to press you. I only thought that if you were going to say no, you would rather say it to my face than in a note, and if you were going to say yes, that you would rather do it having had a chance to discuss terms.”

“Terms,” said Phillipa.

“I did say I was looking forward to them.”

She laughed, it came out rather sharper than she meant. “Your Grace, it may surprise you to learn that this is not the first marriage of convenience I have very nearly entered.”

Something in his face changed, very slightly. He did not say I know. He looked at the bench beside her and said, with grave courtesy, “May I?”

She moved her skirts while he sat. It was a small stone bench, built for two people who did not wish to be very near one another, and it brought him close enough that she could smell the cologne on him.

He set his hat on his knee, and for a little while neither of them said anything at all. The bees went on. A leaf from the pear tree spun down between them and landed, with great neatness, on his boot.

“Were you in love with Ronan?” he asked.

It was such a very direct question, asked in such a mild tone, that Phillipa did the last thing either of them expected.

She laughed, and laughed and then some more. When at last it let go she found that her eyes were wet and that the Duke of Brawnhite was gazing at her with an expression of the most profound surprise.

“No,” she said, when she could. “No. Heavens, no. That is precisely why I did not marry him.”

“I see.”

“He was very kind. He was a good deal kinder than I gave him credit for. It was I who could not do it.” She wiped her eyes with a gloved knuckle. “I was standing there, in a very expensive dress, in front of a great many people, and I understood that I was about to promise my whole life to a man I did not love, because I had been taught that a woman must, and that no one would ever ask whether I could bear it. And I could not. And I said so, and Augusta helped me, and it was the most terrible day of my life and I have never once regretted it.”

She had not meant to say all of that. It was the kind of thing one said to a friend, and she had never in her life said it to anybody.

“And now,” said the Duke.

“And now I am not in love with you either.” She said it plainly, as one states a fact of arithmetic, and looked straight ahead at the pear tree. “I hardly know you. And I find that I am sitting in my father’s garden weighing whether the circumstances have altered enough to make the same mistake I so narrowly avoided. I do not know the answer. I do not know if that makes me sensible or a coward.”

The silence stretched.

She thought: he is going to be offended. She thought: good.

“You were honest with me in the library,” she added, more quietly. “I thought it only fair to give you the same courtesy back.”

“That is very fair,” said the Duke.

She turned her head. He was looking at her, not at the tree, and there was no offense in his face at all. There was something else, something almost like respect, and it made the back of her neck go warm.