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She thought of Joan, with her three lumps of sugar. She thought of Tom, who would not speak before breakfast. She thought of the twins who would only sleep if someone sang, and forty-three small faces in a house meant for twenty-five, all of whom had gone to bed last night without anyone who was theirs.

I am not giving up a family, she thought, with sudden clarity. I am only being asked to choose which one.

She lifted her chin. “Very well.”

He was watching her closely. She thought for an instant that he had seen it, the whole small grief, and she braced herself for pity. But he only nodded, and looked away, and said, after a moment, a little more gruffly than before: “There is a last term.”

“Go on.”

“It would be a marriage of convenience. In the truest sense of the phrase.” He said it lightly, but not carelessly. “You would be free to conduct your life as you liked, so long as you were relatively proper, though I confess I am not a great stickler. I would not ask you to account for your hours. I would ask only that you spare me any scandal, and that you would extend me the same courtesy.”

Phillipa drew herself up. “I am always proper.”

“Are you?”

“Always.”

“Mm.” He turned his head slowly, and there was a gleam in the green of his eyes that she did not entirely trust. He glanced pointedly around the garden. At the hedge. At the gate, and the empty bench, and the great distance between them and the nearest chaperone. “You are alone with me right now, Duchess.”

She felt the color climb from her collar to her hairline. “I have not accepted yet.”

“So you have not.” He leaned in, very slightly, and she had a most distinct awareness of the space between their shoulders. “But I confess, I do not think you carry yourself any differently either way. You have been a Duchess since the moment you refused to give me my nephew back. The name suits you, whether you refuse me or not.”

“It is,” said Phillipa, with as much dignity as she could gather, “a very confusing nickname.”

“Then let us make it a title, shall we?”

She looked at him.

She had vowed to dedicate her life to children. She had said it to herself on a hundred rainy mornings, walking through the gates of St. Anthony’s with peppermints in her pockets, and she had meant it. And here, across a garden bench, was a man asking her to do exactly that with the whole weight of a dukedom behind her, and a small warm baby waiting at the end of it. It was the best choice for the children who had no one. It was the best choice for the little one who had been left in a basket in a library. She was not being sold, this time. She had been asked, and she had named her price, and it had been paid.

Maybe that was the difference. Maybe that was all the difference in the world.

“We shall,” said Phillipa.

The smile came slowly, this time. It was less devastating than the one in the library and somehow a great deal more dangerous, because it was tentative, and she saw that he had been afraid. He stood and offered her his hand, and after a moment she took it. His glove was warm. He lifted her fingers, bowed over them, and did not quite kiss them, which was somehow worse.

“Then I shall speak to your father,” he said, “and to the Archbishop’s office. I have a friend at Doctors’ Commons who owes me a favor. I should like to be married with as little delay as can be managed, before either of us thinks better of it.”

“Before either of us.”

“I am not made of stone, Duchess.” His mouth twitched. “Sunday week, I think.”

“Sunday week!” She heard her own voice rise. “That is barely eight days.”

“Which I am told is scandalously long. I have friends who have done it in three.”

Eight days. She stood in her father’s garden, with her hand still in his, and the pear tree dropped another leaf.

In eight days she would no longer be Lady Phillipa Hewes at all.

CHAPTER 7

The wedding was to be small.

“Small,” said Lady Creighton, for what Phillipa reckoned was the sixth time that morning. “I am told the Duke has already seen the parson. He did not even consult the flowers.”

“He asked what color I preferred. I said white. He said, ‘Very well.’ I confess I felt it was all quite thorough.”