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The breakfast itself had been a simple affair, held in Brawnhite House’s smaller dining room, hung with white ribbon and early roses that must have cost a small fortune to force so early in the year. Her parents had beamed through the whole of it. She had done her part well, she thought; she had smiled, and accepted good wishes, and made pleasant conversation with three elderly cousins of the Duke’s who had each told her, at length, how very like his mother he looked when he laughed,.

She had caught his eye across the room perhaps half a dozen times in the course of two hours. Each time, she had looked away first. She could not have explained why, except that there was something in his gaze that made her feel entirely transparent, as though he could see straight through the pleasant blankness she had spent a lifetime perfecting and read what lay beneath it. It made her nervous in a way she did not enjoy examining.

Her mind, in truth, had not been on the guests at all. It had been three floors up, in a nursery with a worn oak cradle, where a small boy she had promised to raise was, at that very moment, in someone else’s arms.

She had known Gregory noticed as he always seemed to. Before the last of the champagne had gone round, he had made his excuses to the room with such easy grace that not a soul appeared to mind, and steered the party gently to its natural end. When they were alone at last amid the wreckage of ribbon and rose petals, he had asked her, with a directness that still startled her, whether he had read her wrong.

Go, he had said, when she admitted the truth of it. From tomorrow you must begin learning how to be a Duchess. And a mother.

She had asked him, in return, whether he was ready to begin learning how to be a husband, and he had laughed, and said that had not been in their terms, and left her standing in the ruin of her own wedding breakfast feeling both foolish and, obscurely, disappointed.

She had not seen very much of him since.

“Mrs. Glenn,” she said now, setting down her pen, “may I ask you something?”

“You may ask, Your Grace. I cannot promise an answer that pleases you.”

“Is His Grace always so difficult to find?”

Something crossed the housekeeper’s face, there and gone, too quick to name. “His Grace keeps his own hours,” she said, after a moment, in the careful tone of a woman choosing each word with a pair of tongs. “He always has. It is not a new habit, if that is what you are asking.”

“Thank you., regardless,” Phillipa looked back down at her ledger.

She had learned a great deal in a fortnight. The names of every servant in the house, upstairs and down, and something of their history besides, for Mrs. Glenn was not a woman who parted easily with her approval.

She had learned the accounts, and the tenants’ quarterly reports, and the particular way the Duke liked his correspondence sorted, though she had gleaned that last from his secretary rather than from the man himself. She had learned, above all, the small oak cradle and everything in its orbit: which nights the boy slept through, and which he did not; that he startled at loud voices and settled, without fail, to the sound of low humming; that he had begun, in the last few days, to pull himself upright against the bars of his cradle with an expression of ferocious concentration.

She had spent every night since her wedding in the armchair beside that cradle. It was practical. Martha needed her sleep as much as anyone, and there was, in truth, nowhere else in the great cold house that Phillipa much wished to be.

What she had not managed, in two full weeks, was five consecutive minutes in her husband’s company.

It was not for want of trying.

Every time she came into a room, it seemed, he was on his way out of it. She would descend for breakfast to find his place already cleared and his chair pushed in with mathematical precision. She would seek him in the library after dinner and find only the ghost of cigar smoke and a book left open on the arm of his chair. Once, memorably, she had turned a corner in the long gallery to find him halfway down it in the opposite direction, and he had bowed, and inquired after her health, and continued walking, all without once breaking his stride.

She was beginning to suspect that her husband was avoiding her, though she could not for the life of her think why.

She had not asked for anything he had not offered. She had not, so far as she was aware, done anything to give offense. And yet the pattern held, day after day, with an almost mathematical regularity, until she began to feel less like a bride and more like a puzzle he had set down half-finished and did not care to return to.

Martha, at least, was a comfort. The nursemaid had a gift for gossip that she claimed, with an entirely unconvincing solemnity, to be merely a talent for hearing things, and an even greater gift for making Phillipa laugh at moments she had not expected to laugh at all. They had grown close with a speed that surprised them both, two young women thrown together over the same small tyrant, and Phillipa had come, in the space of a fortnight, to depend on her more than she had depended on anyone since Augusta.

It was Martha, in fact, who had first mentioned the visit to St. Anthony’s, three days past, with such enthusiasm that Phillipa had gone the very next morning before she had time to think better of it.

She thought of it now, and set down her pen entirely.

“Drummons.”

“Your Grace.” The butler appeared, as he always seemed to, precisely when needed and not a moment before, materializing at Phillipa’s elbow in the front hall with a silver tray already extended for the morning’s post. He was a tall, spare man of perhaps fifty. Phillipa had come, over her first weeks in the house, to rely on his quiet competence rather more than she had initially expected to.

“I wonder if I might ask you something.”

“Of course, Your Grace.”

“Has His Grace always kept such very particular hours? I find I cannot seem to predict when he will be in his study, or the library, or anywhere else I might reasonably expect to find him.”

Something that might, on a less disciplined face, have been the ghost of a smile crossed Drummons’s expression. “His Grace has always been a restless sort of man, Your Grace, if I may say so. Even as a boy. Mrs. Glenn used to say he wore a path in the nursery carpet, back and forth, back and forth, whenever something troubled him, rather than sitting still with it the way most children do.” He set the tray down with precise care. “I have found, in thirty years of service to this family, that His Grace’s hours grow most unpredictable precisely when something weighs on him most heavily. If you will forgive the presumption of an old servant’s observation, Your Grace, I do not believe the unpredictability is about you at all, whatever it might feel like from where you are standing.”

“That is very perceptive of you, Drummons.”