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“I did not say it to wound you.”

“You said it because it was true, which was rather worse.” He was quiet a moment, the two of them turning slowly past Ronan and Augusta, past Lady Carrow still craning for a better look. “You told me that a boy who is never shown he is loved will not know it, whatever I privately feel for him. I have turned that over every night since the study, and I cannot find the flaw in it. I told you I could not look at him without my own guilt crowding in. That was true. But I have been using it as a reason to give him nothing at all, and calling that protecting him, when it was nothing of the kind. It was only protecting myself.”

Phillipa said nothing, afraid that speaking would stop him before he had finished.

“I watched Duncan with his boy tonight, before we came in,” Gregory went on. “Simple thing. He had the child up on his shoulders in the hall. I felt…. envy, I think, which is a strange thing to feel toward your own friend’s son, until I understood it was not the boy I envied. It was Duncan. For knowing how to simply love his son. I’m not sure if I deserve the same.”

“You do not have to deserve it, Gregory. No one does. That is not how it works.”

“I am beginning to understand that. Slowly.” He turned her again, and his hand tightened very slightly at her waist. “I still do not know how to be what that child needs. I only know now that I would rather fail at trying than succeed at this particular kind of absence.”

“That is all any of us are doing, I think. Failing at trying.” She managed a small smile. “It has gone rather well for me so far, failing at trying. I recommend it.”

He laughed, short and real, the first proper laugh she had heard from him in two days, and something in her chest loosened at the sound of it.

“I want to stop avoiding him,” Gregory said.

“He would like that. So would I, if I am honest. He’s too small to remember, but I think some memories stick with you. I don’t want you to miss out on this part of his life.”

The music was slowing, the dance drawing toward its close, and he did not let go of her hand when the final note sounded, only stood there a moment longer than strictly proper, in full view of the room, in full view of every whispering lady with a fan. “Phillipa. Thank you. For saying what you said, even though I made it very difficult for you to say it.”

“You are welcome,” she said. “Try not to make it quite so difficult next time.”

“I will try.”

They walked off the floor together, his hand still at the small of her back, and if the whispers had not entirely stopped, Phillipa found, for the first time that evening, that she did not much mind them.

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CHAPTER 15

“We still don’t have any reliable leads.”

Gregory had gotten an adress from an old letter of his sister’s, found tucked at the back of a drawer he had not opened in two years, a single line mentioning a friend, a “Miss C.,” who had helped her find lodgings when she first left London proper.

It led them, after a confused hour of asking after a Miss Pleckley at three wrong houses on the same crooked street, to a milliner’s shop that had changed hands twice since the address was current, where a harried young woman behind the counter knew nothing of any Clara at all and seemed, if anything, faintly alarmed that a duke had come asking.

“I do apologize for troubling you,” Gregory said, and left a card he did not expect to be used, and stepped back out into the street with Ronan beside him and a fresh weight of frustration settling over the old, familiar one.

“A dead end,” Ronan observed, not unkindly.

“One of several I expect before the day is through.” Gregory consulted the direction he had, at considerable expense, extracted from a runner who claimed some knowledge of the poorer lodging houses east of Cheapside. “There is one more address. If this proves as fruitless as the last, I do not know that I have any further threads to pull.”

“Then we shall hope it does not.”

It was, in the end, the second address that yielded the landlady, and the news of Clara’s flight, and the small cold certainty that had settled in Gregory’s chest ever since and had not entirely left him. But it was the first, fruitless stop that stayed with him longer than he might have expected, standing afterward on the pavement outside the shuttered shop.

“Do you think we will have any more leads?” said Gregory, and knocked briskly on a door in a street somewhere in the poorer, though reaches of London east.

“We can only work with what we have,” Ronan replied.

The door opened at last, on a chain, revealing a sliver of a woman’s face, elderly and suspicious, framed by a cap gone gray with washing. “We don’t want any,” she began.

“I am not selling anything, madam. I am looking for a young woman who once lodged here. Miss Clara Pleckley.”

The chain rattled off with surprising speed. The door opened wider to reveal a small, cluttered front room and a landlady of perhaps sixty, arms folded, regarding Gregory with the particular hostility reserved for gentlemen who came asking after young women who owed money.

“Gone,” she said flatly. “A week since, in the middle of the night, with three weeks owing and not so much as a note. If you find her, sir, you may tell her from me that I have said worse things about better tenants.”