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Phillipa looked up. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that a wall built by one person is rarely brought down by the other alone. If you want him to trust you with what he is carrying, he will need to see that you trust him with something of your own first. It need not be large. It need only be true.” Augusta smiled, a little wry. “I have found, in my limited experience of these things, that a man who feels he is the only one being asked to be brave will very rarely manage it.”

“I am not certain I have anything left worth calling brave,” Phillipa admitted. “I gave away most of my courage on the subject of Ravenhill, and have been rationing the rest very carefully ever since.”

“Nonsense. You walked away from a wedding four hundred strong because it was not right for you, and you have not once looked back on it with regret. You have courage enough, Phillipa, in great abundant supply. You have simply been spending it everywhere but on yourself.” Augusta reached for the teapot and refilled both their cups, unhurried, giving the words room to settle. “There is a particular kind of bravery in letting someone see you before you are entirely certain they will like what they find. I do not think you have tried that one yet. Not with him.”

Phillipa turned this over for the rest of the drive home, in a carriage that had gone very quiet once the goodbyes were said. She thought of stars, and pears, and gardens, and of a hundred small truths she had never once offered anyone, because no one had ever asked, and wondered, with a flutter of something that was not quite fear, whether she had the courage to hand one over freely.

She did not manage it that night. The opportunity came and went too quickly. Gregory saw her to her door as he always did, and lifted her gloveless hand to his lips in the customary parting courtesy, and the touch of his mouth to her knuckles sent a warmth up her arm that stole every carefully rehearsed word from her head at once.

“Gregory,” she said, as he turned to go.

He turned back. “Yes?”

She opened her mouth. Nothing came.

He waited. The distance between them had somehow, without either of them quite choosing it, grown small. She was aware of the lamplight on his face, and the particular green of his eyes in it, and the way his gaze had dropped, for just a moment, to her mouth.

“Phillipa,” he said, low, and it was not a question at all, and her whole body leaned toward the sound of her own name in his voice as though pulled on a string.

From the nursery window above them, faint through the glass, came the unmistakable rising cry of a baby who had woken and did not care for the world he had woken into.

The spell broke as cleanly as a dropped glass.

“Goodnight,” said Phillipa, and fled up the steps before either of them could say anything further, leaving Gregory standing alone in the lamplight with his hand still faintly warm from hers.

CHAPTER 16

“You are not asleep either, then.”

Phillipa startled so badly she very nearly dropped her shawl. She had come out into the garden a little before one in the morning, unable to lie still in her bed a moment longer, and had not expected to find her husband already there, seated on the old stone bench beneath the pear tree with his head tipped back to the sky and a glass of brandy, untouched, balanced on his knee.

“I could not sleep,” she admitted, drawing her shawl tighter. “I did not think anyone else would be awake at this hour.”

“Nor did I, evidently.” He looked at her for a long moment in the moonlight, and something in his face, tired and unguarded in a way she rarely saw it, made her chest ache. “Will you sit? I promise not to bite.”

She sat, at a careful distance, and for a while neither of them said anything at all. Above them the sky had cleared of the day’s clouds, and the stars had come out in their thousands, cold and bright and very far away.

“My father used to teach me their names,” Phillipa said, at last, into the quiet. It came out before she had quite decided to say it, which she supposed was rather the point of what Augusta had told her. “On nights like this one. He knew a good many of them. We would sit in this very garden and he would point out Orion’s belt, and tell me the same terrible pun about it every single time, and I would laugh every single time as though I had never heard it.”

“What happened to it?”

“I grew up.” She said it lightly, but there was an old ache beneath the lightness that she did not try very hard to hide. “There was never time for it after I turned twelve or so. Between the pianoforte and the dancing master and the endless etiquette, an hour spent looking at stars came to seem rather a waste of an evening a young lady ought to have spent bettering herself for the marriage market. And it was not precisely proper, in any case, for a girl to be out in a garden after dark.” She glanced sideways at him. “Rather like now, I suppose.”

“Rather exactly like now.”

“I had forgotten how much I missed it,” she said quietly, “until just this moment.”

He was silent for a while, turning the brandy glass slowly in his fingers without drinking from it. When he spoke again, his voice had gone somewhere else, somewhere further off.

“Theodosia never wanted any of those lessons,” he said. “Not the etiquette, not the dancing, not the pianoforte, though she had a fine ear for it when she troubled to sit still long enough. She was a wild thing as a girl. She led three governesses to resignation before she was ten, and caused, I believe, a small fire in the schoolroom that was never satisfactorily explained, though I have my suspicions.” A faint, sad smile touched his mouth. “None of it earned her anything but trouble, in the end. And yet she went on doing it.”

“Why?”

He was quiet for a long moment. “I think,” he said at last, “that children will do a great many strange and reckless things for the smallest scrap of their parents’ attention. Even bad attention. Even a scolding is a kind of being seen.” His jaw tightened. “I did not understand that at the time. I have come to understand it a good deal better since.”

Phillipa turned this over carefully, and did not press further, though the thought sat with her, small and sharp, that whatever guilt he carried over the child upstairs had roots buried somewhere in that schoolroom fire and the governesses who had fled from it. She wanted, very badly, to ask. She made herself hold the question instead, and offer something of her own in its place.