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“Miss Theodosia is dead, Your Grace.”

There was not much in the world that could prepare a brother to hear those words. Nothing.

But somehow, he had known it in his body for weeks.

It had been the only explanation. He knew his sister well enough that she would have written to him, no matter what the circumstance was. She had never been one to become a stranger like that, and the fact that he hadn’t heard a word from her…

Well, it had already made him suspect the worst.

“When?” he asked, his voice sounded far away.

“Six months, near enough. She never recovered from the birth, Your Grace, and there was so much blood, and the doctor said...” Clara stopped and shook her head. “She held on for the baby’s sake. For a while but she was so tired. She died in the night, I was with her.”

Greogory closed his eyes. The imagery was too much for him to bear, but he had learned that a man couldn’t express his emotions out in the open. Whatever he felt internally, he had to deal with later. Right now, he needed to show strength.

“She would not name him. I asked her, again and again. So I called him the baby,” she looked down at the bread in her hand. “I think she was waiting for you, Your Grace. I think she hoped that you might do it.”

He nodded once, that was all he could manage.

It was like being struck below the ribs. There was no other way to describe it. The air went out of him, and the little tea room seemed to tilt very slightly to one side. He put his hand flat on the table and kept it there.

Six months.

Six months, in which he had ridden in the park, and signed papers, and danced at a ball, and lived his life. Six months in which his sister had been in the ground, and he had not known.

He wanted, more than he had wanted anything in his life, to put his head on his arms and let it come. But if he let himself go now, he might not get the chance to get the information that he required.

Not yet, he told it. Not until I have finished this.

“I need to ask you about the man,” he said, and then corrected himself after a moment, “The father.”

Clara’s face darkened.

“I… I don’t know much about him expect that he noticed her. And she noticed him noticing, and I think that was all it took.”

“And when she was with child… where was he?”

“He was gone within the month.” Her hands closed on the cloth. “She waited for him, thinking he had been delayed and I did not have the heart to tell her. I stayed. I would not have known where else to go, but I would have stayed regardless.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I would like to know his name.”

Clara looked up. He had expected reluctance, fear. What he saw was something closer to relief, as though she had been holding it a very long while and had been waiting for someone to ask.

She told him.

It meant nothing to him. That was the worst of it. A man had taken his sister out of his house and left her to die, and Gregory had never so much as heard his name.

He took out his purse. Then, thinking better of it, he took out the leather wallet from his inner coat and drew out every note in it, and laid them in a neat stack beside her untouched plate.

“Your Grace, no,” she said. “I cannot.”

“There is nothing on earth I can give you that is the equal of what you’ve done for me already, so you must let me give you what I have.” He pushed the notes gently toward her. “Please. If you need anything more, send to Brawnhite House and ask for me. You will not be turned away.”

She was crying openly now, “She spoke of you,” she said. “At the end she said you were the only one who was ever good to her.”

He could not answer that.

Instead, he rose, and bowed to her, and walked out of the tea room, and out into London’s streets, not stopping until he had reached the river.