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He did not, she was beginning to understand, trust her. That was what stung. She could have borne his sorrow. She could have borne almost anything, so long as he let her be in it with him.

And beneath the anger, more quietly, something else.

On the fifth morning she went to St. Anthony’s, because it was the one place in London where she knew precisely what was wanted of her. Mrs. Fairley met her at the gate with flour on her apron and a child on each hip.

“He has not been back, Your Grace,” she said at once, before Phillipa could ask. “The gentleman who asked after you. Not once since that morning.”

“Thank God.” She meant it more than she wished to show. “Please tell me the moment he does.”

“I have told the boys at the gate. They are to run for me if any stranger so much as looks at the fence.”

Phillipa smiled, and then, because Joan had arrived at her skirts and was tugging with immense determination, she knelt in the mud and allowed herself to be shown a tooth. It was loose. It was, Joan informed her, the third she had ever owned to lose, and she planned to keep it in her pocket with the peppermint.

Afterward, in the cluttered office, she laid out Augusta’s idea to Mrs. Fairley as plainly as she could: a proper subscription, a committee, an annual ball; every house in London that took in children to be visited and counted and helped. She had expected the matron to be pleased. She had not expected her to put her apron over her face.

“I beg your pardon, Your Grace,” came the muffled voice, after a moment. “It is only that I have waited eleven years for someone to say that.”

On the fifth night, she did not go to bed. She sat in the dark of the drawing room with a book open on her knee and did not read it, and watched the hands of the clock creep toward midnight. She heard him come in at a quarter to one. She heard the front door, and the low murmur of the butler, and his tread on the stair, quick and light, going past the drawing room door without pausing. She did not call out. She had meant to. She sat with her hand pressed against her mouth and listened to him go by, and hated herself, and hated him, and did not move.

I miss him, she thought.

It was absurd. She had known him only a few months. She had married him for reasons that had nothing to do with wanting his company. But there it was, plain and unlovely and true, sitting in her chest like a stone.

She missed the way he laughed at Duncan’s stories. She missed the sound of his pen scratching in the study, and his voice reading the newspaper aloud in the evenings while the baby kicked at his boots. She missed being looked at across a table by a man who listened as if what she said were interesting.

She missed her husband.

“You are going to break my wrist,” said Ronan.

“Then guard it.”

The long gallery was filled with the sound of steel clattering against each other.

Gregory had convinced his friend for a fencing match, rather he had been insistent on one.

But it wasn’t a friendly one, and he found that he had been taking all of his frustrations out through it, not once letting Ronan enjoy himself in the slightest.

Nor did he smile, even once. Gregory was being ruthless, perhaps all for the wrong reasons.

Ronan disengaged, stepped clear, and lowered his point. “Enough of this.”

“I am not tired.”

“I am.” He pulled off his mask and wiped his forehead with the back of his glove. “Also, you have been trying to run me through for a quarter of an hour, and I should like to know what I have done.”

Gregory stood a moment with his chest heaving. Then, slowly, he put up his blade. He pulled off his own mask, his hair plastered to his forehead, and there were hollows under his eyes that had not been there a week ago.

“It’s nothing you have done,” he sighed after a moment. Of course, it had been a rhetorical question. “I’ve not slept well.”

Ronan looked at him as though he had stated the obvious.

“You have not slept for a week. I have seen you at the gentlemans club, where you sit at a table with a glass in front of you but do not drink it. You leave before anyone else has finished their cards.” Ronan set down his foil on the bench. “Augusta says Phillipa has not been seen at any of the tea tables, that she is a great deal busier than she was.”

“Phillipa is well.”

“And what of yourself?”

“I am well too.”