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“Please do not downplay it,” Her voice shook. “You are white as a sheet.”

He looked at her then, properly, for the first time since they had come through that door, and something in his exhausted face softened despite everything.

“Come,” he said. “Let us go and see to it, before I bleed on the nursery floor and frighten my son all over again.”

“Your Graces.” Ronan caught them in the corridor before they had gone ten steps, Augusta just behind him, both of them clearly having abandoned whatever they had been doing the moment the first whisper of trouble reached them.

His eyes went straight to the blood on Gregory’s sleeve and his face drained of color. “What has happened? We heard shouting from the floor above and then Drummons came through with two footmen.”

“It is handled,” Gregory said. “Dornet is locked in the blue room, and the constables are being sent for. I will tell you everything, I promise you that, but not standing in this corridor.”

“Go, then. I will see to the ball. No one downstairs need know a thing beyond the fact that the host has had some small accident and will rejoin them shortly.” Ronan’s hand found Gregory’s shoulder, brief and fierce. “I am glad you are standing.”

“So am I, rather.”

Augusta had already turned to Phillipa, taking both her hands, searching her face. “And you? Are you hurt?”

“No. No, I am only...” Phillipa found that her voice had begun, finally, now that the danger had passed, to shake badly. “I am only very glad it is over.”

“Go and see to your husband,” Augusta said gently, and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I will manage the rest of it.”

In Gregory’s bedroom, Phillipa set a basin of water on the nightstand with shaking hands, and turned back his torn sleeve.

The cut ran shallow but long along his forearm, more frightening in its length than in its depth, and she pressed a folded cloth against it and held it there, hard, the way she had seen the doctor do for Theodore’s fever all those weeks ago, as though she might simply will the bleeding to stop through sheer determination.

“You are going to be perfectly well,” she told him, for perhaps the fourth time, “I am sure of it.”

She was trying to soothe herself, maybe even more than she was trying to soothe him and somehow, repeating it over and over was supposed to accomplish that.

“You don’t have to keep saying that, sweetheart.”

She blushed deeply at the word he had used for her. “It’s not just for you. I’m trying to make myself feel better, too.”

“I’m the one who got attacked,” he gave her a wry, amused smile.

And I’m the one who is in love with you. “It hurts me just as bad.”

“Mhm,” he mused. He was looking at her intently again, which she was almost painfully aware of. “Let’s be glad that he didn’t make enough damage.”

“I feel foolish for not trusting you fully before,” she sighed, regret seeping into her tone. “I had just… I had assumed that he wouldn’t stoop to this level, and there might be good in him, still.”

“Not everyone is worth the kindness you extend to them,” he said after a moment.

“I’m learning this lesson from you,” she said. “Please, let me clean you now.

He let her be careful, and sat quite still, letting her clean the wound and bind it properly with strips torn from a clean shirt. At last she tied off the final knot and sat back to look at her work, she caught sight, for the first time, of the state of her own gown.

The deep blue silk was ruined down one side, soaked through dark with his blood.

“Oh,” she gasped, and Gregory’s eyes followed the stain.

She pressed her fingers to the stain as though she might simply rub it away by wanting to. “Oh, no.Your dress…..your lovely dress.”

“It is only a dress,” Gregory replied, not understanding the significance of it. “Though you might have to throw it away now. Shall I call the maid to help you get changed into something fresh?”

He was talking so normally, and didn’t notice just how distressed the discovery had made Phillipa until she started shaking her head.

“It is not only a dress. It was the first thing you ever gave me, and I wanted to keep it, and now it is ruined.” She knew, even as she said it, how foolish it sounded worrying over silk but that didn’t stop her from feeling how she did.