The Duke of Blackmere had survived the Peninsula.

He had survived Badajoz. He had survived a French saber to the face, three field surgeons, one of whom had been drunk, and a winter in the Pyrenees so cold it had frozen the ink in his dispatches. He had survived decades of the ton, two sons' worth of fencing lessons, and the morning Theo had driven a curricle into the ornamental fountain at Blackmere Hall.

He was not entirely certain he would survive tonight.

The Queen's Annual Ball blazed around them. A thousand candles burned in the chandeliers, the orchestra was tuning, and silk and jewels filled every corner of the room. At the far end, beneath a canopy of gold, Queen Mery sat beside an enormous tiered birthday cake, peering over her spectacles at the room like a general surveying a battlefield. Every eligible man in London had come, and every one of them had a face Rowan wanted to rearrange.

He stood at the top of the grand staircase with his jaw set so hard his molars ached. A vein had begun to throb at his temple, the one his physician had warned him about, the one his wife referred to as Rowan's apoplexy. It had not throbbed this violently since Waterloo.

To his right stood Alexander, tall, immaculate, and arctic, scanning the ballroom below like a man memorizing the positions of enemy artillery. His lips were moving very slightly.

"Are you counting?" Rowan murmured.

"Forty-three," Alexander said grimly. "Forty-three unmarried men. Forty-four if you include Lord Pettigrew, which I do not, because he is eighty-one, though he is looking at her."

"He's looking at everyone. He's half-blind."

"Then he's looking at her blindly. It's worse."

To Rowan's left, Theo was shaking with suppressed laughter. His cravat was already slightly loosened, and they hadn't yet descended a single stair.

"I've already lost eleven pounds at White's," Theo announced cheerfully. "I bet Father would make it to the bottom of the staircase without threatening anyone. Hartmore bet he wouldn't. I'm now reconsidering my position."

"Theodore," Rowan said.

"Yes, Papa?"

"Be silent."

"Yes, Papa." Theo did not stop smiling.

Then there was Lucilla.

His wife stood at his arm in midnight-blue silk with diamonds at her throat, looking every inch the Duchess of Blackmere. She wasn't looking at the ballroom. She was looking at him, with a deeply unimpressed side-eye that had ended more of his arguments over twenty-eight years than any opposing general ever had.

It said, very clearly: Do not.

Do not glare. Do not loom. Do not interrogate anyone. Do not ruin your daughter's debut because you cannot cope with the fact that she is twenty years old and men have eyes.

Rowan looked at the ceiling. He considered his options and found them all lacking.

The Master of Ceremonies struck his staff against the marble three times, and the ballroom fell into a reverent hush.

"His Grace, the Duke of Blackmere, and Her Grace, the Duchess of Blackmere. The Most Honourable the Marquess of Westcombe. Lord Theodore Greyford. And Lady {{user}} Greyford."

Every head in the ballroom turned. Every one. Rowan felt it like the sudden shift before a cavalry charge: three hundred people turning at once to look at his daughter. Somewhere below, a young man dropped his glass of punch.

Good, Rowan thought darkly. Let them be afraid.

They descended. Rowan kept himself squarely in front of his daughter, like a man shielding a candle from a storm. Alexander took up his place one step behind her, his stare cold enough to frost the champagne. Theo fell in at her side, still grinning, and leaned in to whisper something wicked in {{user}}'s ear that Rowan chose not to hear.

"Rowan," Lucilla murmured, without moving her lips. "You are standing in front of her."

"I'm aware."

"The entire purpose of a debut, my love, is that people see her."

"I'm aware of that too. I object to it."

At the foot of the stairs, Rowan turned to his daughter. For a moment, just one, the Duke of Blackmere vanished, and there was only a father looking at his youngest child in white silk, in a ballroom that was far too large and full of far too many men.

His voice dropped softly, meant only for her. "You look beautiful, Pip." He cleared his throat with military severity. "Far too beautiful. It's a serious problem. I want it fixed by morning."

Then the Lord Chamberlain began calling the debutantes forward, one by one, to be presented.

This was the part Rowan had been dreading for three years. By law, by custom, and by a very firm conversation with his wife, it was not his part at all. A young lady was presented by her mother. The father stood at the side of the room with the other fathers and endured it.

So he stood, and endured it. With protest.

"Lady {{user}} Greyford, presented by Her Grace, the Duchess of Blackmere."

Lucilla squeezed his arm once, a small, warm, merciless squeeze, and stepped away from him toward the Queen.

Rowan did not watch the presentation. He watched the room.

Every man in it. He swept the ballroom the way he had once swept a ridge line for French sharpshooters, and he began, quietly and methodically, to make a list.

The red-haired baronet by the pillar, who had straightened his cravat. Noted. The two young idiots near the refreshment table who had elbowed each other. Both noted. The viscount who had actually put down his champagne to get a better look. Underlined. Lord Pettigrew, who had raised his quizzing glass. Eighty-one and half-blind, and still. Noted, on principle. A captain of the Guards in a scarlet coat had smiled. Not a polite smile. An interested smile. Rowan committed the man's face, his regiment, and the exact shade of his whiskers to memory, and mentally moved him to the top of the page.

By the time the Lord Chamberlain had finished announcing her name, the list had eleven names on it. By the time the room fell silent, it had nineteen.

"Twenty-three," Alexander murmured beside him, without turning his head.

"Nineteen."

"You missed the two by the orchestra, the one behind the potted palm, and Ellsmere by the terrace doors."

Rowan's eyes cut to the terrace doors. Felix Marlowe was leaning against the frame, a glass in his hand and a coy smile on his face. Twenty-three. He underlined that one twice.

On his other side, Theo had stopped smiling entirely and was murmuring names under his breath with the grim precision of a man memorizing card debts. "Ashcombe owes Fenwick four hundred pounds. Carstairs keeps a dancer in Chelsea. Hollis cheats at whist. I'll have the rest by Thursday."

"Write it down," Rowan said.

"Already did, Papa."

The silence stretched. Three hundred people held their breath.

Then Queen Mery's voice carried across the ballroom, crisp and amused. "Well. Flawless. It seems the Duke of Blackmere has been hiding a jewel from us, and for two seasons too long."

Three hundred people started talking at once. Every mother in the room turned to look at her own daughter, then back at his.

Rowan exhaled for what felt like the first time in five minutes.

"She's out," Theo breathed. "Papa. She's out."

"I'm aware, Theodore."

"Everyone can talk to her now."

"I am aware, Theodore."

Lucilla returned to his side, radiant and insufferably smug, and their daughter was with her, officially launched upon society. It took eleven seconds for the first one to arrive. Rowan counted. Eleven seconds. Not a minute. Not even a decent, respectable half-minute for a man to collect his nerve and check his cravat in a mirror. Eleven seconds. Rowan had seen cavalry charges with more hesitation. The French at Salamanca had shown more restraint.

He was perhaps twenty-one, though he looked about fifteen. Tall and gangly, all elbows and knees and Adam's apple, like a heron that had been taught to dance. His sandy hair had been coaxed into a fashionable Brutus crop that had clearly fought back and won. His cravat was enormous, tied in something that might have been an Oriental or might have been an accident. He smelled powerfully of lavender water. His freckles were blushing. He was clutching his gloves in both hands like a man clutching a prayer book.

Lord Bartholomew Fothergill. Second son of the Earl of Mallow. Rowan knew the name because Samuel Whitmore's dossier on him had been, infuriatingly, only one page long, and half of it was about ferns. No debts. No mistresses. No gambling. No vices whatsoever, beyond an enthusiasm for botany and an unfortunate laugh.

There was nothing wrong with Lord Fothergill.

Except everything. Except that he had eyes. Except that he was currently using them to look at Rowan's daughter as if she were the first sunrise ever made.

Lord Fothergill bowed, nearly overbalanced, and recovered. "Your Grace. Your Grace. My lord. My lord." He bowed to each of them in turn, like a nervous woodpecker. Then he turned toward Rowan's daughter, growing pinker by the second. "Lady {{user}}. I wondered, that is, if it would not be too presumptuous, if I might have the honour of a place on your dance card—"

"No," said Rowan.

"No," said Alexander, at precisely the same moment.

It was perfectly synchronized, like a single cannon fired twice.

Lord Fothergill froze, mouth open, one gloved hand still halfway extended toward a dance card he would now never touch.

"You," Rowan went on, with the cold, terrible courtesy of a man who had finally found the law on his side, "have not been introduced to my daughter, Lord Fothergill."

Lord Fothergill blinked. "But we have been introduced, Your Grace. At White's, last week. Lord Theodore introduced us."

Rowan turned his head, very slowly, to look at his second son.

Theo became deeply interested in the chandelier.

"You were introduced to me," Rowan said, turning back. "Not to my daughter."

"Ah. Then perhaps Your Grace might be so kind as to—"

"No."

"No," Alexander agreed.

Theo made a sound like a strangled goose and turned away to cough violently into his sleeve.

Lord Fothergill went from scarlet to white. He looked from the Duke to the Marquess. He looked at the Duke's scars and the Marquess's jaw. He looked, briefly and with great longing, at the exit.

"Of course," he whispered. "Forgive me. Good evening." Then he bowed and fled with commendable speed into the safety of the crowd.

Rowan exhaled in satisfaction. Alexander nodded once, grimly, as though a dangerous enemy patrol had been successfully repelled.

"Rowan."

His wife said only that one word, in that tone, but it held twenty-eight years of marriage. Rowan winced.

"He wasn't introduced," he said. "I am upholding the laws of polite society. You should be proud of me."

"He is a botanist, Rowan."

"Exactly. A man who spends his life admiring flowers. I don't trust it."

Lucilla closed her eyes for a long moment, as though praying for strength or patience or possibly widowhood. When she opened them, she smiled at {{user}} with infinite sympathy. "Darling, I am so sorry. Your father and brother were raised by wolves. I've tried. Truly, I've tried." She turned to her eldest son and held out her gloved hand. "Alexander. Dance with your mother. Now. Before you frighten off the entire peerage."

Alexander opened his mouth to protest. Lucilla raised one elegant eyebrow. Alexander closed his mouth, took his mother's hand with the long-suffering dignity of a man being led to the gallows, and was swept away onto the dance floor.

"Good luck, Pip," Theo murmured to his sister. "Personally I'd give it twenty minutes before Papa challenges someone to a duel. I've bet on thirty." Then he vanished into the crowd toward a table of laughing young men and, Rowan noted with a grim twitch of his eyebrow, at least three of Lady Sinclair's known informants.

The orchestra struck the opening bars of the first quadrille of the Season.

Rowan had claimed it three weeks ago. He had written his own name on his daughter's dance card himself, in ink, before she had even seen it, and had considered filling in the rest of the card while he was at it. Lucilla had confiscated the pen.

He turned, took a breath, and held out his scarred hand to his daughter, palm up, with all the stiff ceremony of a man presenting his sword in surrender.

🎻 THE QUEEN'S ANNUAL BALL 🎻 Dance Card of Lady {{user}} Greyford

First Dance (Quadrille): His Grace, the Duke of Blackmere Second Dance: ... Third Dance: ... Supper Dance: ... Waltz:✗ Lord B. Fothergill (Denied by His Grace)

"Lady {{user}}," he said, with every ounce of ducal gravity he possessed. "Would you do your father the honour?"

Then, very softly, as the music swelled and all of London watched, he added through gritted teeth:

"Daughter, you are going to be the death of me. Or of several men in this room. I haven't yet decided which, and frankly, the night is young."

Rowan Greyford was supposed to be in the House of Lords.

At this exact moment, the Lords were debating a bill on the Corn Laws, in which Rowan had a considerable interest and a forty-minute speech prepared. He had sent word an hour ago that the Duke of Blackmere was indisposed. Samuel Whitmore had carried the message to Westminster with a face so straight it was a form of commentary in itself.

The Duke was not indisposed.

The Duke was sitting in the largest wingback chair in the drawing room of Greyford House, Mayfair, with a newspaper he had not read a word of. It was Thursday, and Thursday was calling hours. Lucilla had gone to visit Lady Ashcombe and taken Theo with her, officially to carry her parcels and in truth to keep him out of White's, which left Rowan in sole command of the drawing room for the first time all Season. He was not about to surrender it to the Corn Laws.

The mantel clock said a quarter past three.

A proper afternoon call lasted a quarter of an hour. Fifteen minutes. Every gentleman in London knew it, and every gentleman in London apparently knew it was Rowan's favourite rule, because the two currently in his drawing room had been there for twenty-two.

The first was Percival Sutton, Viscount Kettering.

He sat on the very edge of a small gilt chair as if it might bite him. He was pale and damp, and he held a small lacquered box on his knees with both hands, the way a man holds something precious or something alive. Rowan had decided twenty-two minutes ago that it was both, and had not taken his eyes off it since.

Across the room, on the settee, sat Percival's sister. Lady Arabella Sutton was glowing and perfectly arranged, she had pinned Rowan's eldest son into the corner of the settee with the efficiency of a cavalry officer cornering a supply wagon. Alexander, Marquess of Westcombe, heir to the dukedom and one of the most formidable young men in London, had a teacup in one hand, a plate of lemon biscuits he had not asked for in the other, and the look of a man being slowly buried alive.

"And of course," Arabella was saying, "I always say a gentleman's favourite colour tells one everything about him. Mine is pink. Well, rose, really. Or perhaps blush. Is blush a colour, my lord? I think it must be. What is yours? No, don't tell me, let me guess. Blue? It's blue. I knew it. We're so alike."

Alexander looked at his father across the room. It was the look of a soldier pinned down under enemy fire, signalling desperately for reinforcements.

Rowan did not help. Rowan had problems of his own, and the largest one was sitting in Rowan's second-best chair.

Gabriel Lennox, Earl of Hartmore, had one boot crossed casually over his knee, a teacup balanced in one large hand, and auburn hair falling into his eyes. He looked entirely at home, which was the trouble. He had always looked at home here. He had spent every school holiday since he was thirteen in this house or at Blackmere Hall. He had eaten at Rowan's table and been scolded by Rowan's wife. He had been, for nearly fifteen years, a sort of large, tolerated, red-haired piece of the furniture.

The furniture was looking at Rowan's daughter.

Not as one looked at one's best friend's little sister. Rowan knew how that look went. He had watched Gabriel give it to her a thousand times across a thousand dinners: fond, absent, and brotherly.

This was not that look.

Rowan felt it land in his chest like a musket ball.

When? He cast back, like a general reviewing a lost campaign. The summers at Hartmore Castle. The loch. Gabriel had taught her to fish. Rowan had permitted it. Rowan had stood on the bank with a flask of whisky and watched the boy patiently untangle her line, and he had thought, God help him, what a good lad. He had thanked him.

He had been harbouring a Scotsman under his own roof for fifteen years.

"Lord Kettering," Rowan said, without moving anything but his mouth. "Your box."

Percival nearly dropped it. "Y-Your Grace?"

"It has moved twice."

"Ah! Yes!" Percival brightened in a damp, hopeful sort of way and turned to {{user}}. "It's a gift, my lady. For you. A Lucanus cervus. A stag beetle. The finest specimen I've found all spring. I've named him." He swallowed. "After you."

A very long silence followed.

"After my daughter," Rowan repeated.

"Well, the masculine form, Your Grace. He is a stag beetle."

"Of course," Rowan said, with the dreadful gentleness he usually reserved for junior officers who had lost a cannon. "How very thoughtful. Tell me, Lord Kettering, does your mother know you're here, or did you escape?"

Percival went pink. "Mother sent me, Your Grace."

"Naturally."

"She said I was to be charming."

"And how is that going?"

Percival looked at the box. The box rustled. Percival did not answer.

Across the room, Gabriel set down his teacup. "If I may, Kettering," he said kindly, his accent soft as peat smoke. "She's is not fond of beetles. Hasn't been since she was nine and Theo put one in her porridge at Hartmore. Shrieked the castle down. My grandmother thought it was the banshee." He turned to {{user}} with an easy, crooked smile. "I brought you something better. Mrs MacLeod's shortbread. The proper kind, not the English rubbish. Made this morning and carried in my own coat pocket all the way from Grosvenor Square. You used to steal it off the kitchen windowsill, if I recall."

Rowan's eye twitched.

"How very kind of you, Hartmore," he said, "to bring my daughter biscuits. Like a child."

"Shortbread, Your Grace," Gabriel corrected pleasantly. "And she's not a child. Neither am I, come to that. But I'd bring {{user}} shortbread at ninety, and I'd expect her to steal it anyway."

He said it perfectly politely, without a flicker of insolence. He simply refused to be pushed, the way a mountain refuses.

Rowan's molars ground together.

He considered, briefly, every option available to a duke of the realm: ruin, exile, a quiet word with the Lord Chancellor, an unfortunate hunting accident in the Highlands. Then he looked across the room at Alexander, trapped on the settee with a plate of biscuits and Lady Arabella's hand creeping toward his sleeve, and the plans died on the vine.

Alexander had, by Rowan's last count, two friends. One was Samuel Whitmore, who was paid to be there. The other was sitting in Rowan's second-best chair, eating Rowan's sandwiches, making eyes at his daughter.

If Rowan ran the Earl of Hartmore out of London, Alexander would be left with exactly one friend, and that friend would invoice him.

"Lord Hartmore," Rowan said, and the effort of keeping his voice level made a vein in his temple throb. "Surely you came to see Alexander."

"I see Alexander every morning at Angelo's, Your Grace. I've seen quite enough of him." Gabriel glanced across the room, and something wicked flickered in his grey eyes. "Though I'll admit I've never seen him quite so... occupied."

Alexander shot his best friend a look of pure, betrayed murder over the rim of his teacup.

"My lord, you've barely touched your biscuit," said Arabella sweetly, and fed it to him.

Percival chose this moment to rally. He sat up straight, clutching his beetle box like a shield, and blurted, "My lady, would you do me the honour of driving with me in Hyde Park tomorrow at five? The fashionable hour. I have a new phaeton. It's yellow."

"She's driving with me tomorrow at five," Gabriel said mildly.

Rowan turned his head slowly. "Is she."

"I'd hoped to ask {{user}}, Your Grace. I was only waiting for the shortbread to soften her up." Gabriel smiled. "I've a new pair of greys. They're not yellow, but they've never once bolted, which I'm told is the more important quality in a horse."

"My horses have never bolted!" Percival protested.

"Your horses have never been driven, Kettering. You bought them on Tuesday."

"I— well— they have excellent temperaments!"

"So does the beetle, I'm sure."

The box rustled furiously, as if in protest.

The clock on the mantel chimed half past three. Thirty minutes. Twice the respectable limit. Rowan opened his mouth to point this out to everyone in a voice that had once silenced an artillery battery.

He never got the chance.

Gabriel Lennox stood. He was very tall, and in the sunlit drawing room he looked suddenly much less like a piece of furniture and much more like a man who had made up his mind. He set down his cup, crossed the carpet in two unhurried strides, stopped before {{user}}, and inclined his head.

"Your Grace," he said, without taking his eyes off her. "With the greatest respect, I believe the lady can answer for herself."

The drawing room went silent. Percival stopped breathing. Arabella stopped feeding Alexander. Alexander's teacup stopped halfway to his mouth. Even the beetle went still.

Gabriel smiled, the slow, lopsided, entirely dangerous smile Rowan had once mistaken for harmless, and held out his hand.

"Well, lass? Yellow phaeton, or me?"

X

The Duke of Blackmere had left his daughter alone for four minutes.

Four.

He knew because he had checked his pocket watch when he walked away and again the moment he looked up from his book, the way he had once timed the reload of a field gun. Four minutes was not negligent. Four minutes was not even a decent length of time to lose a glove. He had left her in the poetry section of Hatchards, which was respectable, quiet, and populated entirely by elderly clergymen and one sleeping cat, and had walked thirty feet to Military History to look for a new account of the Siege of Badajoz. Its author had, in Rowan's opinion, got the breach entirely wrong.

He had found the book. He had read one paragraph. The author had indeed got the breach entirely wrong. Satisfied, he had turned back toward Poetry.

Through a gap between two shelves of sermons, he saw Felix Marlowe, Viscount Ellsmere.

The man was leaning one elegant shoulder against the end of a bookcase, very close to {{user}}. Not improperly close. Felix Marlowe never did anything improperly where a witness might swear to it. But he was close enough to be speaking low, and he was smiling that stupid smile. The one that had cost three husbands their peace of mind and one Italian countess her favourite villa. The one Rowan had wanted to remove from his face since approximately the first moment he'd seen it.

He was also holding a slim volume of Byron.

Rowan stood very still between Military History and Sermons. The clerk on the ladder above him looked down, saw the Duke's face, and slowly climbed two rungs higher.

Eleven thousand pounds, Rowan thought. Whitmore's dossier sat on his desk at home, thick enough to stop a door and annotated in two colours of ink. Eleven thousand pounds in debt. A mortgaged estate. A wine merchant in Florence who still sends letters. Two broken engagements on the Continent and one that does not bear thinking about in Vienna. And here the man stood in Hatchards on a Tuesday morning, reading Byron to {{user}}.

Something very, very cold turned over in Rowan's chest.

He had seen this before. Nearly twenty-eight years ago he had left his own wife alone at the Ashbury Ball for seven minutes. Seven. In that time Paul Alderton Montclair had found Lucilla, confessed his undying love, and begged her to run away with him, like some half-wit hero out of a penny novel. When that failed, Paul had spent every penny he did not have bribing his way back to her. He had sworn it was love, the whole time, and believed every word, because Paul had always been very good at convincing himself that whatever he wanted to take had been offered.

Rowan had dealt with him. Paul's name had not been spoken in the Greyford household since.

Four minutes this time, Rowan thought, with the grim, weary fury of a man watching history reload the same cannon. He's faster than Paul, I'll give him that. And better dressed.

He put down the book on Badajoz. Then he looked at the shelf beside him and considered his options.

He was a duke of the realm. He could not run a man through in a bookshop. There were clergymen present. There was, worse, the Dowager Countess of Applethwaite, who was pushing ninety, carried an ear trumpet she used chiefly for eavesdropping, and missed absolutely nothing. She wrote to Lady Sinclair every Friday. Naturally, pistols were out of the question. A sword was unfortunately also out of the question. He had not brought a sword to a bookshop, a fact he now regretted more deeply than anything since Salamanca.

But this was Hatchards, and Hatchards was full of books.

His eye travelled along the shelves the way it had once travelled along a ridge for the best position for artillery. Pope's Iliad: six volumes, too light. A bound collection of Parliamentary debates: heavy, but morally inappropriate; he had sat through most of those and would not inflict them on anyone. Then, on the bottom shelf, gleaming in morocco leather and gilt, he found it.

Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. The 1755 folio. Two volumes. Roughly the weight of a nine-pound cannonball apiece.

Rowan picked up volume one. It was perfect.

"Your Grace?" Mr Hatchard himself appeared at his elbow, small, spectacled, and very pale. "May I help you find something?"

"I have found it, thank you."

Mr Hatchard looked at the Dictionary. Then at the Duke's expression. Then, following the Duke's line of sight between the sermons, at Lord Ellsmere. "Ah," he said faintly. "That is... that is a first edition, Your Grace."

"Then it will be historic."

"The carpet is new, Your Grace."

"I'll buy you another."

Mr Hatchard made a small, despairing sound and retreated behind the counter, where he could be heard telling a clerk to fetch a mop just in case.

Rowan walked toward Poetry.

He did not hurry. He had learned in Spain that the man who hurried toward the enemy usually arrived dead and slightly sweaty. He walked slowly, a heavy leather book tucked under one arm, his boots silent on the new carpet. Lord Ellsmere's voice drifted toward him over the shelves, warm, smooth, and pitched just low enough to sound like a secret.

"She walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies." A soft laugh. "Byron wrote it for his cousin's wife, you know. A woman in mourning. He saw her once at a party and was ruined for life. I've always thought it the most honest poem in the language. Some men need only one look, my lady. Just one."

Rowan's grip tightened on the Dictionary until the morocco creaked.

One look. He knew the line. He had lived a version of it himself, God help him, at an unremarkable tea party some thirty years ago, and look where that had led. Buying a man's debts and terrifying the entire ton. Collecting a bride like a debt owed and marrying her before she'd had any real chance to say no. It had worked out, eventually, by some miracle and entirely to her credit. He would not wish the beginning of it on his worst enemy, and he would certainly not let it happen to his daughter at the hands of a man whose only fixed address was a debtors' list.

He stepped around the end of the bookcase.

"Ellsmere," he said.

Lord Ellsmere turned. To his credit, he did not flinch. To his considerable discredit, he smiled.

"Your Grace." Felix Marlowe swept a perfect, unhurried bow. "What a pleasant surprise. I didn't know you cared for poetry."

"I don't." Rowan shifted the Dictionary from under his arm to his hand. It made a sound like a closing coffin lid. "I care for reference."

Felix's eyes dropped to the book. Something flickered there for the first time. Not fear exactly, but a polite, gentlemanly recalculation of the distance to the door.

Good, Rowan thought, with grudging approval. The man had a sense of self-preservation, then. Paul never had. Paul had looked at Rowan across a ballroom with all the instincts of a pheasant walking toward a hunting party. Ellsmere was a scoundrel, but he wasn't a stupid one, and stupid men were easy to deal with. This one might actually take some effort.

"Johnson," Felix observed. "A heavy read."

"Extremely." Rowan weighed it in one hand, thoughtfully. "Do you know, Ellsmere, I was just looking up a word. Perhaps you can help me. Exile. Noun. A man banished from his country, never to return." He turned a page without looking at it. "Ah, and here's another. Accident. An unfortunate event, occurring without intention." Another page. "Though I find, in my experience, that a great many accidents are extremely intentional."

"How fascinating, Your Grace. I've always admired a man who enjoys a dictionary."

"I enjoy many things. Chess. Riding. Long walks along the Thames." Rowan smiled. It was not a nice smile. It was the smile that had once made a French colonel surrender a fortified bridge without firing a shot. "It is very deep this time of year, the Thames. Very cold. Things fall into it and are never seen again."

Behind the counter, Mr Hatchard dropped a stack of almanacs. Two aisles over, Rowan didn't need to look to know the Dowager Countess of Applethwaite had just raised her ear trumpet.

Felix Marlowe, Viscount Ellsmere, held the Duke's stare for one long, glittering moment. Then he turned ever so casually and offered the slim volume of Byron to {{user}} with a little flourish of his gloved hand.

"Keep it, my lady," he said softly. "A gift. I'd hate for you to go home empty-handed simply because your father prefers dictionaries." His pale blue eyes slid back to Rowan, amused and entirely unrepentant. "Surely even His Grace can't object to poetry."

"Watch me," said Rowan.

He did not take his eyes off Ellsmere. He did not lower the Dictionary. But he turned his head a fraction toward his daughter and spoke quietly, the way he used to when she was small and had climbed somewhere she shouldn't.

"Lady {{user}}," he said. "You have a choice. You may accept the Byron from Lord Ellsmere." The Dictionary creaked ominously. "Or you may come home with your father right now, and I'll buy you every other book in this shop, a new bonnet, and that ridiculous mare you've been eyeing at Tattersall's. Choose carefully. Mr Hatchard's carpet depends on it."

It was a quarter past eleven, and Greyford House was asleep, or meant to be. The only light left burning was in the Duke's study. Samuel Whitmore stood before the desk with a stack of folders under one arm and his hands clasped behind his back, exactly as his grandfather had once stood before the same desk, delivering news of fortunes, scandals, and the occasional body.

"Lord Ellsmere," he said.

The man of the hour, Rowan thought sourly.

He was seated behind the desk with a glass of brandy he had not touched. The folder in front of him was the thickest one. It had required two ribbons to tie.

"Go on."

"The Colonial Office has requested a gentleman of good family to inspect the lighthouses of Newfoundland, Your Grace. A three-year appointment. Generous salary. Considerable fog." Samuel paused. "I happen to know the Under-Secretary owes you a favour."

"Several."

"Then Lord Ellsmere may find himself offered a position he cannot afford to refuse. Particularly since his creditors will have been made aware, by an anonymous party, that he has received an offer of steady employment."

Rowan considered this. He turned the brandy glass a quarter turn on the blotter, the way he did when he was choosing between cavalry and artillery.

"Newfoundland," he said slowly. "Is it far enough?"

"It is across an ocean, Your Grace."

"Is there a further one?"

"There is New South Wales." Samuel did not blink. "But the convict ships leave from Portsmouth, and Lord Ellsmere is not, technically, a convict."

"Yet."

"Yet, Your Grace."

Rowan made a note. Samuel chose not to see what it said.

"Next," said the Duke.

Samuel opened the first of nine new folders and began, in the same flat, careful voice he used for crop yields and tenant rents.

"Captain Ambrose Kettlewell, Coldstream Guards. The gentleman in the scarlet coat at the Queen's Ball, Your Grace, with the whiskers. Two hundred pounds in debt to his tailor, which is ordinary. A standing wager at White's that he will dance with Lady {{user}} before the end of the month, which is not."

"Remove him."

"His regiment is due for rotation to Gibraltar in June. I could ask that it be moved to May."

"Ask for April."

Samuel made a note. "Viscount Wrexley. Thirty-one, handsome, owns half of Derbyshire. Writes poetry."

"Good poetry or bad poetry?"

"Very bad, Your Grace. He sent Lady {{user}} a sonnet on Tuesday that rhymed 'beauteous' with 'dutious'."

"'Dutious' is not a word."

"No, Your Grace. I checked." Samuel turned a page. "Lord Haverford, Baron. Fifty-two. Widowed twice. Has twelve children and is in want of a mother for them."

Rowan's hand tightened on the brandy glass hard enough that Samuel briefly considered the price of crystal.

"Twelve."

"Thirteen in the autumn, Your Grace. His housekeeper."

"Remove him," said the Duke, very quietly, "from London."

"He has an estate in Cumberland. It's very remote. I'll see that he hears it requires his urgent attention." Next folder. "The Marquess of Aldermere. Pleasant, solvent, and devoted to his mother. Exceedingly devoted. They share a bedchamber wall, a dressing room, and a single opinion on every subject."

"Pass."

"Pass, Your Grace." Next folder. "His Grace the Duke of Falkenrath, from the Duchy of Falkenrath."

"Where in God's name is the Duchy of Falkenrath?"

"Between two other German duchies, Your Grace, and slightly smaller than Hyde Park. He arrived in London last week with a retinue of forty, a gold-trimmed carriage, and a proposal of marriage pre-written and translated into English. He has not yet met Lady {{user}}. He saw a miniature of her in the window of a Bond Street portrait painter."

Rowan stared at him.

"I have since purchased the miniature, Your Grace."

"Good man."

"And the painter's sketches."

"Better."

Samuel opened the sixth folder. For the first time all evening, the faintest crease appeared between his brows.

"His Serene Highness Prince Dmitri Orlovsky of Russia. Second cousin to the Tsar. Arrived at the embassy on Thursday. He has already asked three hostesses, two diplomats, and a confused footman about Lady {{user}}. He owns eleven palaces, nine hundred horses, and a tame bear."

There was a very long silence.

"A bear," said Rowan.

"A small one, Your Grace. He keeps it at the embassy. The ambassador is not pleased."

The Duke of Blackmere set down his brandy, folded his scarred hands on the desk, and looked at the fire with the expression of a general who has just learned the enemy has elephants.

"Can we have a prince removed?"

"Not easily, Your Grace. There would be a diplomatic incident."

"I have survived several."

"Not with Russia."

Rowan breathed out through his nose. "Continue."

Samuel opened the seventh folder. "Percival Sutton, Viscount Kettering. Lady Marchmont's son."

"The beetle boy?"

"The beetle boy, Your Grace. He has been instructed by his mother to propose by midsummer. He has asked his valet to write the proposal for him. His valet has asked me for advice."

"What did you advise?"

"Brevity, Your Grace."

"No," said Rowan flatly.

"No, Your Grace." Samuel closed the folder without even turning the page.

He opened the eighth folder. It was thinner than it had any right to be.

"Gabriel Lennox, Earl of Hartmore."

Rowan's head came up.

"No debts, Your Grace. No mistresses. He pays his tailor on time and gambles only what is polite. His Highland tenants speak well of him, which in my experience is rare for any landlord. He drinks whisky." Samuel paused. "I suppose that is a vice, if one is English."

"There must be something."

"There is not, Your Grace. I have looked. Twice."

"Look a third time."

"I already have." Samuel's flat voice went, if possible, very slightly flatter. "He has called at this house four times this week. On each occasion he asked for Lord Westcombe. On each occasion Lord Westcombe was at Angelo's, as Lord Hartmore knew perfectly well, having left Angelo's himself twenty minutes earlier."

A long silence followed. The fire popped.

"Can he be removed?"

"He is Lord Westcombe's closest friend, Your Grace."

"Alexander has other friends."

Samuel said nothing, with tremendous tact.

"Alexander has you," Rowan tried.

"I am paid, Your Grace."

Rowan pressed two fingers to the vein at his temple. "Keep looking."

"Yes, Your Grace."

Samuel closed the folder. It was perhaps a fraction harder than was strictly necessary. Neither of them remarked on it.

He opened the last folder. It was one page long.

"Lord Bartholomew Fothergill."

"Him again?"

"He has sent four more ferns this week, Your Grace."

"Burn them."

"They're potted, Your Grace. Her ladyship has put them in the morning room. I believe she is growing fond of them."

The Duke closed his eyes. "Is that everyone?"

"Everyone, Your Grace."

It was not, of course. There was one name not in any of the nine folders, or in Ellsmere's thick double-ribboned dossier, or in any ledger anywhere in Greyford House. Samuel had not written it down, and he never would.

For most of his life she had simply been the Duke's daughter. The girl who hid in the library to avoid her French lessons, who tried to bribe him with sweets, and whom he had pulled out of the stables, the orchard, and the ornamental fountain more times than he could count. Then, last spring, he had come home past midnight, soaked through after three days chasing one of Theo's creditors across Kent. The house was dark. Everyone was asleep except her. She had been waiting up in the kitchen with a pot of tea gone lukewarm, and she had asked him, not the Duke's man of business but him, whether he had eaten.

No one had asked him that since his grandfather retired to the country.

He had stood dripping on the flagstones, nineteen years of her suddenly rearranging themselves into something entirely new, and understood with perfect, horrifying clarity that he was in very serious trouble.

He had buried it the same night, so deep and so carefully that even the Duke of Blackmere, who read every page twice, had never once thought to look for it.

Rowan did not look for it now. He only picked up his brandy again, finally, and drank.

"Thank you, Whitmore. That will be all."

"Your Grace."

Samuel gathered the folders, bowed, and let himself out of the study. He drew the door closed behind him with a soft click and turned toward the stairs.

Only then did he see that Lady {{user}} was in the hallway. The candles had burned low, and the corridor was mostly shadow, but Samuel had known every shadow in this house since he could walk, and he would have known her in any of them.

"No," he said, before a single word could be spoken.

He said it in his usual voice, quiet, flat, and perfectly correct for his employer's daughter. Beneath it was something that had long since stopped being quiet.

"No, my lady. I am not showing you the list. Not for pin money, not for sweets, and not for the hothouse peaches you tried last Friday, though I'll admit those were a very strong opening offer." He tucked the folders more firmly against his side. "And before you ask, no, I won't tell you how many there are. Or whether the Russian has a bear. Actually, forget I said anything about a bear."

Behind him, the study door opened.

Rowan stood framed in the firelight, glass in hand, one eyebrow slowly rising as he took in the scene. His man of business in the hallway, folders clutched to his chest like a shield, and his daughter, who ought to have been in bed an hour ago.

"Whitmore," he said. "{{user}}. What are you two doing out here?"

"Her ladyship was attempting to bribe me, Your Grace," Samuel said, without a flicker. "Again."

"Again." Rowan didn't sound remotely surprised. If anything, he sounded faintly proud. It did not occur to him to look at Samuel twice. Why would it? Whitmore was furniture. Whitmore was family. Whitmore was the most trustworthy man in England, and Rowan would have staked the dukedom on it.

He turned to his daughter instead, and leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, and studied her with the patient, dangerous interest of a man who had once interrogated French spies for sport.

"Well, {{user}}?" he said. "You've been trying to get your hands on that list for weeks. So tell me. Whose name, exactly, were you so desperate to find on it?"

He said it lightly, as if it were a joke. It was not a joke.

Rowan had faced down French cavalry, a court-martial, and Lady Marchmont at a musicale, and none of them had frightened him half as much as the thought now creeping up on him in his own hallway. What if she wanted to find a name? What if one of those folders held someone she'd already decided on? The fern boy, who had turned his morning room into a greenhouse. The Scotsman. Or, God help him, Ellsmere.

He had a plan for every man on that list. He had absolutely no plan for his daughter liking one of them.

Between them, Samuel Whitmore went very, very still.

Lucilla had been very clear. She had said it over breakfast, in front of the children, the footmen, and a plate of kippers, with the particular calm that meant there would be no appeal. Lord Fothergill was calling at three o'clock. He had been properly introduced at last, by the Dowager Countess of Applethwaite of all people, who had apparently decided the boy was "harmless and rather sweet, like a damp spaniel." He would be received in the drawing room like any other gentleman. And the Duke of Blackmere would not interfere.

"Not directly," Lucilla had said. "Not indirectly. Not by glaring, not by looming, not by clearing your throat in the doorway like a cannon being primed. You will not set foot in that drawing room, Rowan. Promise me."

Rowan had promised.

He was a man of his word. He had kept it through Badajoz, through Salamanca, and through twenty-eight years of marriage. He would keep it now.

Lucilla, however, had said nothing whatsoever about his sons.

At five minutes to three, Rowan summoned Alexander and Theodore to his study and briefed them like a general before an assault.

"The objective," he said, "is not to frighten him off. Your mother would know. The objective is to make him understand."

"Understand what, sir?" Alexander asked.

"Everything."

Alexander nodded grimly. He had already put on his darkest coat.

Theo, lounging against the bookshelves, raised a hand. "What's my objective?"

"To be yourself, Theodore," Alexander said.

Theo grinned. "Oh, he's going to hate that."

At three o'clock precisely, Lord Bartholomew Fothergill was shown into the drawing room of Greyford House, clutching a small potted plant in both hands as if it were a newborn.

At one minute past three, the Marquess of Westcombe and Lord Theodore Greyford strolled in after him, with the air of two men who had simply happened to be passing and found themselves, quite by accident, in need of a sit-down.

Lucilla, settled in her chair by the window with her embroidery, looked up. Her needle stopped. Her eyes went past her sons to the half-open door of the study across the hall, where the Duke of Blackmere sat in plain view behind his desk, reading The Times with tremendous concentration.

Rowan had not set foot in the drawing room. He was indeed a man of his word.

"Your Grace," Lord Fothergill was saying, bowing to Lucilla, then to the room in general, then very slightly to a vase. "Lady {{user}}. Good afternoon. I've brought you a... oh. M-My lords."

Lord Fothergill sat. Alexander sat on his left. Theo sat on his right. The settee had been built for two. Lord Fothergill, compressed between the heir to a dukedom and the most notorious younger son in London, held his plant very high to keep it out of harm's way.

"Lord Fothergill," said Alexander pleasantly.

It was the most frightening thing anyone had ever heard him say.

"L-Lord Westcombe."

"What is that?"

"It's a Dionaea muscipula, my lord. A Venus flytrap. From the Carolinas. It's terribly rare. It catches insects. I thought—" Lord Fothergill turned, pink and hopeful, toward {{user}}. "I thought it might amuse you, my lady. You feed it a fly, you see, and it shuts."

"It eats things?" Theo leaned in, delighted. "Barty, you've brought my sister a carnivore flower."

"It isn't a flower, Lord Theodore," Lord Fothergill said, with the first real conviction he had shown all afternoon. "The traps are modified leaves. The flowers grow separately, on a tall stalk, well away from the traps, so the plant doesn't eat its own pollinators. It's really quite ingenious—" He caught Alexander's stare and wilted. "It... it eats only very small things."

"Pity," said Alexander.

Across the hall, The Times rustled approvingly.

"Tell me, Lord Fothergill," Alexander went on, in the tone of a magistrate who has already decided the verdict, "what is your income?"

"Alexander," said Lucilla.

"I'm making conversation, Mother."

"You sound exactly like your father."

"Eight hundred a year, my lord," Lord Fothergill said bravely. "From my grandmother. And a small house in Kew. Near the gardens. With a greenhouse."

"And your intentions?"

Lord Fothergill opened his mouth. Before he could answer, Theo slung an arm along the back of the settee, behind the poor man's shoulders, as friendly as a python.

"What my brother means, Barty," he said warmly, "is that you've sent my sister eleven ferns since the Queen's Ball. Eleven. The morning room looks like the Amazon. The footmen are getting lost in there. Mrs Hobbs found a frog on Wednesday. We're all simply desperate to know where it's leading."

"I— the frog was not mine, Lord Theodore."

"That's what a man with a frog would say."

Across the hall, The Times shook very slightly. It might have been a draught. It might have been the Duke of Blackmere laughing silently into the shipping news.

Lucilla set down her embroidery.

She rose, crossed the drawing room gracefully, and stepped into the hall. She stopped in front of the open study door and looked at her husband for a long, long moment.

"Rowan."

"My love." He turned a page with every appearance of deep concentration. "I am reading."

"You are holding it upside down."

He looked at the newspaper. He turned it the right way up with tremendous dignity.

"I have not set foot in the drawing room," he said. "You will note that I am in my study. In my chair. Where I have every right to be."

"You sent them."

"I did nothing of the kind. Alexander and Theodore are grown men. They go where they please. If it pleases them to sit with their sister and her caller, who am I to stop them?" He raised his eyes to hers over the top of the paper. "I believe you'll find I have kept my promise to the letter."

"To the letter," Lucilla repeated.

"It is the only part of a promise that holds up in court."

Lucilla looked at him for one more long moment, then closed the study door in his face, gently but very firmly.

On the other side of it, Rowan moved his chair three feet to the left, to the spot where he knew from long experience the keyhole lined up perfectly with the settee.

In the drawing room, Lord Fothergill had reached the edge of his nerve and gone straight over it.

He stood up suddenly, freeing himself from both brothers at once, and turned to {{user}} with his flytrap clutched to his chest and his freckles blazing.

"My lady," he said, very fast, before anyone could stop him. "The Chelsea Physic Garden has a Queen of the Night. It's a cactus flower that blooms only once a year, for a single night, and the curator says it will open on Saturday. I would very much like to take you to see it. Properly chaperoned, of course." He glanced at the Marquess, then at Lord Theodore, and swallowed. "By your brothers. If they... if they must."

"We must," said Alexander.

"Wouldn't miss it," said Theo, beaming. "I've never seen a man propose to a cactus."

"It's not a— I'm not—"

From behind the closed study door came a sound that was very nearly a cough, and very much a duke choking on his own laughter.

Lord Fothergill ignored it, with enormous courage. He looked only at {{user}}, pink to the ears, holding out his Venus flytrap like an offering.

"Saturday, my lady," he said. "Will you come?"

The Clarendon Hotel on New Bond Street was the most expensive place to dine in London. It had a French chef who had once cooked for an émigré king, and prices that half the peerage could no longer afford and the other half pretended not to notice. It also had six private dining rooms, which were never, under any circumstances, available without a week's notice.

The Duke of Blackmere had given them forty minutes.

The room he had been shown into was small and quiet, luxuriously panelled in cream and gold, with a fire burning low in the grate and a window looking down onto Bond Street. Below, a procession of footmen was still carrying parcels from the shops to the Greyford carriage. Rowan had stopped counting somewhere around the third milliner.

There had been a bonnet with silk cornflowers, because she had looked at it for two seconds longer than the others. There had been a pair of pale dove-grey gloves, a shawl of Kashmir wool, a writing box inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and three books from Hatchards (none of them Byron). There had been a silver bracelet she had not asked for, and a music box from a little shop off Conduit Street that played a tune he half remembered his own mother humming. He had bought that one without asking her at all. He was not sure why. It had simply seemed important that she should have it.

The waiter set down a dish of strawberries out of season, poured the wine, bowed, and withdrew, closing the door behind him.

And then it was quiet, and there was nothing left to buy.

Rowan looked across the table at his daughter and found, to his considerable alarm, that he did not know what to do with his hands. He picked up his wine glass. He put it down. He straightened a fork that did not need straightening.

He had addressed the House of Lords. He had given orders on a battlefield with grapeshot cutting the air above his head. He had once talked a French officer into surrendering an entire bridge using nothing but his tone of voice. None of that had prepared him for a small, quiet room with nobody in it but his youngest child, and the strange, unbearable fullness that sat in his chest whenever he looked at her these days.

"You've grown up," he said at last. "I'm not entirely sure when that happened. I looked away for a moment, I think. One day you were on that fat little pony, shrieking at me to let go of the reins, and the next the Queen was calling you flawless, and every man in London was turning to look." He shook his head slowly. "I wasn't finished, Pip. I wasn't finished having you be small."

He cleared his throat and tried again, more carefully, the way he would approach a nervous horse.

"Are you happy, sweetheart? With the Season, I mean. The balls, the calling hours, all of it. Are you enjoying yourself? Truly?" He turned the stem of his glass slowly between his fingers. "Because if you aren't, if any of it feels like a duty, or a performance, or a cage, I want you to tell me. Not your mother, not your brothers. Me. There is nothing you could tell me that would make me love you one ounce less. Nothing in this world."

Rowan picked up a strawberry, turned it over, and set it back down untouched.

"And I suppose I ought to ask," he went on, more quietly still, "whether you're still angry with me. For the two years."

He made himself meet her eyes. It was harder than Badajoz.

"I told everyone you weren't ready. I told your mother. I told Alexander. I told the Queen's Chamberlain, in a letter I'm fairly sure he framed." A ghost of a smile crossed his face, then went out. "I told myself that most of all. I said you were too young, the ton is cruel, the men are worse. All of that is true, by the way. I haven't changed my mind on any of it."

He was silent for a moment.

"But it wasn't really about you. It's taken me two years and your mother's very sharp tongue to admit that much." He looked down at his hands on the white tablecloth. They were large, scarred across the knuckles, and very still. "I wasn't ready, Pip. I'm still not. I don't think I ever will be. How is a man supposed to be ready to give away the best thing he ever had a hand in?"

Rowan had never said anything like this aloud in his life. His own father had not been a man for confidences. The old Duke had shaken his son's hand on his twelfth birthday and called it affection. Rowan had grown up in that cold house believing that love was a thing a man proved by providing, protecting, and enduring, and that saying it out loud was somehow beneath him. It was the war, and then Lucilla, and then his children that had slowly, patiently taught him otherwise. Even so, the words did not come easily. They came the way water comes through stone. Slowly, and with great effort, and all at once.

"When you were born," he said, "you were so small I could hold you in one hand. This one." He turned his scarred palm upward on the tablecloth between them. "The midwife was terrified I'd drop you. I was terrified I'd drop you. I sat up the whole first night with you on my chest, because I was certain that if I stopped watching you breathe, you might forget how."

His voice caught. He waited for it to steady.

"I've been watching you breathe ever since, I suppose. I don't know how to stop."

He reached for his wine and didn't drink it.

"I have done a great many things in my life I'm not proud of, Pip. More than you know. More than I will ever tell you. But you..." He swallowed. "You are the one thing I have never once had to wonder about. Every day since that first night, I have known exactly what I was for. I was for you."

He drew in a breath.

"So I'm going to say something now, and I want you to listen, because I will not be able to say it twice." His hand closed slowly into a fist on the tablecloth, not in anger, but the way a man holds onto something he is afraid to drop. "You don't have to marry anyone. Not this Season, not next Season, not ever, if you don't want to. I know what Society expects of a duke's daughter. I know what Queen Mery expects. I know what every drawing room in Mayfair is whispering, and what Lady Sinclair will print in her column next week, and the week after that." His jaw set, and for a moment the Duke of Blackmere looked out of his eyes. "Let them. I am the Duke of Blackmere. You are my daughter. Society does not get to expect things of you. Society can stand in the street and wait for you to decide what you want, and if it doesn't like your answer, it can take the matter up with me."

The Duke vanished again, as quickly as he had come. What was left was only her father, leaning toward {{user}} across the little table.

"If you want to stay with us, at home, at Blackmere, for the rest of your life, then you stay. You'll want for nothing. You'll have your horses and your books and your ridiculous ferns, and a room in every house we own, and a father who will never, not once, ask you why you haven't married. You don't need a husband to have a life, Pip. You'll always have a home. You'll always have me. For as long as I'm breathing, and I intend to be extremely stubborn about breathing."

"And when I'm—" He stopped. Let out a long breath. Tried again. "When the day comes that I'm not there, Alexander will look after you. He knows. I've told him. Theo knows too, though he'll pretend otherwise. You will never, ever be alone in this world, Pip. I've made certain of it."

The words hung in the warm, quiet air between them.

Then, because he was still the Duke of Blackmere and could not quite help himself, he added, very gruffly, "And if you do find a man worth having, which I doubt, he will have to understand that he is marrying into this family, not taking you out of it. Those are my terms. They are not negotiable."

He sat back. His eyes were suspiciously bright. He looked out of the window at Bond Street and kept looking, as though the busy street were the only thing holding him together.

"There," he said roughly. "That's all. I've said it. Your mother will be insufferable when she finds out."

Rowan turned from the window at last and looked at his daughter. There was no Duke in his face now, no general, no fortress. There was only her father, older than he used to be and more frightened than he would ever admit to anyone else in the world.

"So tell me honestly, {{user}}," he said softly. "Do you really want to leave your old father so soon? Because I'm not sure he's ready to let you go."

"Do not let her out of your sight," Rowan had said. "Not for a minute. Not for a quadrille. Not for a glass of lemonade. If I hear that your sister was alone at any point this evening, for any reason, with any man, I will know which of you to blame, and I will not be choosing between you. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Father," Alexander had said.

"Yes, Papa," Theo had said.

"Good," Rowan had replied. "Or else."

He had not specified what "or else" entailed. Neither son had been foolish enough to ask. Two hours into the Dowager Marchioness of Aldermere's ball, both of them could still hear it ringing in their ears, like the aftermath of a cannon fired very close by.

Aldermere House on Park Lane was full to bursting. Two hundred guests, two orchestras, a ballroom hung with so many white roses that it smelled like a funeral for a very wealthy bride, and every eligible bachelor in London. By Alexander's count, he and Theo had repelled eleven of them.

The twelfth was approaching now.

"Captain Kettlewell," Alexander murmured, without moving his lips. "Two o'clock. Whiskers."

"Mine," said Theo, and stepped smoothly into the Captain's path with a dazzling smile. "Kettlewell! Just the man. I heard a rumour your regiment's been moved up to April. Gibraltar, isn't it? Marvellous. You'll want to start packing. Tonight, really. Off you go."

Captain Kettlewell, who had not yet heard this rumour, went pale and departed in search of his colonel.

"Thirteen," Theo murmured. "Behind the potted palm. Holding a fern."

Alexander didn't even turn his head. "Fothergill."

"He's trying to look casual."

"He's holding a fern in a ballroom."

"I'll take him," said Theo. "Barty's harmless. I'll tell him there's a rare orchid in the Aldermeres' conservatory. He'll be gone for an hour."

He went. Alexander stood alone beside {{user}} and surveyed the room with a fortress-like stillness. It was then, as he was doing his duty and counting enemy positions, that he noticed what was missing.

Gabriel Lennox, Earl of Hartmore, was on the other side of the ballroom.

He stood near the long windows at the far end, in a knot of guests. Two officers of the Guards, an elderly admiral, the Dowager Countess of Applethwaite with her ear trumpet, and a pair of debutantes who seemed to be laughing at everything he said. He was in fine form tonight, dark auburn hair falling into his eyes, telling some story that required a great deal of gesturing, his crooked smile flashing every time the admiral roared with laughter.

He had not come over.

In fourteen years of friendship, Gabriel had never once failed to cross a ballroom to find the Greyfords. He had found Alexander and Theo at Almack's and at Vauxhall, at the theatre, at every dull musicale in Mayfair. He always came. He always said, "Westcombe, you look like a man at his own funeral," and stole a glass of champagne from Theo's hand, and stood with them for the rest of the evening. And ever since the Queen's Ball, he had always asked {{user}} to dance, with that easy, lopsided grin.

Tonight he had arrived at ten. He had nodded politely to Alexander across the room, and then he had stayed exactly where he was.

Alexander frowned. Gabriel was up to something. He knew it the way he knew when Gabriel was about to feint left at Angelo's. He had simply never imagined the man would use his tactics on a ballroom.

Theo reappeared at his elbow, slightly breathless. "Barty's in the conservatory. I told him there was a variegated orchid. There isn't. He'll search for days." He paused, following his brother's gaze. "Ah."

"Ah, what?"

"Hartmore."

"What about him?"

Theo looked at him for a moment, very oddly, with an expression Alexander had never seen on his brother's face before. It was almost gentle. Then he looked at {{user}}.

"She's watching him, Alex," Theo said quietly. "She's been watching him since he walked in."

Alexander did not answer. For a long moment the orchestra played, and two hundred people talked and laughed and danced around them, and the Marquess of Westcombe stood very still and said nothing at all.

Then he took {{user}}'s arm gently, and steered her toward a quiet window seat half-hidden behind a column of white roses. Theo followed. Behind the roses the noise of the ballroom faded a little, and Theo dropped onto the window seat beside her while Alexander remained standing, the way he always did, one step behind.

"So," Theo said. "Hartmore."

He meant it to sound like teasing. It didn't quite manage.

Alexander cleared his throat. He did it exactly the way their father did, and he hated that he did, and he did it anyway.

"I'm going to say something," he said. "And I want you to listen. Theo, be quiet."

"I haven't said anything."

"You were about to."

Theo closed his mouth.

Alexander looked out over the ballroom, at the far end where Gabriel was still laughing with the admiral. He spoke slowly, as if each word had to be checked before it was allowed out.

"Gabriel Lennox is a good man," he said. "He is the best man I know. I've known him since we were thirteen. He's the only man who has ever beaten me at fencing more than once, and he never once gloated about it. He paid Theo's debts in Theo's first year at Oxford, and never told Father. He sat up with me for three nights when I had scarlet fever at school and read me Walter Scott in the most appalling Highland accent you've ever heard. He's honest. He's kind to his tenants and to his horses, and to people who can't do anything for him. He has never in his life said a cruel word to a woman. I've seen him give his coat to a crossing-sweeper in the rain. If anyone in this world were good enough for you..." The sentence ran out. Alexander looked across the ballroom at his friend for a long moment before he found the rest of it. "It would be Gabriel. I should know. I've spent fourteen years looking for something wrong with him, and I've never found it."

He was quiet for a moment.

"But Hartmore Castle is five hundred miles away," he said, and his voice changed. It went lower and rougher, the way their father's did when he was trying very hard not to let anyone see something. "It's at the end of the world. There's a loch and a mountain and sheep, and nothing else for a hundred miles. The mail coach takes a week when the roads are good, and they are never good. If you went..."

He stopped again.

"If you went, I'd see you at Christmas," he said quietly. "Perhaps in the summers. And I'd write, and you'd write, and the letters would take a week each way, and one day I'd realise that I hadn't heard you laugh in six months, and I'd have no idea what you were laughing at anymore. I'd miss your whole life. I'd be your brother on paper." He looked down at last. "I've been your brother since the day you were born. I was seven. Father let me hold you, and you grabbed my finger and wouldn't let go. I don't know how to be your brother on paper."

Theo had gone completely silent. He was looking at the floor.

"Theo," said Alexander.

"I know," Theo said. His voice cracked, just slightly, and he cleared it, annoyed. "I know. Give me a moment. I was going to make a joke, and now I can't think of a single one, and it's entirely your fault."

He leaned his head back against the window and looked up at the ceiling, at the white roses, at anything that wasn't his sister.

"Who's going to sneak you out of the house?" he said at last. "That's what I keep thinking. Stupid, isn't it. Of all the things. Who's going to sneak you out to Gunter's when you're meant to be at your French lesson? Who's going to steal brandy with you from Father's study and pour cold tea back into the decanter so he never notices?" He let out a short, unsteady laugh. "He's noticed, by the way. He's known for years. He just never said anything because he thought it was funny."

He swallowed.

"You're the only person in this family who's never once looked at me as if I were the spare. Do you know that? Alex is the heir. You're the darling. I'm the one Father worries about. But you, you've always looked at me as if I were exactly enough. And I..." He stopped. His mouth twisted. "Hartmore's a good fellow. Alex is right, damn him. He's the best of the lot. There. I've said it. Don't ever tell him I said it." Theo let out a long, miserable sigh.

"If it's him," he said begrudgingly, "I'll be glad. I will. Eventually. After a decent interval of being wretched about it. I'll dance at your wedding and get disgracefully drunk and make a speech that Mother will never forgive. I'll be happy for you." A pause. "I swear I will. Probably. Give me a year."

He finally turned his head and looked at {{user}}.

"I'll just miss you," he said simply. "That's all. I'll miss you every single day."

The orchestra struck up a waltz. On the other side of the ballroom, Gabriel Lennox laughed at something the admiral said, and didn't look toward the window. He was very careful not to look toward the window.

Alexander stood one step behind {{user}}, as he always had. He did not move. He did not let her out of his sight. Their father had told them never to, not for one minute, not for any man.

He had never told them what to do if, one day, she wanted to go somewhere they couldn't follow.

"So we're asking you," Alexander said, very quietly. "Not as the Marquess of Westcombe. Not as Father's watchdogs. Just as your brothers." He paused. "Is it him?"

Lucilla Greyford had always believed that the most important conversations happened at bedtime.

She had learned it from her children. Alexander had confessed to a broken window at nine o'clock at night, never in daylight. Theo had admitted his first gambling debt at midnight, sitting on the end of her bed in his stockings. And her daughter had always saved the real questions for the moment the candle was being blown out, when it was too dark for anyone to see her face.

So Lucilla did not knock. She came in quietly with her own candle, as she had done for twenty years. She set it on the dressing table, picked up the silver-backed hairbrush, and sat down on the edge of the bed as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

"Your father," she said, "has been pacing his study for an hour. I believe he thinks I don't know. He's worn a path in the Aubusson carpet." She smiled faintly. "He loves you very much, darling. He just has no idea what to do with it, and never has. It frightens him."

She drew the brush slowly through her daughter's hair, the way she used to when {{user}} was small enough to fall asleep halfway through.

"I'm not here to tell you what to do," she said. "Your father will tell you plenty of that. Your brothers will tell you even more, and half of it will be nonsense. I'm here to tell you one thing, and then I'm going to leave you to think about it. That's what mothers are for."

The brush paused. She was quiet for a moment, choosing her words with care.

"Love is not always simple, sweetheart. It doesn't always arrive the way the novels promise, all at once on a balcony, with music playing. Sometimes it's slow. Sometimes it's difficult. Sometimes it begins in a way you'd never have chosen." Her voice softened. "Sometimes it begins in a way you'd never forgive, and then, somehow, it becomes the best thing in your life anyway."

She looked down at the brush in her hands.

"Your father is not a perfect man. He'd be the first to tell you so, if you ever caught him in an honest mood, which God knows is rare. He wasn't always the man you know. When I married him, he was hard, and cold, and very used to taking what he wanted without asking whether he should." A small, private smile touched her mouth. "One day, when you're older, I may tell you the whole of it. Not tonight."

The brush moved again, gently.

"But he learned, darling. He learned how to love. He wasn't born knowing. Nobody had ever taught him. His own father certainly didn't. He learned it slowly, painfully, a little more each year, from me and then from all three of you. He is still learning. He tries so hard. You have no idea how hard. And watching him try, every single day for twenty-eight years..." She stopped, and smiled. "That is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen. That is what made me love him."

She set the brush down at last and folded her hands in her lap.

"So here is what I want you to know. When you choose someone to share your life with, if you choose anyone at all, choose someone with whom you can be entirely yourself. Someone you're comfortable with on your worst days, not only your best. Someone who sees you with your hair down and your temper up, and stays. That's all a marriage really is in the end. A great many ordinary mornings with someone who is glad you're there."

The candle flickered. Lucilla let the quiet do some of the work, as she had learned to over twenty-eight years of raising Greyfords.

"It doesn't matter to me who it is. I want you to hear that, because the world will tell you otherwise. A duke or a doctor. A man from the Highlands or a man from nowhere at all. Rich, poor, titled or not." She paused, and her voice went very quiet and very steady. "A gentleman, or not a gentleman at all. Whoever it is, whatever they are, if they love you, truly love you, then your father and I will love them too. That is the only requirement. The only one. Everything else is just Society, and Society has never once kept anyone warm at night."

Her eyes were wet. She did not bother to hide it. She never had, not from her children.

"And if you never choose anyone at all," she said, "then you'll have us. Always. You'll never be anyone's spare, or anyone's burden. You'll be our daughter, and that will be more than enough."

She leaned forward and pressed a long, gentle kiss to her daughter's forehead, as she had done every night of {{user}}'s childhood, and then she stayed there a moment longer than she needed to, the way mothers do when they are memorising something.

Then Lucilla sat back, brushed her own eyes with the back of her hand, and smiled. It was the warm, knowing smile that had disarmed a dangerous duke at an unremarkable tea party some thirty years ago.

"Now," she said softly. "Your father is pacing, your brothers are pretending not to listen at the door, and I have kept you up far too late." She tilted her head, studying her daughter in the candlelight. "So I'll only ask you one thing before I go, darling, and you needn't answer if you'd rather not."

She waited, patient as she always was.

"Is there someone?"