The two childhood friends had remained close, even if not geographically. The duchess had never gone back to her former home after her marriage, and though Barbara had been frequently invited to stay with her, she had not often accepted, and even when she had, she had not stayed as long as Hannah would have liked. She had been too intimidated by the duke. And so they had kept up their friendship by letter. They had written to each other, usually at great length, at least once a week for eleven years.

Now Barbara had accepted an invitation to spend some time in London with the duchess. They would shop for her bride clothes in the only place in England worth shopping in, the duchess had written as an inducement. Which was all very well, Barbara had thought when she read the letter, shaking her head in slight exasperation, when one had pots of money, as Hannah did and she most certainly did not. But Hannah needed the company now that she was alone, and she rather fancied a few weeks of exploring churches and museums to her heart’s content before finally settling down. The Reverend Newcombe, her betrothed, encouraged her to go and enjoy herself and lend her support to the poor widow, her friend. And then, when she decided that she would go, he insisted that she take an astonishingly large sum of money with which to buy herself some pretty dresses and perhaps a bonnet or two. And her parents, who thought a month or so with Hannah, of whom they had always been inordinately fond, would be a wonderful thing for their daughter before she settled to a sober life as the vicar’s wife, pressed a largish sum of spending money on her too.

Barbara felt quite decadently rich when she arrived at Dunbarton House after a journey during which it had felt as though every bone in her body had been jolted into a new, less comfortable position.

Hannah was waiting for her inside the hall, and they hugged and squealed and exclaimed over each other for several minutes, both talking, neither listening, and laughing over nothing at all except the sheer happiness of being together again. The ton, if they could have seen Hannah, might have been forgiven if they had not recognized her. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes wide and bright, her smile broad, her voice almost shrill with excitement and delight. There was not the merest suggestion of mystery about her.

And then she became aware of the silent figure of the housekeeper in the background, and she relinquished Barbara to her competent care. She paced aimlessly in the drawing room while her friend was taken up to her room to wash her hands and face and change her dress and comb her hair and otherwise use up half an hour before being brought down for tea.

She was looking her neat, tranquil self again. Dear, dependable Barbara, whom she loved more than anyone else still living, Hannah thought as she beamed at her and crossed the room to hug her again.

“I am so, so happy that you came, Babs,” she said. She laughed. “Just in case you did not understand that when you arrived.”

“Well, I did think you might have shown just a little enthusiasm,” Barbara said, and they both laughed again.

Hannah suddenly tried to remember when she had last laughed, and could not recall an occasion. No matter. One was not meant to laugh while one was in mourning. Someone might call one heartless.

They talked without ceasing for all of an hour, this time both listening and talking, before Barbara asked the question that had been uppermost in her mind since the Duke of Dunbarton’s death, though she had not broached it in any of her letters.

“What are you going to do now, Hannah?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair. “You must be dreadfully lonely without the duke. You adored each other.”

Barbara was probably one of the few people in London, or in all of England for that matter, who truly believed such a startling notion. Perhaps the only one, in fact.

“We did,” Hannah said with a sigh. She spread one hand on her lap and regarded the rings she wore on three of her well-manicured fingers. She smoothed her hand over the fine white muslin of her dress. “I do miss him. I keep thinking of all sorts of absurdities I simply must rush home to share with him, only to remember that he is not here any longer waiting to hear them.”

“But I know,” Barbara said, her voice earnest in its sympathy, “that he suffered dreadfully with his gout and that his heart was giving him much pain and trouble in his last years. I daresay it was a blessing that he went quickly in the end.”

Hannah felt inappropriately amused. Barbara would make an excellent vicar’s wife if her head was full of platitudes like that one.

“We should all be so fortunate when the time comes,” she said. “But I daresay his heart seizure was helped along by a too hearty indulgence in beefsteak and claret the night before he died. He had been warned off such extravagances ten years or more before I even met him and every year after that—oh, at least once a year. He was forever saying that his headstone ought to have been already gathering moss in the graveyard when I was rocking my dolls to sleep in the nursery. He used to apologize to me once in a while for living so long.”

“Oh, Hannah,” Barbara said, half distressed, half reproachful. And clearly unable to think of anything else to say in response.

“I finally put a stop to it,” Hannah said, “when I composed a very bad ode entitled ‘To the Duke Who Ought to Have Died’ and read it aloud to him. He laughed so hard that he brought on a coughing fit and very nearly did die. I would have written a companion piece, ‘To the Duchess Who Should Be a Widow,’ but I could think of nothing to rhyme with widow, except perhaps his toe, referring to his gout. But it seemed rather lame.”

She half smiled as Barbara recognized the pun and exploded into laughter.

“Oh, Hannah,” she said, “you are bad.”

“Yes, aren’t I?” Hannah agreed.

And they both laughed.

“But what are you going to do?” Barbara came back to the question and looked very directly at Hannah for an answer.

“I am going to do what the ton expects me to do, of course,” Hannah said, spreading her other hand across the arm of her chair and admiring the rings she wore on her third and little fingers. She tipped her hand slightly forward so that they caught the light from the window and sparkled in a thoroughly satisfying way. “I am going to take a lover, Babs.”

It sounded a little … wicked spoken aloud. It was not wicked. She was free. She owed nothing to anyone any longer. It was quite unexceptionable for a widow to take a lover provided it was a secret affair and she was discreet about it. Well, perhaps not unexceptionable. But certainly quite acceptable.

Barbara was, of course, of a different world than her own.

“Hannah!” she exclaimed, color rushing up her neck and over her cheeks and on up across her forehead to disappear beneath her hair. “Oh, you horrid creature. You said it to shock me and succeeded admirably. I almost had a fit of the vapors. Do be serious.”

Hannah raised her eyebrows. “But I am perfectly serious,” she said. “I have had a husband and he is gone. I can never replace him. I have had escorts. They are always good company, but I find them less than completely satisfactory. They feel depressingly like my brothers. I need someone new, someone to add some … oh, some vividness to my life. I need a lover.”

“What you need,” Barbara said, her voice far firmer, “is someone to love. Romantically, I mean. Someone with whom to fall in love. Someone to marry and have children with. I know you loved the duke, Hannah, but it was not—”

She stopped and flushed again.

“Romantic love?” Hannah said, completing the sentence for her. “It hurts anyway, Babs. Losing him, I mean. It hurts here.” She set her hand over her ribs beneath her bosom. “And romantic love did not serve me well before I met him, did it?”

“You were little more than a child,” Barbara said. “And what happened was not your fault. Love will come in time.”

“Perhaps so.” Hannah shrugged. “But I do not intend waiting around for it to show its face. And I have no intention of going in desperate search of it and perhaps persuading myself that I have found it when I have not and so trapping myself in another marriage so soon after the last. I am free, and I intend to remain so until I choose to give up my freedom, which may be a long, long time in the future. Perhaps I will never give it up. There are advantages to widowhood, you know.”

“Oh, Hannah,” Barbara said reproachfully. “Do be serious.”

“A lover is what I am going to have,” Hannah told her. “I have quite decided, Babs, and I am perfectly serious. It will be an arrangement purely for enjoyment with no strings attached. He is going to be someone sinfully handsome. And devilishly attractive. And wickedly skillful and experienced as a lover. Someone with neither a heart to break nor any aspirations whatsoever toward matrimony. Is there such a paragon, do you suppose?”

Barbara was smiling again—with what looked like genuine amusement.

“England is said to abound with dashing rakes,” she said. “And it is quite obligatory, I have heard, that they also be outrageously handsome. I do believe, in fact, that it is against the law for them not to be. And of course almost all women fall for them—and the eternal conviction that they can reform them.”

“Why ever,” Hannah asked, “would anyone wish to believe that? Why would any woman wish to reduce a perfectly wicked rake and rogue to the dullness of a mere worthy gentleman?”