All was very formal, very proper.

Lauren felt weighed down by the hugeness of the lie she had set in motion. She had not told even Gwen the truth. And there had been no word from Lord Ravensberg to tell her how well—or how ill—his announcement had been received at Alvesley. Only the letter of formal invitation from his mother.

“Ah,” Aunt Clara said now, waking from a doze that had kept the two younger women silent and had left Lauren alone with her thoughts and her conscience, “this must be it. I will not be sorry to see the journey at an end, I must say.”

The carriage—the Duke of Portfrey’s, complete with all the pomp of ducal crest and splendidly liveried coachman, postilions, and outriders—had just passed through a small village and was slowing to turn between massive wrought-iron gates, which a porter was throwing wide. He stood aside, glanced up into the carriage, and dipped his head, pulling respectfully on his forelock.

“Oh, Lauren.” Gwen leaned forward to squeeze her cousin’s knee. “This looks very impressive indeed. You must be bursting with excitement. You have not seen Lord Ravensberg for almost two weeks.”

“I am eager to make the young man’s acquaintance,” Aunt Clara said. “Despite Sadie’s disapproval and Wilma’s foolish vapors, I am prepared to like him. Elizabeth does, and she is invariably sensible in her assessment of character. And he has won your regard, Lauren. That must override any possible doubt I might feel.”

Lauren curved her lips into a smile—they felt remarkably stiff. She did not want to be doing this—deceiving the two people who were dearest to her in the world, deceiving the Earl of Redfield and his family, bowling along through a shaded, heavily wooded park toward a charade of her own making. But of course it was too late now not to be doing it.

How could she have made that irresponsible suggestion at Vauxhall? What on earth had possessed her? She was never impulsive. And she did not even like Lord Ravensberg. Did she? Certainly she did not approve of him. His dancing eyes and his frequent laughter suggested altogether too careless an attitude to life. He positively delighted in doing and saying outrageous things that were simply not gentlemanly. At this precise moment, she thought with some alarm, she could not even remember exactly what he looked like.

Suddenly the carriage interior was flooded with sunlight again. Lauren moved her head closer to the window beside her and gazed ahead. They had drawn clear of the forest and were approaching a river, which they were going to cross via a roofed Palladian bridge. To her far left she could see that the river emptied its waters into a lake, which was just visible among the trees. Beyond the bridge, well-kept lawns sloped upward to the classical elegance of a large, gray stone mansion. The lawns were dotted with ancient trees. On the lake side of the house were stables and a carriage house.

“Oh,” she said, and Gwen pressed her face to the window too, turning her head to look backward.

“Splendid,” Aunt Clara said. She was looking through the opposite window. “That must be a rose arbor beside the house with flower parterres below it.”

Then Gwen was patting Lauren’s knee again and smiling, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

“I am so happy for you!” she exclaimed. “I knew that sooner or later you were bound to meet the man who was created just for you. Are you very deep in love with him?”

But Lauren only half heard. The carriage had turned past the stables, and its wheels were crunching over a wide graveled terrace toward the steep flight of marble steps leading up beyond massive fluted pillars to the mansion’s great double doors, which stood open. There were people on the steps—two, three, no, four of them. And at the foot of the steps, dashing and elegant in a form-fitting coat of blue superfine over tight gray pantaloons and shiny, tasseled Hessian boots, a sunny smile on his face . . .

“Ah, yes,” Lauren said, though whether in answer to Gwen’s question or her own foolish fear that she would not recognize him, no one thought to ask—least of all Lauren herself.


Kit had been restless all day. He had ridden for hours, alone, across country, following no particular route, trying to kill the hours until she could reasonably be expected. Then, back at the house, he had paced in and out of front-facing rooms, peering out through the windows long before the carriage could possibly roll into sight unless it had left London in the middle of the night. He had even walked briskly down to the lodge shortly after luncheon to chat with the porter for a while.

He wished this whole thing were not happening. He wished, now that it was too late to do things differently, that he had simply written to his father earlier in the spring with a firm refusal to have any marriage arranged for him. He should have refused even to come home until he felt more ready to do so. He should not even have sold out last year. He could be with the armies now, doing what he did best. He should have written to his father . . .

But the trouble was that he was Ravensberg. He was the heir. And as the heir he had responsibilities, which he had shirked for almost two years even though he had ended his career. It was his duty to be at home, to make his peace with his father, to learn what the future Earl of Redfield needed to know, to take a wife, to father sons—yes, preferably plural.

But was he fulfilling those duties even now? With a sham engagement? And a homecoming that would have been difficult even under the best of circumstances? His father had been predictably furious when, after the first awkward exchange of greetings following his arrival, he had made his announcement. The situation, he had then discovered, was far worse than he had realized. A marriage settlement had been discussed and fully agreed upon by his father and the Duke of Bewcastle, Freyja’s brother. They had even signed a contract. It had apparently not occurred to either of them that it might be advisable to consult the wishes of the prospective bride and groom first.

Kit doubted that Freyja’s wishes had been consulted.

His mother had been dismayed and then tearful. The tight hug with which she had greeted him had not been repeated since. Even his grandmother had shaken her head at him with unspoken reproof. She was unable to say a great deal, having suffered an apoplexy five years before from which she had never quite recovered all her faculties. She still treated him with affection, but he knew that he had disappointed her.

And Sydnam—well, he and his younger brother, who had shaken hands awkwardly and without making full eye contact on Kit’s arrival, had had a nasty falling out that same night and now scarcely spoke to each other. Kit had found him in the steward’s office after everyone else had retired to bed, writing laboriously in a ledger with his left hand.

“So this is where you disappeared to after dinner,” Kit had said. “Why here, Syd?”

“Parkin retired before Christmas last year,” Sydnam had explained, looking at the worn leather cover of the ledger rather than at his brother. “I asked Father if I could take his place as steward of Alvesley.”

“As steward?” Kit had frowned. “ You, Syd?”

“It suits me very well,” his brother had told him.

Kit had assumed that Syd was living a life of enforced idleness here without his right arm and with only his left eye out of which to see and with no possible way of doing what he had been created to do. They had exchanged no letters in three years. He had assumed that Syd could not write any, and he had written none of his own because . . . well, because there had been nothing to say.

“How are you?” he had asked.

“Well.” The single word had been spoken abruptly, defiantly. “I am perfectly well, thank you.”

“Are you?”

Sydnam had opened the top left-hand drawer of the desk and placed the ledger inside it. “Perfectly well.”

They had been unusually close when they were younger, despite the six-year gap in their ages. He had been Syd’s hero, and in his turn he had adored his young brother, who had possessed all the qualities of character that he lacked—steadiness, sweetness, patience, vision, dedication.

“Why did you tell me to leave?” Kit had blurted suddenly. “Why did you join the chorus?”

Sydnam had not had to ask what he was talking about. After their father had banished Kit three years before, Syd had got up from his sick bed and come down to the hall, looking like a ghost and a skeleton combined, clad only in his nightshirt, his valet and a footman hovering anxiously in the background. But instead of offering the expected sympathy, he had told Kit to leave, to go, not to come back. There had been no word of farewell, no word of forgiveness . . .

“You were destroying all of us,” Sydnam had said in answer to his questions. “Yourself most of all. You had to go. I thought you might defy Father. I thought you might go after Jerome again and kill him. I told you to go because I wanted you gone.”

Kit had crossed the room to the window, from which the curtains were drawn back. But he had been able to see nothing outside—only his own reflection thrown back at him, and Syd’s, still seated at the desk.

“You did blame me, then,” he had said.

“Yes.”

The single word had pierced his heart. He would never forgive himself for what had happened, but without Syd’s forgiveness there was no hope of any kind of lasting peace. Only more of the restless search for forgetfulness, which he had been able to achieve with a measure of success while he had still been commissioned, but which had been impossible to find since he sold out. He had tried. He had hardly rested, day or night.