“My favorite marchioness is out of sorts. Hale must have gone beyond soliciting business advice.”

“I provide him business advice in great detail, in my finest hand, on scented stationery. His next move is usually to demand that I take my place as a proper wife.”

“Doesn’t the man know you better than that?”

“No, Neville, he does not. I’ve borne him five children and been married to him for nearly thirty years, and he does not realize that I take a very dim view of men who comport themselves like domestic field marshals.” A few months shy of thirty years, but who was counting?

“I will endeavor to keep this in mind.” He popped the last section of orange into his mouth, holding her gaze while he chewed, the scamp. “Why did you marry such a blockhead?”

The question was fair, one she’d asked herself many, many times. “He was tall enough.”

Neville’s elegant, manicured hand stopped midreach toward his tea. “My dear, when prone or supine, a man’s height hardly matters.”

“I was seventeen years old, you dratted idiot. I wasn’t thinking about anybody being supine or prone, I was thinking about waltzing with him. Do you know how desperately a girl who is almost six feet tall longs for a partner worthy of her height?”

“I’ve wondered why you tolerate my company. Height would never have occurred to me as the sine qua non of my many charms.”

“Nor humility. Hale had height and a wonderful smile, and his papa was stupid enough to sign the marriage contracts my papa had drawn up. I was besotted with Hale’s beautiful manners and his beautiful speeches.” Also his beautiful body, but it would be disloyal to Hale to bruit that about. “We had some good years, and whatever else is true, my children are well provided for and welcome in every drawing room.”

Neville took a slow, silent sip of tea.

“Just say it, Neville. I consider you a friend.”

“What comes after the blustering? When dear Hale finally figures out that blustering and lecturing and cozening aren’t going to work, what then?”

“I don’t know.” She buttered another scone and took a bite lest some uncomfortable truth try to find its way onto the breakfast menu. Neville was a friend, but he was a man, too.

In less than two years, Deirdre would turn fifty years old, an age unthinkable to that girl waltzing around all those ballrooms years—decades—ago. As a wife and marchioness, she’d learned that nobody could make her as angry as Hale; nobody could bring out her stubborn streak as effectively.

And when he stopped lecturing and cozening and blustering, there was nobody whose letters she’d miss more.

She rang for her confidential secretary, bid the man copy the missive, then told him to fold it back up and return it to the sender with a fresh seal of the same colored wax as it bore when delivered—just as she’d done with every other epistle from her stubborn, pigheaded, high-handed husband.

* * *

“I was hoping Fiona might be free to join me for a short hack this morning.” Tye sent the child what he intended as an avuncular smile, and she grinned back at him and started fidgeting in her chair.

“May I go with Uncle, please?” She swung a pleading gaze from her aunt to her great-aunt while Tye busied himself with whatever he’d put on his plate.

Anything was preferable to meeting Hester Daniels’s eyes after that interlude in the garden last night. Sleep had eluded him for far longer than it should have, and for all the wrong reasons.

“My old bones tell me we’re to have rain later today,” Lady Ariadne said. “A ride this morning might be just the thing. Hester, you’ll accompany them?”

Half a question, half a command, both in the gentle tones of a matriarch whom Tye would have pitted against the late Duke of Wellington—with whom the lady had probably flirted in her younger years.

“You’ll want to change into old clothes, Fee.” Miss Daniels aimed a tolerant smile at her niece, a much-softer smile than Tye had seen on her even a day ago.

“If you’d like to join us, Miss Daniels, we’d be pleased to have your company.” Manners required him to say that. Manners did not require that he watch her mouth when she replied.

“I will let Dolly rest up today and maybe join you tomorrow. Fiona will be on her very best behavior if she has you all to herself.”

Even her voice was different, more musical, less clipped and strained. She looked like she’d slept well, too. For which he tried to resent her—unsuccessfully.

Fiona kicked rhythmically at the rungs of her chair. “Then may I please be excused? I have to change my clothes and ask Deal for some carrots and find my boots.”

“Look under your bed,” Tye suggested, helping himself to the bite of toast left on Fiona’s plate. “When I was a boy, my boots migrated there every time I didn’t want to make time to wash the mud off them.”

Lady Ariadne smiled while Miss Daniels hid behind her teacup.

“You’re excused,” Lady Ariadne said. “You might want to wipe off your boots lest you track mud onto your mama’s spotless carpets.”

The child was off like a shot, leaving a domestic quiet in her wake.

“It’s good of you to take her up,” Miss Daniels said. “She was used to having three uncles to tag after before her mother married, and everybody at Balfour treated her as a sort of mascot. This isn’t a MacGregor property, so her situation has changed some.”

“Rowan enjoys frequent exercise, and so do I. She’ll be no bother.”

This went beyond gentlemanly manners to an outright falsehood, and Miss Daniels let him know it by smiling at him directly.

“Eat your eggs, Spathfoy.” Lady Ariadne picked up a buttered toast point. “You’ll need your sustenance.”

Eggs. Tye glanced at his plate, where several bites of steaming omelet yet remained. He didn’t recall serving himself eggs, but then, neither could he recall three consecutive monarchs of the English royal succession when Miss Daniels smiled at him like that.

Fortunately, Fiona came pounding back into the breakfast parlor before Lady Ariadne could abandon Tye in Miss Daniels’s exclusive company. He let the child physically tug him from his seat and out to the stables.

“I want to hunt for the fox,” she was saying. “I hear him at night sometimes, and I think, what if he can’t find his family? What if he’s lonely or homesick?”

Or lust crazed.

“What if his mama signed him up for singing lessons?” Tye shot back. “What if he’s practicing his serenades for all the young lady foxes, or what if he’s had one pint too many at the local fox pub and he’s yodeling his way home?”

“Foxes don’t yodel.”

“In Switzerland, everybody yodels. They’re proud of their yodeling and their cheese. He might be a fox of Swiss ancestry.” Tye picked the girl up when they reached the stables and sat her on a pile of clean straw. “You are to sit there and not move until I lead Rowan out to the mounting block, do you understand?”

“Yes, Uncle Tye.”

And there she did sit, but ye gods, it seemed the less she moved physically, the more her mind hopped around and her mouth chattered on. What was his favorite bird? Did he know how to yodel? When was he in Switzerland? Her mama and papa might go to Switzerland, because it was near Italy.

By the time Tye had Fiona up on Rowan before him, he realized why the parents of young children wore a perpetually dazed expression. The adult mind was not meant to keep up with such gymnastics. He stopped trying just as Fiona’s chatter slowed to an intelligible rate.

“I like Rowan, even though he’s not very grown-up.”

“Why do you say that?” The gelding was rising five and muscling up quite nicely.

“He’s working on his manners. Like there, when he scooted at the puddle? He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to say may-I-please or just walk right through it. You’re a good boy, Rowan.” She whacked him soundly on the neck, but the horse—perverse beast—didn’t take umbrage. If Tye had attempted to pet his horse thus, they’d be dancing all the way into Ballater.

“Shall we take a fence, Niece? Rowan particularly enjoys showing off his jumping style.”

“Oh, yes, let’s!”

She had the natural seat of the very young, and Tye himself enjoyed hopping the stone walls with her up before him. When Rowan had taken enough fences to have worked off some of his energy, Tye brought the horse back to the walk.

“Your father was not very keen on jumping, but he was a great whip.”

“My father?”

“Your first father.” He didn’t want to say her real father. Fiona had never met the fellow responsible for her conception—how real could such a man be to her?

“He didn’t like jumping on horseback?”

“He learned, eventually, but give him the reins of any vehicle, and he was quite at home. He abhorred the trains, said they’d put the horse out of business.”

“What else?”

He was learning to read her little body, to know an eager stillness from a tense one from a relaxed one. She was hungry—nigh starving—for knowledge of her father.

“He liked animals, like you do, and he hated asparagus.”

“I hate asparagus too. Even with butter and leeks, it’s still green and mushy.”

They came to a divergence in the path, and Tye took the left fork, away from Ballater. He’d considered making inquiries at the local livery regarding a pony—making them right before his niece’s dazzled eyes—but realized he had something even more fascinating than a pony to offer her.

“Shall I tell you a story about when your father was a young boy?”