“It is to be hoped, my love,” his grace said dryly, “that you will resist the urge. I have already got my boots wet this month, not to mention my unmentionables. I was hoping to save my neckcloth from a similar fate.”

She laughed and he tightened his arm about her shoulders.

They were walking along the beach close to the water’s edge as they sometimes did late at night after James had been fed and everyone else had retired and they might be assured of some private time for themselves.

“Nevertheless, I will be quite happy to return to Lindsey Hall,” she said.

“Will you?” he asked.

“It is home,” she said with a sigh. “I will be glad to go home.”

“Will you?” he said again, and he paused for a few moments in order to kiss her with unhurried thoroughness.

“Will you sell the white house to Mr. Butler?” she asked him as they walked on.

“It is not really a white house, my love,” he said. “I ought to have taken you over there and shown it to you.”

“But that is what its name means in Welsh,” she said. “Will you sell it?”

“My grandfather bought it as a young man,” he told her. “Apparently the rumor was soon making the rounds of fashionable drawing rooms that he was housing his mistress there, but it turned out-though not before my grandmother had blackened both eyes of the man who was foolish enough to drop a malicious word of warning in her ear-that it was her particular friend, a severely battered wife, who had taken sanctuary there. My grandfather killed the husband when challenged to a duel over the matter-an incident that was quite efficiently hushed up, by the way, as such matters usually were in those days. He was a colorful man, my grandfather-and my grandmother no less so. The Bedwyn men, of course, never ever employ mistresses after they are married.”

The duchess laughed softly. “I daresay,” she said, “they gave it up as a hazardous practice after a few of them acquired wives like your grandmother.”

The duke uttered one of his rare barks of laughter.

“I suppose I will sell Ty Gwyn to Sydnam,” he said after they had strolled in silence for a few minutes. “In fact, I undoubtedly will, since I know it will be passing into very good hands. But I am not expected to give in too easily on such matters, you know. I will tell him before we leave here.”

“I have been so very disappointed,” she said, “that nothing seems to have developed between him and Miss Jewell after all our efforts. I was convinced that they were made for each other. We all were.”

“I shudder,” he said, “at the realization that a whole generation of Bedwyns and their spouses have descended to the ignoble sport of matchmaking. It is enough to make me seriously wonder where I went wrong with them. They even appear to hold the extraordinary conviction that they had a hand in bringing us together, Christine.”

“He needs someone,” she said as if she had not heard him, “and so does she. And whenever I have seen them together, they have always looked right. Has it struck you, Wulfric, that she might have been the Marchioness of Hallmere if Joshua’s cousin had married her, and that Joshua might have been plain Mr. Moore?”

“I do not imagine,” he said dryly, “that Freyja would have liked being plain Mrs. Moore.”

“And I like them both exceedingly,” she added, clearly still talking about Anne and Sydnam.

“I daresay,” he said, “logic seems to point to the conclusion that therefore they must belong together, Christine. But if such logic always prevailed, what in heaven’s name are you and I doing together?”

“I had high hopes,” she said, “after he took her to see the white house this afternoon while we were all at Pembroke Castle that we would arrive home to find that he had offered for her and there would be a betrothal to celebrate. I even had tentative plans for persuading everyone to stay another day or two for a grand celebratory party. But instead Miss Jewell had hardly a word to say this evening about Ty Gwyn but merely wanted to know everything about Pembroke. And she scarcely stopped smiling all evening. Did you notice? But of course, I ought to have realized it before now-that was the problem, was it not? Why would she have been smiling if she had not been secretly nursing a broken heart? Perhaps he simply did not have the courage to make her an offer. I suppose he thinks he is unbearably ugly, foolish man. I wish now I had invited him for the evening, but I did not know when we would be back. Wulfric, do you think-”

“Christine,” his grace said sternly, stopping altogether and swinging her around to face him before gazing down at her with eyes that matched the moonlight, “I did not bring you out here in order to discuss the sad state of Sydnam Butler’s love life-or that of Miss Jewell.”

“I do beg your pardon,” she said with a sigh. But then she smiled up at him and set her hands on his shoulders, not noticeably chastened by the reproof. “Why did you bring me out here?”

This time his kiss was not so much thorough as it was ruthless.

Her grace said no more about Anne Jewell and Sydnam Butler.



The long spell of hot, dry weather appeared to have broken at last. The clouds hung low and gray overhead and rain was drizzling down as Sydnam made his way on foot up the driveway toward the main house. The weather seemed appropriate to the occasion.