“Yes?”

Mr. Fitzhugh waved a hand. “I’d have lots of pennies. Jolly useful things, pennies. Vaughn, old bean! Didn’t think to see you out here!”

“The feeling is mutual,” said Lord Vaughn drily. “This party was by invitation only.”

“Got the invitation straight from the horse’s mouth,” Mr. Fitzhugh protested indignantly. “Henry Innes told me to come. Saw him at Miss Climpson’s yesterday, bringing parcels to his cousin.”

“How delightful,” said Lady Vaughn, in a voice that suggested it was anything but.

Arabella took a step back from the glare of Lady Vaughn’s rubies. “We didn’t mean to intrude upon your party.”

“Such a pity, then, that your intent didn’t match your execution,” said Lady Vaughn, so smoothly that it took one a moment to notice the stiletto beneath the silk. “Miss...”

Arabella knew that the former Miss Alsworthy knew very well who she was. Aunt Osborne and Miss Alsworthy’s mother had been cronies of sorts. They went shopping together, spurring each other on to ever more egregious purchases. But now that Miss Alsworthy was Lady Vaughn — and now that it was known that Arabella was no longer likely to be her aunt’s heiress — Lady Vaughn couldn’t be bothered to recall a mere Miss Dempsey.

“It’s Dempsey,” Mr. Fitzhugh provided for her, looking sternly at Lady Vaughn. “Miss Dempsey. And her friend, Miss Austen.”

“Dempsey?” Lord Vaughn eyed her lazily through his quizzing glass. “Not Lady Osborne’s ward?”

“Her niece,” Arabella corrected. Ward implied a status that Arabella no longer enjoyed.

The sun glinted off the serpent scrolled around Vaughn’s quizzing glass. “Ah,” said Vaughn. “You must be here to see your aunt. How... touching.”

So they were here. For all her speculations, she hadn’t really expected they would be.

Arabella felt her fingers go hot, then cold.

“Oh, no,” said Mr. Fitzhugh blithely, immune to nuance. “We’re here to see the ruins.”

Lady Vaughn looked innocently up at her husband. “Isn’t that what you said, Vaughn?”

Her meaning was impossible to mistake. Arabella squirmed, feeling uncomfortable for her aunt, for Jane, for herself. Aunt Osborne’s marriage had made all the papers. The scandal sheets had reveled in the ridiculous spectacle of an aging woman marrying an ambitious young man. Arabella had, for the most part, been left out of it, but there had been one or two mentions made of dashed hopes and disinherited relations.

Just so long as no one ever realized exactly which sorts of hopes had been dashed.

“Farley Castle is accounted very picturesque,” Jane was saying, when a woman came hurrying out of the castle gates, nearly bumping into their party.

“I do beg your pardon — ,” she began.

“I say!” Mr. Fitzhugh’s face lit up with recognition. “Don’t I know you? Met you at Miss Climpson’s yesterday. You’re the French mistress.”

“Mademoiselle de Fayette,” said the lady in a soft voice. “And you are Mr. Fitzhugh.”

“Miss Climpson’s, did you say?” asked Jane, looking meaningfully at Arabella. The young woman, while prettily and warmly dressed, looked harried, her hair escaping in dark wisps from its pins, her bonnet askew.

“Mr. Fitzhugh’s sister is a pupil at Miss Climpson’s,” said Mlle de Fayette. “A most apt pupil too.”

She made one of those quick, shifting movements people make as they prepare to excuse themselves, but she was forestalled by Lady Vaughn.

“A Fitzhugh?” Lady Vaughn’s laugh, sickly sweet as syrup and just as devoid of any genuine nourishment, grated on Arabella’s nerves. “Apt?”

“I shouldn’t be too hasty to condemn the entire garden on the basis of one vegetable, my sweet,” returned her husband blandly, as though the vegetable in question weren’t standing right there. “One never knows where one might find the odd flower.”

Lady Vaughn tossed her glossy head, making the crimson plumes on her hat dance. “Why bother with root vegetables when there are roses to be had?”

Lord Vaughn regarded his wife from beneath half-closed lids. “Too humble for you?”

Lady Vaughn’s gaze shifted to Mr. Fitzhugh’s dangling watch fobs, all decorated with exaggerated enamel carnations. “Too tasteless.”

Arabella remembered the hot bricks and the cold chocolate and the solicitude with which Mr. Fitzhugh had tucked blanket after blanket around them in the carriage. When had Lady Vaughn, for all her vaunted good taste, ever performed a kind deed for anyone? Turnips might be plain, but they were certainly nourishing.

“Even humble fare has its advantages,” said Arabella defiantly.

“Yes, thirty thousand of them a year,” said Lady Vaughn with a knowing arch of her brows. “And all in gold.”

Arabella looked at Lady Vaughn, at her crimson-dyed feathers and watchful eyes. “Not everyone counts a man’s worth in coins.”

Lord Vaughn lifted his quizzing glass. “Who said anything about a man? I spoke merely of cultivating one’s garden.”

Arabella could feel Mr. Fitzhugh step closer to her, ranging himself protectively beside her. It was a sweet thought, even if misplaced. Lord Vaughn’s weaponry was something other than physical.

The French mistress backed away, eager to be gone. “If you will excuse me...”

“Ah, Delphine!” Another man joined them, fashionably dressed, but without the ostentation of Mr. Fitzhugh’s costume. His voice had a slight French lilt to it, although less so than Mlle de Fayette, whom he addressed in tones of familial intimacy. “Have you found your lost lamb yet? Sebastian, Lady Vaughn,” he added, with a nod to the others.

Mlle de Fayette subsided, with a worried look over her shoulder. “Mr. Fitzhugh, ladies. I do not believe you know my cousin, the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent.”

The chevalier directed his smile at Arabella and Jane. “It is a mouthful, is it not? I am Argent to my friends. Nicolas to my very, very close friends.”

“And scamp, scapegrace, and limb of Satan to his relations,” said Mlle de Fayette. She did not seem to be entirely joking.

“All terms of endearment,” explained the chevalier complacently. “It is simply their way of saying ‘I love you.’ ”

“Why not simply say it, then?” suggested Mr. Fitzhugh, with a tinge of asperity. “They could save a lot of bother that way.”

“But they would lose so much face,” the chevalier returned. “Ladies don’t like to make their affections too generally known. Do they, Miss... ?”

“Dempsey,” Mr. Fitzhugh provided for her, folding his arms across his chest. “Miss Dempsey. And that is Miss Austen.”

Ignoring him, the chevalier continued to direct his smile at Arabella, carrying on as though Turnip had never spoken. “What do you say, Miss Dempsey? Have hearts gone out of fashion as ornaments on one’s sleeve?”

Arabella glanced away. “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

Through the castle gate, she could see the fashionable set milling about. There was Lord Frederick Staines and Mr. Martin Frobisher, both tricked out in the latest of multi-caped coats; Percy Ponsonby and his sister; Lord Henry Innes, Lieutenant Darius Danforth, and a group of their cronies; others she recognized from her many years on the fringes of London’s elite.

A dimple appeared in the chevalier’s cheek. “Have you no affections, then, Miss Dempsey? Would you, as your poet says, sooner hear your dog bark at a crow than a man say he loves you?”

“The problem has never arisen.” The crowd shifted, blocking her view. “I have no dog.”

There was a moment of silence and then the chevalier laughed, a genuine, rolling laugh of the sort that made others want to laugh too. “But many admirers, I imagine.”

“The chevalier has quite the imagination,” Lady Vaughn murmured to her husband.

“Dozens of admirers,” Mr. Fitzhugh said stoutly. “Have to beat ’em off with a stick.”

“Ah,” said the chevalier with amusement. “Due to the lack of a dog. You might want to invest in one. It would save the wear and tear on the trees.”

“I thank you for your advice, Monsieur de la Tour d’Argent.”

There he was, Captain Musgrave, standing near the refreshment table, a silver cup in one hand. Arabella could see the steam rising off it in long curls, framing his face like a picture carried in a locket.

The chevalier grinned at Arabella. “Why not just call me ‘limb of Satan’ and have done with it?”

“Because some people, Nicolas, have manners,” said the chevalier’s cousin.

There were clusters of people on either side of Captain Musgrave, but not with him. He stood alone between the chattering groups while Arabella’s aunt gossiped with a nearby matron. As Arabella watched, he looked up, his eyes meeting hers across the clearing, across a divide of two months and one ring.

“Is that what you teach?” Arabella heard Jane ask Mlle de Fayette, dutifully making conversation. “Deportment?”

“Teach?” repeated Lady Vaughn, as though the word were unfamiliar to her.

The crowd moved again and he was gone, blocked out. Arabella looked abruptly away, forcing herself to focus on her companions. Act naturally, she admonished herself. The point was to look as though she were enjoying herself.

“I teach French,” said Mlle de Fayette. “It is a logical subject for me, no?”

“Oh, yes!” agreed Arabella enthusiastically. Too enthusiastically. Jane gave her a strange look.

“Do you like it?” asked Jane. “Teaching?”

Mlle de Fayette exchanged a wry look with her cousin. “It was not entirely a matter of choice, but it has its compensations. Today, however...” Leaning forward confidentially, she said, “There is a situation of the most awkward. A student of the school is here today, against all prohibitions.”