“And by that, you mean . . . ?”

Charlotte thought back over those few minutes in the chapel anteroom. It was already becoming hazy in memory, filmed with a heavy layer of wishful thinking. “I wish I knew.”

“Charlotte!”

“There’s not terribly much to tell. He was very insistent that I should stay away from Sir Francis Medmenham — ”

“Jealous!” crowed Henrietta. “He’s jealous!”

“Or just being protective,” corrected Charlotte, in the interest of fairness. “Sir Francis’s reputation isn’t the best. And Robert is the head of the family, no matter how long he’s been away. It’s his responsibility to look out for me.”

Amazing what a lowering word “responsibility” could be. Charlotte approved of responsibility in principle, just not as directed towards her.

Henrietta waved that aside. “Protective, jealous. They’re both sides of the same coin. Just ask Miles.” A satisfied smile spread across her face. “He was delightfully cranky about Lord Vaughn.”

“So was your mother.”

“Not in the same way,” said Henrietta definitely.

Charlotte decided it was better not to go into that one. Lady Uppington, like Henrietta, was a woman of strong opinions and not afraid to voice them. Charlotte wondered what Lady Uppington would think of Robert. . . . With an effort, Charlotte wrenched her attention back from that fascinating line of speculation.

“So?” demanded Henrietta. “What happened after he warned you off of Medmenham?”

“Well . . .” Charlotte bit down on her lower lip. “We were standing in the chapel anteroom, and I thought, for a moment — ”

“Yes?”

The color rose in Charlotte’s cheeks as she fiddled with one of the pearl buttons on her glove. “I thought for a moment he was going to kiss me. But he didn’t,” she added hastily, before Henrietta could say whatever it was she was obviously bursting to say. “So I must have been imagining things. As I am wont to do.” She sighed.

Sometimes, having an overactive imagination could be a distinct liability. The daydreams were lovely, but it was always so disappointing when they turned out to have no relation to reality. Her debut three years ago had been a case in point.

Henrietta, on the other hand, saw nothing to be disappointed about. She sat bolt upright and jabbed a finger into the air. “Ah! An almost kiss!”

Charlotte wrinkled her nose at her dearest friend. “I didn’t know there could be an almost about a kiss. It seems like the sort of thing that either happens or it doesn’t.”

“Oh, no,” said Henrietta, with the worldly wise air of someone who had been married for a whole six months. “There’s an entire universe of near misses out there, kisses that almost were, but weren’t.”

“How very sad,” said Charlotte. “Can’t you just picture it? The Land of Lost Kisses. All the loves that might have been but weren’t.”

Henrietta’s chin lifted with an expression of pure determination that Charlotte recognized all too well. “Yours will be. You just need to make almost an actuality.”


It wasn’t as cold as he had feared. That was one of the saving graces with which Robert consoled himself as they tramped across the park towards their designated tree. Like good elves, the ubiquitous staff had been there before them. In their wake, a substantial bonfire burned a safe distance from the tree line, the leaping flames adding a pagan tang to the evening.

The servants had also left a folding table on which rested two rows of rough brown jugs made of a coarse pottery that contrasted strikingly with the snowy cloth of Irish linen that had been laid across the table. Lord Henry Innes made straight for the table, while two of the locals, clearly men of substance in the local community with preexisting grudges, began quibbling over which oak was meant to be the Epiphany tree.

Robert didn’t see how the particular tree mattered; once they started shooting off all those pistols, rifles, muskets, and — heaven help them all, was that a blunderbuss? — any evil spirits who had had the poor judgment to roost anywhere within a two-mile radius were sure to be rousted out and set to flight.

Both men tramped over to him, firearms in hand, and poured out their competing theories. Fortunately, Robert managed to refrain from asking why in the devil they were chewing his ear off. He had nearly forgotten. He was meant to be the Duke, and thus expected to settle this sort of dispute. He might not know about trees, but he did know about quarreling men.

Robert picked a third tree at random.

“This one,” he said as the flames cast grotesque shadows across their expectant faces. “It’s clearly the biggest of the lot.”

“How positively Solomonic,” murmured Medmenham. It didn’t sound like a compliment. Strolling to the other side of the tree, he tapped it lightly with one knuckle. “Crammed full of evil spirits, too, I warrant.”

Robert suspected any evil spirits were outside rather than inside the tree. But since they were holding firearms, it didn’t seem like a good time to press the point.

Instead, he said mildly, “Shall we get on?”

Turnip Fitzhugh warily circled the tree, as though expecting it to engage in a preemptive strike. “I say, are we meant to shoot at the tree or away from it?”

“At it, I should think,” replied Lord Freddy Staines, polishing the stock of his pistol to bring out its pretty sheen. His initials were tooled onto the stock in shiny silver filigree, all extravagant curlicues and improbable flourishes. “How else are we to kill the evil spirits?”

Fitzhugh nodded as though that made perfect sense to him.

Robert gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to bang someone’s head against the tree, preferably Staines’s. He had seen Staines’s type time and again in the army, pampered aristocrats, confident to the point of obtuseness, who barely knew one end of a gun from the other but had no scruples about sending whole regiments of men far more seasoned than they to their deaths in battle plans so ridiculous that even a five-year-old child could have seen the flaws.

In short, the sort of man who would recommend so idiotic a measure as pointing a bullet at a hard object at point-blank range with a large group of people clustered around. There was a name for that. It was called suicide.

Robert did his best to put it in an idiom they would all understand. “I’d say shooting at the tree would be a jolly dangerous idea.”

“Why?” demanded Lord Henry Innes, trooping over to join the group, a brown jug in one hand and his pistol in the other. “It ain’t going to shoot back.”

Medmenham rose to Robert’s aid. “Ricochet,” he said succinctly. “I, for one, have no desire to breathe my last because of a bullet bouncing off a tree.”

“Better than at the hand of a jealous husband, eh?” put in Frobisher, sending an elbow towards Medmenham’s ribs.

Medmenham neatly sidestepped, sending Frobisher stumbling sideways into the tree. Given the way Frobisher bounced off, Robert decided that the score was tree: one; men: zero. “My dear fellow,” he said in a tone of mock censure, “I do not toy with married women.”

“Safer than the unmarried ones,” retorted Frobisher, brushing bark off his sleeve. “Right, Staines?”

Staines looked up from his pistol with a smug grin. “I’d say it depends on which unmarried woman.” It was painfully clear to whom he was referring.

Tommy pushed away from his post by the tree. “Don’t you mean lady?”

Staines regarded him coolly, his fashionably high shirt points pushing against his cheekbones. “I always say exactly what I mean.”

Something crackled in the air that wasn’t the bonfire.

Robert stepped neatly between them. “Isn’t it about time we got our revels underway?”

Neither man moved. Robert could hear the puff of their breath in the cold air, the shuffle of feet against the cold ground in the unnatural stillness that preceded a challenge.

But there wasn’t going to be one. Not if he could bloody well help it.

Robert seized on the first expedient that came to mind. Assuming his best ducal air, he called out, “As your host, I claim the privilege of the first toast.”

He didn’t have a glass to hand, or even a jug, so he made up for it by lifting both hands in what he hoped was a magisterial gesture.

“To Epiphany Eve, a time for revelry” — there was some cheering and lifting of bottles at that, a nervous, too shrill sound — “reconciliation” — he looked pointedly at Tommy, who looked grimly back at him — “and revelation.”

Around him, he could hear the popping sound of stoppers being yanked from jugs. “Epiphany Eve!”

Staines let his pistol drop to his side.

Robert raised his voice to be heard above the others. “And now — let’s drink!”

“I’ll drink to that!” one of the locals called out and the group dissolved into a milling mass, separating into small groups, as the men let their weapons fall and dropped onto the frozen ground for a good spot of drinking and masculine companionship. Robert wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the whole ritual was largely an excuse for getting out of the house while the women fussed over preparations for Twelfth Night. Charlotte would probably know, or at least have a theory about it.

No one seemed particularly concerned about frightening away the spirits; they were far more interested in getting at the cider and telling long, boastful stories about their weaponry. Given the amount of cider sloshing into the roots of the tree, any evil spirits were going to be too sloshed by the end of the evening to work any harm. Robert hoped that the same could be said for the humans.