Chapter One
"Smile, Daniel. You look as though someone has died."
"No one has died, Rosanne. I am simply standing."
"You areglowering. There is a difference." Lady Rosanne Wynthorpe tucked her hand more firmly into the crook of her brother's arm, as though she feared he might bolt for the house at any moment. Which, to be fair, was not an unreasonable fear. "The tenants will think you disapprove of them."
"I do not disapprove of them."
"Then perhaps you might inform your face of that fact."
Daniel Wynthorpe, sixth Duke of Wyntham, did not dignify this with a response. He was, he felt, being perfectly pleasant. He had arrived at the tenant fair at the appointed hour. He had shaken the appropriate hands, nodded at the appropriate children, and made the appropriate remarks about the weather, the harvest, and the general state of the county. He had even, at Rosanne's insistence, consumed a meat pie from one of the village stalls, though it had sat in his stomach like a small, resentful stone ever since.
What more could possibly be required of him?
"You might tryenjoyingyourself," Rosanne said, as though she had heard the question he had not asked aloud. "It is a fair, Daniel. There is music. There are games. Mrs. Hendricks has made her famous apple tarts."
"I am aware of Mrs. Hendricks's tarts. She has made them every year for the past decade."
"And every year, you refuse to eat one."
"I do not care for apples."
Rosanne made a small sound of exasperation; a sound Daniel had become intimately familiar with over her seventeen years of existence. It was the sound she made when she found him particularly impossible, which was, admittedly, often.
He supposed he could not blame her. The fairwaspleasant, in its way. The September sun was warm without being oppressive, the village green was festooned with bunting and ribbons, and the air smelled of roasted meat and fresh bread and the particular golden sweetness of autumn. Children darted between the stalls like small, shrieking comets, their laughter rising above the general hum of conversation. Farmers compared livestock with the grave intensity of generals surveying a battlefield. Young couples walked arm in arm, stealing glances at each other when they thought no one was looking.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a scene of simple happiness.
But Daniel found it exhausting.
Not the happiness itself; he did not begrudge his tenants their pleasures. But there was something about all thisfeeling, all this unguarded emotion on display, that made him want to retreat to the cool silence of his study and remain there until everyone had gone home.
You are a cold man, his mother had told him once, during one of their final arguments.You will die alone, Daniel, with nothing but your precious control for company.
She had been wrong about many things, but perhaps not about that.
"Oh, look!" Rosanne's grip on his arm tightened suddenly. "Something is happening over there. By the puppet show."
Daniel followed her gaze and saw a small knot of people gathering near one of the far stalls. A woman was crying, one of the tenant farmers' wives, he thought, though he could not recall her name, and several others were speaking in the raised, urgent tones that suggested crisis rather than celebration.
"Stay here," he said, already moving toward the commotion.
"Daniel, I am not a child."
"Stay here."
He did not wait to see if she obeyed. His long stride carried him across the green in moments, the crowd parting instinctively as he approached. Being a duke had its advantages; people tended to move out of one's way.
"What has happened?" he demanded, addressing no one in particular.
A dozen voices answered at once, creating a cacophony of overlapping explanations from which Daniel extracted the following: a child had wandered off, a boy of perhaps four or five years, and his mother had only just noticed his absence. The puppet show had been very engaging, you see, and she had only looked away for a moment, and now the boy was nowhere to be found. What if he had wandered toward the river, what if...
"Enough." Daniel held up a hand, and the voices fell silent. "How long has he been missing?"
"Only a few minutes, Your Grace," someone offered. "But he's so small, and there are so many people."
"Then we shall find him. You,"he pointed at one of the young farmhands, "check the livestock pens. You, the food stalls. You..."
