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Leonora declined with a smile. She was hoping to sit out the next dance and was about to claim a chair at the edge of the ballroom floor when she felt her skin prick, a sensation she had had once before. Someone with an unsettling energy was standing behind her.

‘Miss Appleby, may I have the honour of the next dance?’ The voice was insinuating and familiar; she could feel his breath on her cheek. She turned to meet the narrow eyes of Captain Ormonde, watching her as he murmured, ‘It sounds as if it’s a waltz.’

Politeness decreed she could not refuse him, so she placed her hand on his arm as he led her to the dance floor. Captain Ormonde behaved with greater decorum than Beau Beacham and as the music started, they danced at the required formal distance and only on the turns did his arm draw her closer. But his conversation was not as amusing as the Beau’s; there was a predatory energy about him. The flash of his legendary smile was indeed charming but always troubling when allied with his cynical manner. He murmured as they danced, ‘Miss Blythe is looking very fine tonight. What a difference when a young woman learns she’s been born of aristocratic blood.’

Leonora thought this a strangely disobliging comment and changed to a more neutral subject. ‘To which regiment do you belong, Captain?’

‘The King’s Regiment.’ He danced them away from the window then added, ‘The same as the Rokeby brothers.’

Too late she realised this was not an uncontroversial topic of conversation. Leonora felt the fluttering of alarm. ‘I suppose your paths didn’t necessarily cross?’

She felt his shoulders stiffen under her fingers. ‘Indeed. They were often out of camp. Exploring officers are mostly in enemy territory before reporting their findings back to our commanders.’

There was a hostility in every mention he made of them, and Leonora grew even more uneasy. She met his eyes as he danced her out of the path of another waltzing couple and said, ‘Knowing a little of what the Earl of Rokeby has been through has made me full of admiration of all men who go to war.’

The dance had come to an end and Leonora was keen to get away, but he clamped her hand on his arm and she did not want to make a scene. In a low ferocious voice he said, ‘I suppose your admiration for military men falls on your local Earl? I presume he told you his brother died in his arms on the field of battle?’

Leonora tried to extract her hand discreetly from his grasp. She was wary as she said, ‘He did.’

‘Well, rather than trying to save his brother, Alistair Rokeby walked away and left him to die. That way he inherited the estate, the title, everything.’

A protective outrage rose in her breast. She did not want to be heard so lowered her voice, but emotion burst out of her. ‘How dare you blacken a man’s name thus. How can you say such a wicked thing?’

Captain Ormonde met her blazing eyes and answered her with deadly intent. ‘Because I was there when his “heroic” brother died and far from cradling him in his arms, Alistair Rokeby was off rutting with one of Boney’s army cooks.’

Leonora felt as if she had been punched and gasped with the force of the blow. She walked quickly to the far side of the room just as the music for the next dance was beginning. Her emotions were in such miserable turmoil, she ignored the music, the dancers. Disbelief, jealousy, fear, anger and love were coiled in a deadly ferment. She had witnessed the closeness of Madame Dupré’s relationship with Lord Rokeby; indeed, it had haunted her thoughts; could such a dreadful thing be true?

She was gazing sightless on the dark garden when she became aware of a ripple of consternation through the room. The orchestra slithered to a halt and everyone turned to the double doors where a dishevelled figure in black, his great wolfhound by his side, had just entered. For a moment, Leonora stopped breathing.

The Earl of Rokeby was without a mask, wearing only his distinctive eye patch and yet, even fully masked, she would have known him anywhere. His height and natural authority distinguished him. To her he was the most admirable and manly of men and whenever she saw him, her pulse quickened. The dancers had stopped momentarily and Leonora watched him scan the room. A man’s voice was heard. ‘This is the Duchess’s ballroom. Dogs to the stables, my lord!’ But Lord Rokeby ignored the instruction, still looking from masked face to masked face, seeking the person he had come for. Leonora heard a woman next to her mutter, ‘It’s such bad form to parade your wounds at a social event. Look at his face! We want to enjoy ourselves and not be reminded of the war.’

Her companion chimed in. ‘And as for his uncouth behaviour bringing his cur…’

Leonora’s emotions were so close to the surface she could not stop herself turning to face the woman, turbaned in pink silk with a matching pink feathered mask. In a quiet voice filled with fury she said, ‘Madame! It is men like Lord Rokeby who sacrifice their health, even their lives, to keep us safe and able to enjoy such entertainments as these!’

Then Achille suddenly caught a scent and trotted purposefully through the crowd, followed by his master, heading into the press of dancers who parted like the Red Sea. In moments they were by Leonora’s side. She felt the dog’s wet nose nuzzling her hand and looked up into the tense face of Lord Rokeby. Her knees almost gave way with the shock and emotion of having him so close to her again. The music had started but everyone’s eyes in the room had seen his dramatic entrance and wondered what had drawn him here with such urgency.

Taking Leonora’s arm, Alistair Rokeby drew her away into the window embrasure farthest from the orchestra. She had recovered some of her equilibrium. ‘Lord Rokeby! I thought you could not stomach Town and that nothing would induce you to appear at any event, let alone one like this.’

They moved farther into the recess and he said in a bitter voice, ‘You’re right, it’s not my favoured habitat.’

‘Then why here? Why now?’

‘I’ve been summoned to receive my brother’s posthumous medal for gallantry. I went to my grandmother’s house to find you had left for this pantomime.’ He indicated the masked throng with disdain. ‘I had to enter the lion’s den to find you.’ He then took both Leonora’s hands and gazed deep into her eyes with an unspoken question she could not fathom. He continued with a throb in his voice, ‘Hasterleigh is not the same without you. I could not wait any longer. Achille needs you, my piano-forte has lost its harmony… And I too am strangely unstrung.’

Leonora had spent two weeks longing to see him again, yet not knowing anything about his feelings, about the truth of anything in his life or hers. His declaration of need for her could barely be understood in her current state of anxious unknowing.

Lord Rokeby’s voice dropped lower and he was speaking fast, as if he did not quite believe the coup de foudre that had overtaken him so completely. ‘Before you, everything seemed black. Achille was all I cared for and the only reason to continue. And then on a muddy lane, you arrived in my life.’ He dragged his hand across his brow. ‘A country maid with your basket of apples and a pink nose from the cold, but you were a flame to light me through the darkness. Just knowing you were in the world, I began to love life as you did. But it was a love too keen to bear alone.’

Leonora’s heart had begun its speeding rhythm that made her tremble, her head grow light and dizzy. Alistair Rokeby squeezed her hands, his words tumbling out. ‘But with you gone this long fortnight, I realised it is not enough just to know you’re in the world. I want you close to me, day and night.’

This was more than she had even dreamed she would hear from his lips. It was all she had longed for and she returned his grip with a force of feeling that overwhelmed her. But Leonora could not forget the Earl’s greeting of Madame Dupré as if she were the only woman in the world for him. What did his impassioned declaration mean alongside that? And Captain Ormonde’s malignant words seeped into her mind like an ineradicable stain. The ecstasy at having him close at last, declaring such feelings, became as insubstantial as will-o’-the-wisps in the shadow of the shameful suspicions she could not ignore.

‘But my lord, what about Madame Dupré?’ She met his gaze with uncertain eyes.

He looked shocked then turned away, his voice short and clipped. ‘I have explained her part in my past. You have no reason to bring her into this conversation.’

‘But is it the past? She stayed with you at the Abbey, without a chaperone.’ Leonora could have bitten her tongue for saying something so mean and provincial-minded, but she had not voiced her fears to anyone, and they had grown in the silence until she could not suppress them any longer.