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“A clever child, then.”

“Dreadfully. She still is.” Leonora shook her head fondly. “But that was the whole of it, really. Wanting things, and not always getting them, and finding some other, smaller way around the wanting instead. I do not think I would trade a single one of those afternoons for anything grander.”

Marian was quiet for a long time, so much so that Leonora feared she had said something wrong.

“I had rather thought you a very proper young woman,” Marian said, watching her fondly. “Prim, even. I am delighted to discover I was wrong.”

Leonora giggled then. “I can be prim when the occasion calls for it.”

“I am certain you can. I am equally certain you know precisely how to have fun when the occasion calls for that instead, and I confess I am relieved to hear it. This family has had entirely too much properness in it these past years and not nearly enough mischief.”

“I do know how to have fun, Your Grace,” Leonora said. “When it is needed.”

“Good.” Marian looked pleased with this answer in a way that suggested it had mattered to her more than she was willing to say outright, and for a moment neither of them spoke, the fire cracking softly and one of the cats stretching and resettling itself nearer the hearth.

“My Edmund used to say much the same thing about me,” Marian said after a while, her voice gone somewhere further off, somewhere in the past. “That I was too solemn by half when we first met, and then he heard me play the pianoforte at a gathering and changed his opinion entirely within the space of a single song.”

“Is that how he came to notice you?”

“It is precisely how. I had no great fortune to recommend me and no particular beauty that anyone remarked upon, but I could play, and he told me afterward that he had never in his life heard anyone put so much feeling into a piece of music that was, by any objective measure, not especially difficult. He said it was as though I meant every note of it.” Marian smiled. “He asked me to dance before the song had even finished, which was terribly improper of him, and I have never regretted saying yes.”

Leonora’s heart softened. “That is a lovely story, Your Grace.”

“It is a true one, which is better.” Marian set her cup down and regarded Leonora with fresh interest. “Do you play, my dear?”

“The pianoforte? I do. Not so well as I would like, but I do.”

“Then you must play for me. I insist upon it.” Marian was already rising, moving toward the pianoforte in the corner of the room with more energy than Leonora had seen from her all morning. “Do you know ‘Robin Adair’?”

Leonora nodded slowly. “I believe I do, Your Grace, though it has been some time since I last played it.”

“Then it is high time you played it again. Come, come, I have been waiting weeks for an excuse to hear that instrument used properly instead of gathering dust.”

Leonora rose, setting aside the ruined handkerchief without a trace of regret, and crossed to the pianoforte. She sat, arranged her hands over the keys, and found the opening notes without needing to think very hard about them, the melody rising up out of memory the way old, well-loved things tended to. Marian settled into a chair nearby, eyes half closed, keeping time with one hand against her knee, and Leonora let herself sink into the music, comfortable knowing that she was doing something she was actually good at, in a room where no one expected her to be anything other than exactly what she was.

It occurred to her, somewhere in the second verse, that she had stopped thinking of this as a task some while ago. She could not say precisely when it had happened, only that it had, quietly, without her noticing the moment it began. She had come to Glenhaven prepared to endure a difficult old woman for the sake of a necklace and nothing more, and had found instead someone sharp and funny and unexpectedly kind, someone she could actually talk to, which was not a thing Leonora had expected to find in this house, or perhaps anywhere at all just now.

She finished the piece to Marian’s applause and found, to her own faint surprise, that she was smiling.

“You have a real gift for it,” Marian said. “I mean that. You played that as though it meant something to you.”

“Thank you, Your Grace.”

Marian settled deeper into her chair. “Again,” she said. “Play it again. After this, you need to tell me everything about the proposal. Every last detail. I want to hear how Anthony asked you.”

Leonora’s fingers hesitated over the keys for the briefest moment before she found her place once more, and her smile did not falter, though something behind it did.

“Of course, Your Grace,” she said. “Where shall I begin?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You are certain of this?”

“Fairly certain, Your Grace.” Miller stood with his hands clasped neatly behind his back, his expression giving away nothing more than it ever did. “I made careful inquiries, as instructed.”

Anthony set down his pen and leaned back in his chair, turning the matter over before he asked the man to continue.

It had started, if he was honest with himself, with the way Leonora had looked the day they went to choose the ring. She had been more agitated than usual, though she had tried to hide it, answering his questions a half second too late and staring at the jeweller’s trays without truly seeing them. He had noticed it at the time and set it aside, telling himself it was none of his affair. It had bothered him since. He had not liked not knowing what it meant.