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Then William hit him. It was a clean, cheerful punch, straight to the shoulder, and Anthony went off the end of the bench and landed on his back in the sawdust. He lay there looking up at the rafters. He was laughing. He did not know when it had started.

“That…” said William, standing over him with his hand out. “…was for years of being impossible to tease.”

Anthony took the hand and let himself be hauled upright.

“Well?” William asked. “Are you going to tell her?”

“Not yet.”

“Anthony.”

“Not yet.” He shook the sawdust from his hair. His voice was steady now, steadier than it had been in weeks. “But I know what I am waiting for. That is something.”

“It is a terrible plan.”

“It is the only one I have.” He picked the muffler off the floor and pulled it over his fist. “Now, put your hands up.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It was barely two hours into the break of dawn, but Leonora was ready to make her way to Glenhaven.

She had meant to go two days ago, the morning after she found her mother. She could have written, of course. A note would have reached him by noon. But each time she turned the idea over, she put it down again. This was not something to be folded into a letter and handed to a footman. She wanted to say it to his face, and she wanted to see him hear it.

Then the sky opened and rained for the whole of that first day, and the lanes between Lady Byron’s house and the Duke’s turned to soup. Lady Byron forbade the mare outright.

“You will not break your neck for a conversation that will keep,” she said, and Leonora had no argument.

The second day had been taken from her in a better way. Lady Byron sent the maids on errands and the cook to visit her sister, and Rose came in through the kitchen garden with her hood pulled low. They spent the whole afternoon in the old sewing room at the top of the house with the door locked, and Lady Byron stood guard on the landing with a poker she insisted was for the fire.

Nobody had said anything important. Rose asked about the paints, and the sisters and what Leonora took in her tea. Leonora asked whether she still disliked cabbage. They laughed a great deal at nothing. At dusk Rose was bundled back out the same way she had come, and by the time the carriage had carried her off, it was far too late to ride to a duke’s house.

So there had been no time. Now there was nothing left in the way, and Leonora had been awake since before the birds.

She had not seen Anthony since the afternoon she walked out of his library. They had both said things. She had said that she wanted to go home, and he had let her, and the look on his face as she crossed the room came back to her at night with a clarity she would have paid money to be rid of so she did not miss him so much. She had decided on the news. It was the only part she could say without her voice doing something foolish.

Leonora went straight to the stables once she was dressed for the day to get a horse for the journey.

“Miss?” The stable lad was a freckled boy of fifteen with straw in his hair. “Her ladyship said...”

“Her ladyship is not here, and I shall be careful. Saddle the mare, please.”

“Will I fetch one of the grooms to go with you?”

“No.” She said it too quickly, and she made herself soften it. “I am only going as far as Glenhaven. It is family business.”

He went red to the ears and brought the mare round without another word.

She knew it was not wise. She had promised Anthony she would stay indoors, and a lady alone on a country road would draw comment from anyone who saw her. But the road to Glenhaven was eight miles, and she had ridden it a hundred times. He would forgive the broken promise, she thought, once he heard what it had been broken for.

The mare was glad of the sun and eager to run. Leonora let her go for the first mile, and the wind pulled her hair loose from its pins and dried the last of the damp from her collar. Hedgerows ran past in a green blur. Birds shot up from the verges. For the first time in two days she could breathe all the way to the bottom of her lungs.

She slowed at the first long hill and let the mare walk. Behind her, a quarter mile back, a single rider came over the crest. He wore a brown coat and a low hat. He did not close the distance, and when she glanced back again at the next bend he had gone, as though the road had folded him away.

Probably a farmer going to market. She thought no more about it.

She thought instead about what she would say to him.

Anthony, I found her. She is alive. No, that was too abrupt. He would think she had lost her wits.