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He held it there for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then, with a quiet exhale, he took a generous mouthful of whisky.

Tonight, he suspected, he might require more courage than usual before retiring to bed.

There remained one final duty before he sought his own chambers. He made his way upstairs towards Radnor's room, expecting, as he had every evening since returning from Belgium, to spend a little while beside his oldest friend before attempting to sleep himself.

Instead, he found Laurence standing outside the bedchamber door.

Arthur regarded him for a moment.

"It generally helps," he observed dryly, "if you open the door before attempting to enter."

A grin tugged briefly at Laurence's mouth. Rather than answering, he merely nodded towards the narrow gap where the door had been left slightly ajar.

Arthur glanced through it.

Eliza sat exactly where she had the previous evening, perched upon the chair beside Radnor's bed with a small collection of parcels, drawings and brightly coloured trinkets spread across her lap. The Colonel remained deeply unconscious, the damp cloth still resting across his forehead exactly as Dr Abraham had instructed. At the same time, Eliza chatted away as though he were perfectly capable of replying.

"...and this one was from Alice," she was saying, holding up a child's drawing with unmistakable pride.

"Although I confess I am not entirely certain whether it is supposed to be a horse or perhaps Mr Didley's goose." She continued talking without the slightest expectation of an answer. Most people required another voice to sustain a conversation.

Eliza never had. For perhaps the first time since she had arrived at Winworth, Arthur found himself quietly grateful for that particular quality.

Whether Radnor heard her or not scarcely mattered. He was no longer alone.

"I shall see him in the morning," Laurence said. Neither man felt inclined to disturb her. Turning quietly away from the door, Arthur made his way towards his own chambers.

Ellis had already laid out his nightclothes and, anticipating the Duchess’s rather unconventional birthday request, had thoughtfully left the fire burning low within the grate, if only to protect the furniture from an untimely demise should Eliza go fumbling about the room at midnight.

He extinguished the lamp at his bedside and found sleep claiming him almost immediately. On this rare occasion, he slept so deeply that he never felt the mattress sink beneath another’s weight some time later. Nor did he feel his wife slip quietly beneath the covers and settle instinctively against his back.

For the second night in succession, neither the Duke nor Duchess of Buckingham slept alone.

Chapter 29

The next six weeks seemed to pass in a pleasant blur, each day a gentle variation of the one before it.

Every morning began the same. Breakfast was taken with Arthur and Laurence, the three of them gathered around the long mahogany table. It rarely remained a peaceful affair for long. Laurence possessed an extraordinary talent for provoking Arthur before either of them had finished their tea, whether by disputing the previous day's newspaper, questioning their management of Radnor's estate, or simply existing in a manner Arthur found deeply irritating.

Arthur, for his part, always rose to the bait.

His replies were always clipped, dry and devastatingly witty, delivered with such practised precision that even when Laurence declared himself victorious, Eliza suspected Arthur had quietly won the exchange all along.

She delighted in watching them jest. It was impossible to imagine this version of the Duke from the man she had first met three months ago. There was unrestrained dry humour and small smiles now.

After breakfast Laurence would relieve whichever servant had spent the night with Colonel Radnor, disappearing upstairs for the morning while Arthur excused himself to his office with the correspondence tucked beneath one arm. She still had little notion of precisely what occupied him there. Estate business, no doubt. Tenants. Accounts. Parliament perhaps. Dukes, she supposed, always seemed to have an endless supply of important letters requiring equally important replies.

The Dowager Duchess had still not arrived. Seasonal storms and a short illness had delayed her journey north while great sheets of rain swept across the country as summer quietly surrendered to September. The gardens beyond the windows had begun to change almost overnight, deep greens giving way to orange, while cooler evenings encouraged the fires to be lit earlier each day.

The afternoons belonged entirely to her. Sometimes she painted, losing herself for hours above an easel.

Other days she visited Colonel Radnor.

He was awake now and had survived the worst of it. Against all expectation, he had fought off an infection that had threatened to claim him, though the shattered leg remained bound in splints and he was still confined to his bed. Recovery, Dr Abraham insisted, would take many months.

He was hardly recognisable as the man she had met before Waterloo. The broad-shouldered officer who had stood beside Arthur in the chapel had been replaced by someone thinner, paler, and so unnaturally still that, at first glance, he scarcely appeared alive. His face had hollowed, dark shadows lingered beneath his eyes, and the strain of constant pain had etched lines into features that had once carried effortless confidence.

Arthur had warned her before she first entered the room on the day he had first woken.