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Mrs. Priscilla appeared at her shoulder, as if she had been waiting at a discreet distance. “Shall I show you to your rooms, Your Grace?”

The east corridor was older than the rest of the house, its floors slightly uneven and its ceiling lower, and the room at the end was large in the way rooms built for someone important are.

A fire already burning, two tall windows looking east over the grounds toward the tree line, a glass dressing table, and a four-poster bed with blue hangings.

The maid Mrs. Priscilla introduced as Mary was already waiting, hands folded, with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been briefed.

“The dressing room is through there,” Mrs. Priscilla said, gesturing to a door on the left, “and your trunks have been unpacked.”

There was a second door. On the wall opposite the fireplace, adjacent to the dressing table, closed and fitted with a plain bolt on Juliet’s side.

She looked at it.

“His Grace’s rooms, ma’am,” Mrs. Priscilla said. “The household arrangement has always been this way. The bolt is yours to manage as you see fit.”

Juliet turned her eyes to the door and held them there a moment. On the other side of that door, he was eating dinner in his study. The man who had held her hand at the altar without looking at their joined fingers, who had said each word of their vows as though they were individually considered, who had looked at her during the ceremony and looked away first.

She turned from the door.

“Mary,” Juliet said, “Could you please help me with the laces?”

“Of course, Your Grace.” The maid’s hands found the fastenings at her back.

Below, she could hear Eloise’s voice, light and carrying, making her case to someone else in the kitchen about the cakes.

Chapter Six

“If one has a very great number of peas,” Eloise announced, “one could quite theoretically build a wall.”

Juliet looked up from her bowl. Eloise had arranged her garden peas into a precise row along the rim of her soup dish and was studying the formation with the gravity of a general reviewing his troops.

“That is an extraordinary observation,” Juliet said.

Eloise nodded enthusiastically. “Isn’t it? I have been thinking about it since Tuesday.”

“Hmm…and have you been eating those peas, or merely strategizing with them?”

Eloise considered this. “Strategizing,” she admitted, and ate one to demonstrate her capacity for compromise.

Juliet laughed, and the ease of it surprised her. She had not laughed freely in so long that the sound came out before she could compose it into something smaller.

This child, with her pea fortifications and her enormous opinions and her complete absence of pretension, had done something Juliet hadn’t anticipated. She had made Ravenlocke feel habitable.

The smaller dining room held a table laid for six and set for two, candlelight warm across the linen, the rain that had started at dusk tapping steadily at the windows. The chair at the head of the table stood empty.

But the soup was good, and the bread was excellent. Eloise asked three questions about the proper diet of horses, speculated at some length on whether Mrs. Priscilla had ever been frightened of anything at all, and announced that she intended to become an explorer upon reaching her majority, pending her father’s cooperation, which she described as ‘unlikely but not impossible.’

“I think that is a very sensible ambition,” Juliet said.

“Papa says ladies do not explore.”

At that, Juliet rolled her eyes. “And what do you say to that?”

Eloise looked at her with an expression that was simultaneously diplomatic and entirely unambiguous. “I say that I have not yet run out of ideas.”

Juliet pressed her lips together and refilled her glass. She liked this child immensely. She had liked her from the moment Eloise had appeared at the butler’s elbow in the dark and declared her a princess with the full confidence of someone who saw no reason to doubt their own judgment.

The footman—Thomas, Eloise had called him, and thanked him by name when he refilled her water—moved quietly around the table. Eloise watched him go and then turned back to Juliet with the directness her father shared, though without the guardedness behind it.