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“I want to ask you something,” she said.

“All right.”

“Did you know my mother? Her name was Charlotte.”

Juliet set her spoon down. The question arrived without preamble, in the same tone Eloise used to ask about the weather, but her hands were very still in her lap, and she watched Juliet’s face the way a child watches for the answer before it arrives in words.

“No,” Juliet said. “I’m afraid I didn’t have that pleasure.”

“Oh.” Eloise looked at the candles, then back. “Do you know anything about her?”

“I don’t,” Juliet said. “Very little, in fact. Only that she was the late duchess, and that she was your mother. I had rather hoped you might tell me something about her.”

Eloise was quiet for a moment. The rain shifted against the glass.

“Papa doesn’t like me to talk about her,” she said.

Juliet held very still. “He’s told you so?”

“He doesn’t shout about it.” Eloise pressed her lips together in an expression that was, Juliet noticed with a start, a rather accurate impression of a man whose face has shut itself. “He just gets that look. And then the subject is finished.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know why.” Eloise poked at a piece of bread. “She can’t have been very terrible. I have a painting of a horse that she put in my nursery when I was a baby. Mrs. Priscilla said she drew it herself.”

“That was kind of her.”

“Yes, I believe so too.”

They finished the soup. Thomas brought the next course. Eloise cheered up considerably upon the arrival of a glazed pork loin and applied herself to it with enthusiasm, but when she glanced up and caught Juliet’s expression, she said, plainly, “You think it’s strange too.”

“What’s strange?”

“That I don’t know much about her.”

Juliet chose her words. “I think every child deserves to know where they come from,” she said, “in whatever way is possible.”

Eloise nodded once, gravely, as though Juliet had confirmed something she had long suspected but lacked the authority to declare herself.

The study was at the far end of the east wing, and Juliet had to ask one of the footmen for directions before she found it. Light showed under the door, so she knocked.

“Come.”

He sat at his desk with papers spread across its full width, a candelabra pushed to one side to make room, and a ledger open before him. But his coat was gone, his cravat untied and hanging loosely at his neck, and his sleeves turned back to the forearm. He held a pen and was mid-sentence when she entered. He looked up and stopped writing.

“Duchess.” A cowlick of his thick hair fell across his strong brow, and Juliet pretended not to notice.

“Your Grace.” She stepped inside. “I apologize for the intrusion.”

“You were told that the same applies at night,” he said, his tone without any hostility as he set the pen down.

Juliet took the opportunity to look around his study. There was a great deal of it to look at: ledgers stacked in close rows, correspondence sorted into piles, estate maps spread across the side table with annotations in a hand that was dense and vertical. A glass of half-drunk brandy sat near the edge of the desk. Three of his fingers were ink-stained.

“I understand you dined with Eloise this evening,” he said.

“I did. In fact, I came to ask why you didn’t join us.”

His brows flew high on his forehead, and he leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest as he did so. And in the low candlelight, with his cravat loose and his shirt open at the collar, he looked considerably less like a duke and more like an absolute rake.