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Across the room, above the fireplace, Charlotte looked out from her gilded frame. In the warmth and the low light, she looked almost close enough to touch.

Mary appeared in the doorway. “Shall I help you, Your Grace?”

“Yes,” Juliet said. “Thank you, Mary.”

Chapter Seven

“You cannot sit all the way at the end,” Eloise said.

Thomas had already laid Juliet’s place at the far end of the long table, and Eloise regarded this arrangement the way she regarded all arrangements that displeased her: with the full-fronted certainty of someone who had arrived at the correct answer and was simply waiting for the room to catch up.

She looked at the footman, then at Juliet, then at Adam, who had settled himself at the head of the table a full minute ago and had been hoping, rather optimistically, that this would proceed without incident.

“It is too far,” Eloise said. “How would anyone hear anything?”

Adam opened his mouth.

“Thomas,” Juliet’s voice was entirely pleasant. “Might we trouble you for two more settings? Either side of the duke would do nicely.”

Thomas looked at Adam, but Adam said nothing in response to her direction, so the footman went about moving the settings.

Adam looked at the candelabra in the center of the table, which, until this evening, had occupied the seat to his right without complication for the better part of three years.

Juliet settled at his left. Eloise dragged her chair another two inches closer to his right, apparently unconvinced by Thomas’s adjustment, and then sat with the expression of someone who had resolved a national crisis and was ready for her soup.

“Thank you, Eloise,” Juliet said.

“You are most welcome,” Eloise said, and immediately began pulling her bread roll apart with two fingers.

Adam reached over and tapped the back of her hand. “Butter it first.”

Eloise exhaled like a woman twice her age. “Yes, Papa.” She sighed and reached for the butter.

The soup arrived. Adam picked up his spoon.

“I have a pony, Juliet. Named Sable. Poor thing has an earache. It started on Monday,” Eloise announced, to no one in particular and to both of them simultaneously. “It was perfectly normal on Sunday. I checked.”

“What changed between Sunday and Monday?” Juliet asked.

Eloise considered this with the seriousness it apparently deserved. “That is precisely what I intend to find out.”

“Could be the weather,” Adam said.

Eloise turned to look at him as though he had suggested the ear had gone rogue of its own accord. “Papa. It is flopping.”

“Ears flop.”

“Not like this.” She demonstrated with her own hand pressed flat against the side of her head, fingers drooping at the wrist. “Like that.”

Juliet pressed her lips together. “Has she seemed otherwise well? Eating normally?”

“She ate three apples yesterday,” Eloise said. “I gave her two, and she took the third from my pocket.”

“That sounds like a well pony.”

“That sounds like a rude pony,” Adam said.

Eloise giggled, which she then attempted to convert into a more dignified expression. “She is spirited,” she said. “That is different from rude.”