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“All the best ones are.” He looked at her. “Did it work?”

“I know quite a lot about clematis,” Valerie said, and went with him.

Juliet watched them cross the lawn. Then a presence settled at her shoulder and a low voice said, “You are calculating something.”

She turned. Adam stood at her right with his hands at his back, his coat dark against the white of the tablecloths beyond. His expression was the one she had learned to read as patience.

“I was thinking,” Juliet said, “that Lord Honeysett has excellent timing.”

“He has been looking for a reason to speak with her alone since the first course.”

“And you allowed it.”

“I arranged the table seating.” He looked out across the garden. “The rest was Daniel’s own work.”

She turned this over. “And Blackwood?”

“Daniel found him. He was in Bath.” A pause. “Daniel is useful in ways that do not always look like usefulness.”

“And Proudlake? Did he need much persuading?”

“He needed figures and a solicitor’s statement. Once those existed, he did not require further encouragement.” He kept his eyes on the garden. “He had already sent Penhurst on his way before we arrived that night. He simply needed the means to ensure he stayed away.”

Juliet thought about the sealed letter arriving at midnight, and Adam already moving before she had drawn breath to ask what it said. After a moment, she said, “You did all of that for Valerie.”

“For you,” he said, without inflection, as one states something obvious.

The warmth that moved through her was immediate and inconvenient.

Before she could do anything with it, Lady Worthington materialized at their side with the quiet devastation of a woman who has never needed noise to make her presence felt. She looked at Adam with the expression she reserved for things she approved of but would not talk about openly.

“Your Grace.” She took him in, from his cravat to his boots. “You’ve come.”

“Lady Worthington.” He inclined his head. “The roses are extraordinary.”

“They are, yes.” She received this without false modesty, her fan already open. Her eyes moved to Juliet. “Your color is good.” She said it the way one might note an improvement in livestock. “Marriage agrees with you.”

“You had the modiste re-cut three of my bodices,” Juliet pointed out.

“A practical investment.” Lady Worthington closed her fan with a decisive click. “We want the inheritance secured. There is no point in coyness about biology.” Her gaze returned to Adam. It was brief, and direct, and carried the full weight of a woman who had been steering things discreetly for forty years. “I trust you are attending to that, Your Grace.”

Adam’s expression did not alter. “Diligently, my lady.”

Lady Worthington looked very satisfied. She tapped her fan once against her palm, turned, and intercepted a passing countess without breaking her stride.

Juliet kept her gaze on the roses.

“She is,” Adam said, “entirely forthright.”

“She is a menace,” Juliet said. “I love her unconditionally.”

His shoulder dropped one degree. He spoke quietly, only for her: “She is not wrong.”

Juliet looked at him. He was watching Daniel and Valerie forty feet away.

She looked too.

They were standing close enough that it was no longer about the clematis, if it had ever been. Daniel was saying something, hands still, his face angled toward Valerie the way a man’s face angles toward the one thing in a room he has stopped pretending not to watch. She looked at the plant, then at him, then at the plant again with the focused attention of someone who'd noticed she was looking at him too often and was making a corrective effort that wasn't working.