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“My father died in the spring of 1812,” he said. “Before that.”

She waited.

“We came every August, when I was young. My father shot, and I was taught to shoot, and there was a tenant’s son named Graves whose company I preferred to most of what the castle offered in those years, and we spent a great deal of time in the oaks and at the water.” He turned his glass on the table. “My father considered this an acceptable use of a ducal heir’s summer. He was not a warm man, but he knew that boys needed to run, and he let me run here.”

She was watching his face. He was not looking at her; he was looking at the fire, and his expression was not closed. It was the expression she had come to recognize as the one he wore when he was turning something over honestly rather than managing it.

“After he died,” he said, “I tried to come the spring after.” He picked his glass up again and shook his head once. “It was not the right time. It needed more years.”

“And now?” she said.

He looked at her. “Eloise has been asking about swimming since December. She read something in one of her books about children at a Swiss lake and decided it was entirely essential, and my options were limited.” He held her gaze. “And I was not prepared to use the lake at Ravenlocke.”

She said nothing. She did not need to.

He looked back at the fire. After a moment he said, at almost ordinary volume, “It was a good day to come back.”

The fire shifted in the grate, and the room was very quiet around them. She picked up her claret, drank, and set it down, looking at the shelves along the far wall without meaning to focus on anything, when a book caught her eye: spine outward, dark cloth cover, a strip of paper visible at the top. She stood without thinking, crossed to the shelf, and pulled it out.

It was a surveying primer, the title faded at the spine. Inside the cover, in careful, slightly labored handwriting unlike his current hand, someone had written: A. R. Townsend, August 1796. Below it, in a different ink: This is mine and no one else’s.

She looked at the inscription. She read it twice.

“You were nine,” she said.

He had turned in his chair. He looked at the book, then at her. The line of his mouth was different from a moment ago, and his eyes were lighter at the edges.

“Eight,” he said. “My father gave it to me at the start of that August. He said a duke who did not understand land could not manage it.” He paused. “I wrote my name in everything that summer. In case of theft.”

“From whom?”

“I did not specify.” He held out his hand for the book. She brought it to him, and he turned it over in both hands, and she stood beside his chair and watched his face as he looked at the eight-year-old’s careful handwriting, and she thought, I am so glad I came to his door.

She thought, I am so glad he let me stay.

She went back to her chair without saying any of it out loud. What good would that do now, anyway? He must know she was glad that he let her stay. If he hadn’t, she’d have been doomed to a life of sorrows too ghastly to imagine even now.

He set the book on the table between them as if it were evidence of something they had both agreed to acknowledge, and picked up his claret.

“My father had a house in Lincolnshire,” she said. “Near the fens. We went each July when my mother was alive. There was a lane between two fields where I used to ride very fast because there was no one to see, and she would ride alongside me and pretend she was trying to slow me down but never actually managed it.”

She turned the glass in her hand. “I went back once, after she died. He took me for some estate matter. I asked to ride the lane.” She pressed her lips together. “It was exactly the same. Every hedgerow exactly the same. And I was quite useless for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Yes,” he said. “That.”

She looked back at the fire. There was a quality to the conversation she had noticed before in rooms that were only theirs: the way things could be said plainly and then set down without requiring a response that explained them.

He did not ask her to say more about the lane. She did not ask him more about that August long past, and the boy who wrote his name in everything. They sat with the fire and the claret and the surveying primer still on the table between them, and the evening did what evenings do when they have been used rather than managed: it settled.

Then he said, “There was a frog.”

She turned. “In the reeds, while you were watching Eloise float. She would have lost herself entirely.”

Juliet felt the laugh arrive before she was ready for it. “You said nothing.”

“She would have screamed. Scattered every goose on the water.” He did not smile, but his eyes went lighter at the edges. “I chose the float.”

She pressed her hand to her mouth. He watched her, and the corner of his own mouth moved, and she had the thought that she loved the way he looked when he had decided, despite himself, to find something funny.