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“He is a duke,” her father said. “Marriage is a responsibility he cannot expect everyone to forget because he finds the subject unwelcome. His mother may remind him of it.”

“Am I to wait while she reminds him?”

Her father put the folded paper aside. “I have told you Harrington may call. You are free to consider him.”

The permission ought to have settled the matter. It made Harrington sound like a pleasant way to pass the time until Ashcombe made up his mind. Her mother leaned forward. “You need not decide anything today.”

“I had already decided before we left.” She said it to the window.

Neither answered immediately. Outside, a cart approached from the other direction. Their carriage slowed, wheels grinding near the verge, and her father held the curtain aside to see whether there was room to pass. A mint leaf had caught beneath the edge of its paper covering, and Lydia freed it carefully, holding the basket steady as the carriage passed the cart.

The difficulty was that part of her wanted her mother to be right. She had wanted Tristan to ask her to stay, to name the next time he would see her, or simply to look sorry that she was leaving. Hope was inconvenient the way a loose thread is inconvenient: it invited pulling. She had watched women build entire courtships from a careful look, a remembered plant, a polite farewell, and had always thought herself too sensible to do the same.

He had wished her a safe journey with perfect manners. She would not build a future from the possibility that restraint meant desire.

“When Mr. Harrington calls,” she said, “please do not treat him as someone to occupy me until Ashcombe is ready.”

Her mother’s face softened. “I shall not.”

Her father nodded. Lydia thanked them and turned toward the window. The road continued between high hedges. For a while, she tried to identify what grew in them. Then she let the names go and watched the green pass without taking out her book.

London received them with a delay in the street and a problem concerning a trunk which everyone remembered placing on a carriage. It was found on the other one. By the time Lydia reached her room, she was tired enough to welcome familiar inconveniences. The drawer beside her bed still caught unless lifted. The window still required both hands to open. Her drawing table stood where she had left it, with an unfinished sheet beneath a clean cloth.

Her maid set the mint beside the window. “Here, my lady?”

“A little farther from the glass.”

Lydia moved the pot herself, then read Samuel’s instructions again. She refused to let every breath of its scent carry her back to the greenhouse. The room had collected the small traces of her absence. An invitation waited on the mantel, and someone had tidied away the scissors she usually left beside her papers. Beneath the chair lay the ribbon she had searched for before leaving.

Lydia retrieved it with a sigh and turned to her cases. She unpacked her drawings first, smoothing the sheets before setting them aside. Among them was the flower sha had collected in the woods at Ashcombe. Its stem had bent during the journey, and she took particular care as she laid it between fresh sheets of paper. She straightened it gently with the tip of her pencil, working carefully around the petals. When she finished, she wrote the place and date beneath it.

By the following afternoon, she had moved the mint twice and caught herself touching its leaves more often than watering required. On the third morning after their return, she sat down to finish the drawing she had begun before the visit; her finger no longer troubled her, and her ankle had eased enough that crossing the room required little thought. She sharpened the pencil to the point she preferred and placed a clean sheet beneath her hand. At home, a drawing could remain overnight without a servant clearing the table, or a man leaning over it to ask the right question.

The first line displeased her. She rubbed it out. Then another. The Ashcombe sketchbook lay beneath the paper. She pulled it free to give herself a firmer surface and found it open at the mint. One leaf was larger than it should have been. She had corrected it in the greenhouse, but the faint outline of the first attempt remained visible.

Lydia traced the ghost of the first line. She had admitted the mistake to Tristan without shame, and he had noticed her error without making her feel foolish. Alone at her own table, she closed the sketchbook she had been studying before she could resume the conversation in her head. Finish the drawing in front of you. She returned to her unfinished work, but her mother knocked before she finished the stem.

“Mr. Harrington is here.”

Lydia put down the pencil. “Now?”

“He sent to ask whether this morning would be convenient. You said it would.”

“Yes. I remember.”

She did remember yesterday, the memory hadn’t survived the night, however, and this morning she had been elsewhere without leaving the room. Her mother looked at the drawing, then at her hands. “Shall I tell him you will be down shortly?”

“Please.”

Lydia washed the graphite from her fingers and changed the ribbon at her waist. She took no longer than necessary. Mr. Harrington had come because he wished to see her, and that deserved better than being used to prove she could forget someone else. No mothers had maneuvered him into the room from opposite sofas. He had remembered a conversation and come to continue it. If she measured every kindness against Tristan, she would turn a decent man into an instrument of someone else’s absence.

In the drawing room, he rose as she entered. “Lady Lydia. I hope the journey was comfortable.”

“Comfortable enough. One of our trunks attempted to go elsewhere, but we recovered it.” She took the chair opposite him.

“I trust it contained nothing essential.”

“According to my mother, everything in it was essential.”