Page 37

“My sister will expect nothing less.”

He bowed, and the countess accompanied him to the door. Lydia remained beside the chair, holding the borrowed volume. The visit had pleased her. Harrington was attentive, good-humored, and interested in seeing her again; she could name what she liked about him without excuses. What was missing she could not yet name without being unfair.

Her mother returned. “Well?”

“He is very pleasant.” She turned the borrowed book over once.

“Yes.”

Lydia waited for another question. The countess glanced at the book in her hands, then seemed to decide against asking it. “He will call about the walk.”

“I know.”

Upstairs, Lydia placed Harrington’s book beside her unfinished drawing. The mint stood near the window, its leaves turned toward the light. One brushed her wrist as she reached to move the pot. The scent rose warm and green from her skin. She held her wrist there a second longer than necessary. Then she sat, opened Harrington’s book, and gave its first plate the attention it deserved.

Before she reached the second page, she was wondering which part Tristan would have challenged, and what she would have said simply to keep him beside her.

CHAPTER NINE

By the eleventh day after the Pembrokes left, Ashcombe had been made thoroughly efficient. The lower gate hung on new hinges. The drainage in the west field had been surveyed, argued over, and surveyed again. Collins, who had served the estate for twenty years and had never been asked to bring the quarterly accounts a week early, presented them with the wary air of a man handing a stranger a loaded pistol. Tristan read every column. He signed where signing was needed, queried an item for hay, and found nothing in the ledgers that could keep his mind from returning to a bench outside a greenhouse.

Keeping busy had not helped. For eleven days Tristan had buried himself in estate business, hoping that work would occupy his thoughts. Yet Lydia had a way of intruding upon them when he least expected it. He remembered the frankness with which she had told him what he did not want to hear, the hand she had held out for his handkerchief, and the way she had made him laugh in the woods when he had meant to scold her. More than anything, he missed their conversations, missed the ease with which she challenged him and the pleasure of making her smile. It was an uncomfortable admission, made worse by the knowledge that he had no right to wish her back when he had nothing to offer her. Even his morning rides, once sufficient to clear his head, offered little relief.

The botanical volume still lay on his desk. Lydia had returned it before leaving, and Whitmore had twice offered to put it back in the library. Twice Tristan had said it could wait. He could send it to her, of course. She had copied what she needed, but there were other plates worth her attention. He had reached that point in a proposed note three times and stopped. A book would be easy to send. It was the invitation to continue their conversation that he could not make sound as harmless as he wanted it to be.

On Wednesday morning, twelve days after the Pembrokes’ departure, Whitmore brought a letter marked urgent. It had come from London by express, and the sight of the seal made Tristan put down his pen before the butler spoke.

“From Hollis, Your Grace. It came by express.”

Tristan broke the seal. Hollis, who managed Ashcombe House in London, wrote that the Dowager Duchess had been taken unwell the previous afternoon. She had kept to her room, declined to see a physician, and asked whether her son had been sent for. Hollis begged His Grace to forgive the liberty of writing without her express instructions.

He read it twice, though the second reading changed nothing. His mother had never been ill in his hearing. She had survived the loss of a husband, the management of a duke in his minority, and a winter crossing to Dover in a gale, without altering the position of a single hairpin. If Hollis was writing in that hand, something was wrong.

“Have the traveling carriage brought round. I want to leave within the quarter hour. Collins will need to know I am gone.”

“Shall I send word to the Duke of Dunhaven, Your Grace? He mentioned calling.”

“No.” He was already crossing to the door. “Send word to no one.”

He reached London in the last of the light, having changed horses twice and spoken to no one in between, and found Ashcombe House lit like a ship. The porter took his coat with the expression of a man who had been told to say nothing. Hollis met him in the hall, and Tristan noticed, with the part of his mind that remained capable of noticing, that the steward looked embarrassed.

“How is my mother?”

“She is in the morning room, Your Grace.”

“The morning room.” He stopped with one foot on the stair. “Not her bedchamber.”

“No, Your Grace.” Hollis studied a point above his shoulder. “Her Grace felt the light was better.”

His mother was seated at her writing desk with a pen in her hand and a cup of chocolate at her elbow. She wore a gown of dove-gray silk he had last seen at a christening. Her hair was arranged. Her color was excellent. She looked up when he entered and lowered the pen with the unhurried courtesy of a woman who had been expecting a tradesman.

“You made good time,” she said. “I had allowed until tomorrow.”

“I was told you were ill enough to send for me.”

“I was indisposed. Hollis has perhaps been more anxious than necessary.” She indicated the chair opposite. “Sit down, Tristan. You have been traveling all day.”

He remained standing. Her chocolate had left a brown crescent on the saucer. There were sugared biscuits beside it, untouched. In the carriage he had been trying to recall whether he had answered her last letter. Now he could scarcely bear to look at the plate.