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“No. I cannot offer you a very convincing account of that.”

She felt her fingers tighten on his sleeve and made them relax. He had given her honesty, but nothing she could build a future upon. She had begun to suspect that his reserve concealed more feeling than he knew how to express. There were moments when he let her see it, and those moments had come to matter to her far more than was sensible. She wanted to know the man behind the restraint. More foolishly still, she wanted to be the person he trusted enough to let past his defenses.

“Then we shall leave Saturday as it is.”

“Of course.” He bowed to a woman passing in a carriage and waited until she was beyond hearing. “I should like to see your new drawing another day. If you would care to show it to me.”

She agreed, provided he sent word first. Near the gate her father stopped to speak to an acquaintance. Tristan waited beside her, the cloth of his sleeve warm beneath her glove. She could have let go now. Instead, she asked whether he would be in London long. She wanted another afternoon, then another after that, and felt the danger of wanting them before he had named a day.

“We should join your parents.”

“Yes,” Lydia said. “I suppose you should.”

He took her home. At the door of the house in Brook Street he bowed over her hand, exactly as far as courtesy required and not an inch farther, and said, “Good afternoon, Lady Lydia. I enjoyed it.”

He had said it as if he were reporting a fault.

She went upstairs and closed her bedchamber door. Through the window the low sun lay across the roofs and threw a stripe of amber over her drawing table. Mary had brought the mint back from the drawing room, where Lydia took it when she wished to sketch downstairs. She crossed to it and touched a leaf. The scent rose on her fingers, and she remembered Tristan lifting the handkerchief from her palm.

I am not hoping, she told the plant. I am observing.

The mint gave her no assistance. She went to her desk and wrote Saturday’s engagement on the small list beside her drawing. Then, after a pause, she left the next afternoon free. It was not a promise to Tristan. She was less certain what it meant that she wanted it to become one.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sebastian Percy had been holding his son for a quarter of an hour, and there was a stain on his shoulder to prove it. Tristan had seen the Duke of Ravensmere asleep over a book, infuriatingly sober at the end of a long dinner, and triumphant over arguments no one else remembered beginning. He had never seen him walking a small circle around a nursery with an infant settled against his waistcoat. Each turn brought him past the window, and each time he shaded the child’s face from the light without interrupting what he was saying.

“Say nothing,” said Sebastian, without turning.

“I have said nothing.”

“You were about to. It was in the set of your face.” He shifted the baby a fraction. “Julian says you are having a crisis. I told him it was a very ordinary sort of crisis. Sit down, Tristan. You look as though you were about to arrest someone.”

He sat. The nursery smelled of milk and soap and the cold tea of a nurse who had been sent to rest, and a rocking horse stood watch in one corner. Amelia, when she came in, brought a great deal of light, none of it deliberate. She was a small woman with a quick manner and a habit of looking at people as though she had been told a good joke about them and intended not to repeat it. She kissed Tristan on the cheek, took a chair, and looked from him to her husband and back.

“You look dreadful,” she said. “Sebastian says your mother has taken it upon herself to find you a wife.”

“My mother has taken a great many things upon herself. Most without consulting me.”

“I like her,” said Amelia. “She has never struck me as a woman who sees much need for consultation.”

The baby stirred, produced a small, indignant noise, and settled. Sebastian looked down, breaking off in the middle of a breath. Tristan turned his eyes to the rocking horse. He had known his friend for twenty years and could not remember ever seeing him so easily silenced.

“How,” said Tristan.

“How what?”

“How did you do it? You used to speak of marriage as though it were a punishment devised particularly for you.” Tristan glanced at the child, then at his friend’s face. “I should like to know what changed.”

“Ah,” said Sebastian softly.

Amelia rose and held out her arms for the child. “I shall leave you to talk.”

Sebastian passed him over, taking a moment to free his cravat from the small fist. Amelia kissed the child’s head and carried him into the adjoining room.

The door closed. Sebastian watched it for a moment before turning back to Tristan. He no longer seemed inclined to make a joke of the question.

“I waited for it to become easy,” Sebastian said. “Amelia grew tired of that. I nearly lost her. Afterward I found I could bear a good many things I had declared impossible.”