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“Her name was Eleanor,” he said at last.

Lydia did not move.

“You know I married before. Everyone knows that. Nobody knows the rest, except my mother and Sebastian and the physician.” He kept his eyes on the rain. “I was twenty-four when we married. She was twenty-three. She was clever and quick and argued with me about everything, and she mended her gloves by candlelight because she saw no reason to discard something that could be repaired. I was happy. I never thought about it. I was a duke and young and happy, and I thought that was the natural order of things.”

His voice held steady. That was the worst of it. She saw what the steadiness cost him in his white knuckles and the pulse beating in his throat.

“She was with child within the year. Her family rejoiced, as did my mother, and half the county. I rejoiced more than any of them. I wanted an heir. I talked of nothing else. I had a nursery painted. I bought a wooden horse before she had begun to show.” He stopped. “She was ill through much of it. The physician called that nothing unusual. Toward the end she could not leave her bed most days. And one night she asked me whether she would survive it.”

Lydia’s hand had gone to her mouth.

“I told her not to be foolish. I told her every woman feels frightened the first time, and that worrying did no good before there was anything to worry about.” His voice cracked on the last word, and he waited until it would hold again. “Her question made me impatient. I remember that. I remember the impatience.”

“Tristan.”

“The labor began at night. By morning they had shut me out of the room. By afternoon the physician had stopped telling me it went well. I stood in the corridor outside her door for eleven hours. I could hear her.” He closed his eyes. “The child came a little before dark. A boy. He lived less than an hour. They brought him out to me because Eleanor could not hold him. He was so small. He did not cry. He opened his eyes at me, and then he stopped.”

Tears ran down Lydia’s face. She did not wipe them.

“And Eleanor?”

“She had already gone. While I held him.” He opened his eyes and met hers at last, and she saw the man who had stood in the corridor five years ago. She understood that he had never truly left it. “I asked her for that child. I wanted it so badly I would not hear her fear. I told her not to dread the thing that killed her. And then I stood outside the door and let it happen.”

He bent forward and put his face in his hands. His shoulders shook once, hard, and then went rigid, as if he held something down with his whole body.

Lydia rose on her knees and put her arms around him.

He did not move at first. Then something gave way in him, and he turned and dragged her against him and held her so tightly she could scarcely breathe, his face pressed into her neck. She felt him shaking. She felt the wet heat of his face against her skin. She stroked his hair and his back and said nothing, because nothing would help, and she held him on the cold floor with the coverlet slipping from her shoulders until the shaking slowed and stopped.

When he lifted his head, she took his face in both her hands.

“Tristan, look at me,” she said. She waited until he did. “Wanting a child did not kill Eleanor.”

“You do not know that.”

“No. I do not know why she died. But your desire for a child did not cause it. You cannot know whether a different answer would have saved her.”

“I should have listened.”

“Yes. You should have listened. I wish you had.” Her voice caught. “But neither of us knows what would have happened if you had. You said the wrong thing. That is not the same as killing her.”

His eyes were red and his face wet, and he seemed younger than she had ever seen him.

“You were twenty-five,” Lydia whispered. “You had just lost them both. You should not have had to carry it alone.”

He made a sound she had never heard a man make. Then he bent his head and rested his forehead against hers, and they stayed like that a long time, kneeling together on the rug in the gray light, with the rain coming down.

“I cannot do it again,” he said at last, low. “I cannot stand in that corridor again. Not for you. Least of all for you.”

“Why least of all?”

He drew back far enough to see her. She watched him search for the words and find that they frightened him.

“Because I did not expect you,” he said. “I had built a life where nothing could reach me, and it worked for five years, and then you walked into my house and told me I was not the man you wanted, and I have not had a quiet hour since. I lie awake thinking about you. I go to the greenhouse because you are in it. I sat in my study every night for ten days with the door shut so I would not come to yours.” His thumb traced her cheekbone, learning it. “I loved Eleanor, Lydia. I will not pretend otherwise. I loved her the way a young man does, easily, without thought. What I feel now has nothing easy in it. Nothing in my life has frightened me as much as what I feel for you.”

She could not speak. She turned her face into his palm and kissed it.

“So you see,” he said, “why I cannot.”