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“No.” She lifted her head. “I see a man who has let one terrible day decide the rest of his life. I will not let it decide mine.”

He started to speak. She put her fingers against his mouth.

“You need not give me a child tomorrow,” she said. “I want one. I will not pretend I do not. But I am frightened too, Tristan. We cannot let a terrible tragedy decide every year we have left.”

He said nothing. His thumb moved against her cheek.

“I want to go slowly. I can be afraid with you. But you have to ask what I want and let me answer for myself. Can you try?”

He held her eyes a long time. She saw how hard it was. She saw him want to say yes and fail, and try again.

“I can try,” he said.

“Then try.” She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the mouth. “That is all I ask. For now.”

He kissed her back, slower and more careful than last night, with the salt of his tears still on his lips, and when it ended he kept hold of her. He pulled her up off the cold floor and into his lap in the chair, coverlet and all, and held her against his chest with his chin on her hair, and she listened to his heart slow under her ear.

“I have never told anyone that,” he said into her hair. “Not all of it. Not even my mother.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“You told it like a man who had never said it aloud.” She closed her eyes. “Thank you for telling me.”

They sat there while the rain eased and the light grew in the window. After a while a maid knocked to ask whether Her Grace would take breakfast upstairs, and Tristan answered through the door that they would both come down. His voice came out rough but steady. Lydia laughed against his chest and felt him laugh too.

She dressed while he went through to his own room for a fresh shirt. When she came out onto the landing he waited at the head of the stairs, and he offered her his arm, and they went down together. He brought no newspaper to breakfast. Halfway through the meal he reached across the cloth and took her hand, deliberately, in front of the footman, and held it while he finished his coffee with the other, and the footman stared hard at the sideboard. Lydia kept her hand where it was. She did not mention the second rule. Neither, for the first time, did he.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Tristan gave Whitmore the instruction that evening while he dressed for dinner. He had meant to wait a day, or a week, or until he knew how to phrase it. Then he came upstairs and found the connecting door standing open for the first time since the wedding, and Lydia beyond it in her shift at the dressing table while Mary pinned up her hair, and she met his eyes in the glass and smiled, and all his good intentions about waiting vanished.

He rang. Whitmore came.

“Move my things into Her Grace’s rooms,” Tristan told him. “The bedchamber, not the sitting room. I shall no longer need my own bed made up.”

“Very good, Your Grace.”

Whitmore’s expression did not change. He made a small note in his memorandum book and turned to leave.

“You might attempt to look less pleased.”

“I was not aware that I looked pleased, Your Grace.”

“That is precisely the difficulty.”

“I shall endeavor to correct it.”

Through the open door, Lydia laughed. Whitmore bowed slightly to the doorway as he went out, one conspirator to another.

Tristan went to the connecting door. Mary had finished and gone. Lydia sat at the dressing table in her shift and wrapper, her hair up and her throat bare, and raised her eyebrows at him in the glass.

“Your own butler has defeated you,” she said.

“He has served the family since I was seventeen. He has had time to perfect his methods.”

“You might have asked me before you instructed the household.”