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“Mama.” Lydia stood in the hall in her traveling cloak with Mary behind her and the cases on the step, and could say nothing else.

Her mother asked no questions. She came down the last stairs and put her arms around her, cloak and dust and all, and Lydia put her face in her mother’s shoulder and shook.

Henry and Edmund came out of the library. She heard Edmund say, quietly, “Where is he?” in a voice she had never heard from him, and Henry say, “I will kill him,” as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing to announce in a front hall.

“No,” said Lydia, lifting her head. “Neither of you will do anything. Do you understand?”

“Lydia, if he has…”

“He has not hurt me. Not like that.” She wiped her face with the back of her glove. “He has hurt me in a great many other ways, and I will not tell you about any of them tonight, and you are not to go near him. Either of you. Promise me.”

Edmund held her eyes a long moment. Then he said, “I promise.” Henry said nothing, and Edmund put a hand on his shoulder, and after a moment Henry nodded, jaw set.

They took her into the small drawing room. Her mother sent for tea and sent the footman away. Lydia sat on the same sofa where she had said goodbye to Charles Harrington, and looked at the empty windowsill. She had left the mint at Ashcombe.

“Do you still love him?” her mother asked.

“Yes.” It came out steady. “That makes it so much worse. I love him, and I want a life with him, and children with him, and I cannot make him want any of it. I cannot make him trust me. I tried.” She studied her hands. “He told me he should never have married me.”

Henry made a sound. Edmund’s hand closed on his arm.

“Then he is a fool,” her mother said. “And you will stay here as long as you like.”

“I do not want to stay here, Mama. I want to go home.” Lydia pressed her fingers against her eyes. “But I will not go back because everyone expects it, or because his mother writes to say it would be best. If he wants me, he must come himself and tell me why.”

Her mother drew her head down onto her shoulder.

That night Lydia lay awake in her old bed. She thought of the conservatory with morning light coming through the new glass. She thought of their room, and his book on the far side of the bed, and his shirts in her wardrobe. She thought of him by the fire saying do not stop imagining a future because I am afraid of it, and how much she had wanted to believe him. She thought of him on the conservatory tiles with Sebastian’s son on his knee, laughing.

She wondered whether any of it had been real, and kept wondering until the window went gray.

Tristan rode home at first light, with the little wooden horse wrapped in a shawl and buckled into his saddlebag, its wheel glued back on.

He knew before Whitmore spoke. The house sounded as it had before the wedding. No one called from the stairs. A maid crossed the passage with linen and lowered her eyes. Whitmore stood in the hall with a letter on a salver and an expression Tristan had never seen on him.

“Her Grace has gone to London,” Whitmore said.

Tristan stood in the hall in his riding boots and broke the seal and read it, then read the last lines again. He had expected to find her hurt and waiting. He had rehearsed his speech all the way from the lodge. Even that expectation, he saw now, had been one more way of deciding where she should be.

“What time?”

“Nine yesterday, Your Grace. She traveled with Mary and the groom.”

“Did she…” He stopped. He held her reasons in his hand. Whitmore could add nothing that would make them more convenient. “Thank you.”

He went upstairs. Her books still lay beside the window. The apple mint stood on the table, turned toward the light. In the bedchamber the wardrobe stood closed and the bed made, with no disorder anywhere to suggest haste. She had left behind nearly everything that made the rooms hers, taking only what she needed.

He went to the conservatory, where Samuel was setting out pots for the children’s visit, and told him to do it exactly as she had arranged.

He stood in the doorway. Morning light came through the new glass and lay across the drawing board and the empty stool. Her studies hung on the brick in their narrow frames. The white flower from the wood. A sycamore seedling in a pot with a label, rehoused with dignity.

Everywhere he looked, he saw her. In the conservatory she had rescued from ruin. In the Hales’ new roof and the baskets she had sent. In the second lamp in the sitting room and the pillow without a lump and the book on his side of the bed. Six weeks ago, the house had been the same as it had been for years. Now she had altered every room in it, and he wanted none of them changed back.

He did not want his old life. He had spent five years building it and wanted not one hour of it back. He wanted Lydia, for herself, whatever his mother had arranged or society expected. She had made Ashcombe a home. Without her it was a large house full of rooms.

He went back to the house at a run. In the hall he told Whitmore to saddle the fastest horse in the stable and to send James after him with a change of clothes by the mail.

“You will not take the carriage, Your Grace?”