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“The carriage would not have me there before midnight.” He was already pulling on his gloves. “I am not waiting until midnight.”

He was on the road within the quarter hour, the wooden horse in his saddlebag and sixty miles in front of him, and he did not stop except to change horses until he reached London.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Alittle after four Tristan rode into Brook Street. He had changed horses four times and eaten nothing since leaving the lodge. Dust filmed his coat and dried in his throat; the saddlebag strap dug into his shoulder. A crossing sweeper stared as he handed his horse to a startled groom in the mews. Tristan went straight to the front door and knocked. The sentences he had rehearsed on the road vanished while he waited.

Edmund opened the door himself.

For a moment neither of them spoke. Edmund took in the dust and the unshaven jaw and the bag, but his expression did not change.

“Your Grace.”

“I have come to see my wife.”

“So I see.” Edmund did not move out of the doorway. “She is not receiving.”

“Then I will wait until she is.”

Behind Edmund, Henry had come into the hall. He stood at the foot of the stairs with his arms folded and an expression that made Edmund’s seem warm. Lord Pembroke came out of the library behind him.

“Let him in, Edmund,” the earl said.

Edmund stood aside. Tristan came into the hall. Nobody offered to take the bag.

“You will wait in the morning room,” Pembroke said. “I will tell my daughter you have called. Whether she comes down is her decision, and hers alone. If she does not, you will leave this house and not return until she sends for you. Do you understand me?”

“I understand.”

Pembroke studied him a long moment. “Yes,” he said. “I think perhaps you do.”

Tristan was shown into the morning room, where he had once come to collect Lydia for a walk. He stood by the window with the saddlebag at his feet. Through a flaw in the glass, the wheel of a passing carriage appeared distorted. There was a pot of geraniums on the windowsill where the mint once was.

Twenty minutes passed. Then half an hour. He heard voices upstairs, too low to make out, and a door close. He stood at the window and thought that if she did not come down, it would have been deserved. He would go to the inn round the corner and wait, and come back tomorrow, and the day after, for as long as it took.

After three quarters of an hour Lady Pembroke came in alone. She closed the door and did not sit.

“My daughter has not told me every word of your quarrel,” she said. “She has told me enough.”

“I am sorry.”

“She is the one who needs to hear that.”

“I know.”

The countess considered him. She seemed less composed than at the wedding, and he knew why. She had trusted him with her daughter. She had believed him when he said, in this house, that he stood by his offer.

“If she does not wish to go back with you,” Lady Pembroke said, “no one will concern themselves with the inconvenience to your household or what society might say.”

“Of course.”

“And no letters from your mother.”

“I have not sent for her. She does not know I am here. This is mine to answer for.”

Lady Pembroke held his eyes a moment longer. Then she opened the door. Lydia stood beyond it in a plain blue gown, one hand resting against the frame.

He had imagined seeing her again all the way from Ashcombe. In every version she had seemed farther away, and he had known what to say. She looked tired. Shadows lay under her eyes, her face was pale and set, and she held herself straight, as she had on the first day they met.