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The Countess closed her eyes. It had been a very trying week.

The announcement had appeared in the Morning Post on Thursday, and thereafter the front hall at Hewes Manor had become a sort of public thoroughfare.

Phillipa had been looked at, in the last week, in every drawing room in Mayfair. Twice she had been kissed by ladies who had cut her in April.

Her parents were ecstatic.

That was the truth of it, and they complained loudly and constantly about everything, because it was the only way they knew how to express it.

“Your first was such a spectacle,” Lady Creighton sighed, with a sort of aching nostalgia. “Four hundred at St. George’s. The Bishop! One does not forget a thing like that.”

“Nor does anybody else,” said Phillipa, gently. “That is rather the point.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I only mean that four hundred witnesses were a great many, in the end. It seems to me a great mercy that this time, if it should go badly…” She stopped. She had not intended to finish the sentence. She saw her mother’s face change, and her father, at the far end of the breakfast table, lower his newspaper by a slow inch.

“If it should go badly,” said Lord Creighton.

“It will not, I merely meant that a dozen is a good deal easier to survive than four hundred.”

There was a pause. Then her father, to her considerable surprise, made a small noise that was very nearly a laugh, and raised his paper again to hide it.

They had not spoken of the drawing room since. Nothing had been said, and nothing, she supposed, would be. But that same afternoon, a small flat box had appeared on her dressing table, wrapped in brown paper and tied with an old blue ribbon, and inside it, on a bed of yellowing silk, lay the Hewes pearls. They had been her grandmother’s. Nobody had worn them in her lifetime. There was no note. There did not need to be. It was the way her father had always said the things he could not say aloud, and she sat on the edge of her bed for a long while with the string of them in her lap, feeling extremely tired, and rather more loved than she had strictly expected.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Brawnhite wrote her notes.

They arrived every morning, punctual as the milk, brief and dry and delivered by a footman who had evidently been instructed not to smile.

The first said: Dear Duchess. Special license procured. Chapel: St. Anselm’s, Mayfair. Hour: eleven. Ronan will stand with me, God help him. I have instructed my housekeeper to make ready the Duchess’s apartments; she informs me she was ready some days ago. I am told this is my fault. Yours, G. The second said: The Dowager Pembury has called. She stayed an hour and a quarter and asked eleven questions, of which I answered two. I believe we are in good standing. G. The third, which arrived on the Friday, said only: You have not yet said what you would like for your wedding gift. Please do not say nothing. It is an alarming answer. G.

She had said nothing. She had folded the note very small, put it in the drawer of her writing desk, and gone on to fittings.

She had not seen the baby.

That was the strange part. In the whole of the week, in all the noise and the fuss, she had not once been alone with the thing she had agreed to. She had not been near Brawnhite House. There had been no opportunity that was not improper and public, and it seemed to her, in the small hours, a very strange way to be preparing to become someone’s mother. She lay in bed with her hands folded and tried to remember the exact weight of him. She could not. She kept coming up with a different number.

“You are thinking too much,” said Augusta.

The Duchess of Ravenhill had arrived on Friday afternoon with a hatbox, a parasol, and the general air of a woman who has been summoned to a crisis and finds she rather enjoys it. She was a handsome woman, older than her husband by some years, with a quick, direct way of speaking and a habit of taking a room in hand the moment she entered it. She had shooed the dressmaker out, dismissed the maid, poured herself a cup of tea, and settled on Phillipa’s window seat.

“Am I?” said Phillipa.

“You have been standing in front of that gown for ten minutes without once looking at it.”

Phillipa looked at the gown. It hung from the wardrobe door, pale and pretty, with a small satin ribbon at the waist.

It was, she thought, a perfectly nice gown. It looked like something that belonged to a woman she had not yet met.

“Ronan told me,” said Augusta, “though he told it very badly, and I had to have the rest from the maid. He was quite astonished. He says Gregory has not been himself for three days. He has cut his fencing short twice and once, entirely unprompted, hummed.”

“Hummed?”

“In the corridor. At the club. Ronan is convinced it was a waltz.” Augusta blew on her tea. “I have known Gregory Welby for a small whilw now, and he has never in that time been anything but charming. I would not have said so for the world, but he has not been charming this week. He has been nervous. It has been the making of him.”

Phillipa let out an uncertain breath. “I did not know you thought so.”

Augusta set the cup down. “May I be honest with you?”