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Something cold settled in Gregory’s chest. “Did she say where she was bound?”

“She did not say anything at all, which is the trouble.” The woman’s eyes narrowed, taking in his coat, his boots, the general quality of the man standing on her doorstep. “You’re not her father, I’ll wager. Nor her husband.”

“No,” said Gregory. “But I owe her a very great debt, and I mean to see it paid, whatever else has become of her.” He reached into his coat and withdrew a sum considerably larger than three weeks’ lodging, and pressed it into the landlady’s startled hand. “For the debt she left, and something over for your trouble. If she should return, or if you should hear word of her, I would count it a great kindness if you sent to Brawnhite House at once. My card.”

The woman stared at the notes, and then at the card, and then, with the swift recalculation of a person whose opinion of a stranger had just undergone a considerable revision, dropped a curtsy that nearly unbalanced her. “Yes, Your Grace. At once, Your Grace.”

Gregory bowed slightly and turned away. Ronan fell into step beside him, quieter now, and it was not until they had gone some way down the street that he spoke.

“You have not told me why this particular maid matters so much to you.”

“She was in my sister’s employ, near the end,” Gregory said, after a moment. “She is the only living soul who might tell me what truly became of Theodosia, beyond the little I have managed to piece together on my own. I have waited two years for some word of her, Ronan. I find I can no longer simply wait.”

Ronan said nothing more. He put a hand briefly on Gregory’s shoulder, and left it there a moment, and that, Gregory found, was worth a great deal more than any number of words might have been.

“You are quiet tonight,” said Augusta, once the drawing room door had shut behind the gentlemen.

The dinner had gone better than either of them had dared hope. It was a small gathering, easy company: only Ronan and Augusta, and their friends Charity and Duncan, whose sharp wit and evident happiness had made silence rather difficult to sustain through the soup and well into the fish, with Duncan recounting, at Ronan’s considerable expense, the story of a hunting expedition some years past that had ended with the Duke of Ravenhill up a tree and the fox, by all accounts, thoroughly unbothered. Even Gregory had laughed, more than once, in a way that had made something in Phillipa’s chest ease for the first time in days.

“You will never guess what Duncan attempted at the christening,” Charity was saying, with the particular relish of a woman who had told this story many times before and had lost none of her enjoyment of it, “and I mean that quite literally, because none of you were present, and I defy anyone to guess correctly on the first attempt.”

“He fell in the font,” Ronan offered.

“Ronan Parsons, I would not joke about dropping a baby in a font if I were you, not with your own history of near catastrophes on horseback.” Augusta’s eyes were dancing. “Let her tell it properly.”

“He attempted,” said Charity, with immense dignity, ignoring her husband’s increasingly pained expression from across the table, “to give the vicar a written list of instructions for how our daughter’s name ought to be pronounced, because he was convinced, entirely without evidence, that the poor man would mangle it in front of the entire assembled family. The vicar, quite reasonably, found this rather insulting, and there was a full five minutes of the most excruciating politeness I have ever witnessed in a house of God, during which absolutely nobody was willing to be the one to point out that the vicar had, in fact, baptized eleven of our own relations without incident and might, perhaps, be trusted with one more.”

“It is a difficult name,” Duncan protested, with the air of a man who had made this defense many times and expected, correctly, to lose it again now. “Isadora is not a simple name.”

“It is four syllables, Duncan, and you gave the man written instructions as though he were an illiterate stable boy rather than an Oxford-educated clergyman of forty years’ standing.”

The table dissolved into laughter, Gregory’s own genuine and unguarded among it, and Phillipa, watching him laugh properly for what felt like the first time in days, found something in her own chest loosening in sympathy with it. It was, she thought, watching him lean back in his chair with real ease for once, a good reminder of the man beneath all the careful management. Quick-witted, and fond of his friends, and capable of exactly this kind of uncomplicated warmth when the weight he carried gave him room enough to breathe.

“And did Isadora survive the ordeal?” Phillipa asked, once the laughter had settled enough for speech.

“Screamed the entire time, which I am reliably informed is traditional and a very good sign,” said Charity, “and has since shown absolutely no preference whatsoever for how her own name is pronounced, being four months old and largely indifferent to matters of linguistic precision. Duncan maintains this proves nothing about the necessity of his instructions.”

“It proves I was thorough,” said Duncan, with immense and entirely unwarranted satisfaction, “which is more than can be said for most fathers on their first attempt.”

“You were the only father in recorded history to hand a vicar a written brief,” said Ronan. “I am not certain that is the compliment to yourself you believe it to be.”

The evening went on in much the same spirit, warm and easy and filled with the particular comfortable teasing of old friends who had long since stopped needing to perform for one another, and Phillipa found herself, more than once, catching Gregory’s eye across the table and finding him already looking back at her, something unguarded and almost hopeful in his expression before he caught himself and looked away. It was, she thought, watching the candlelight catch gold in his hair as he laughed again at some further absurdity of Duncan’s, one of the pleasantest evenings she had spent since her wedding, and she found herself unwilling, for once, to let the good feeling of it go entirely when the carriages were called and the party began to break apart.

But Charity and Duncan had gone home to their children, and the gentlemen had retired for their cigars, and Phillipa found herself alone with her oldest friend and a great deal less able to hide behind pleasant conversation than she had been a quarter hour before.

“Am I so obvious?” she asked.

“To me. I doubt Ronan noticed a thing; he was rather occupied with the fish.” Augusta settled back in her chair with the particular attentiveness of a woman who had decided to be told the truth and meant to wait, comfortably, until she got it. “Tell me.”

And so Phillipa told her.

The avoidance. The quarrel in his study. The wall she could feel between them, invisible and entirely unyielding, no matter how she pressed against it.

Augusta listened with her chin propped on one hand, and when Phillipa finished, she let out a long breath that was equal parts sympathy and exasperation. “Men,” she said, “are the most maddening creatures God ever made, and I say that as a woman who married one for love. Ronan does precisely the same thing. He will carry an entire ship’s worth of trouble on his own back rather than let me lift a single crate of it, because he has somehow convinced himself that asking for help is a kind of failure.” She shook her head. “They would all benefit enormously from a little assistance, if only they could be persuaded to accept it.”

“I have tried to press him. It only seems to make him retreat further.”

“Then perhaps,” said Augusta, more gently, “you might try opening a door yourself, before you ask him to open his.”