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“Do not tell me. Lady Phillipa, is that your baby?”

A loud gasp followed.

“No,” she said. Her voice came out much smaller than she intended. “No, it is not… I found him, I was only….”

But nobody was listening. That was the terrible part.

The crowd had already begun to talk among themselves.

“…so that is why she has been absent this whole time.”

“…I said at the time, did I not, that it was most peculiar, breaking it off with Ravenhill…”

“Not a single ball since spring, and all of us thinking it was a broken heart…”

“And poor Ravenhill, to think he might have been made a fool of..”

“Withdrawn, entirely withdrawn, would not take a dance, and now we see why…”

It did not seem to matter that the child in her arms was so plainly nearer a year old than a month. No one in the history of the ton had ever permitted logic to stand in the way of a good scandal.

Every fact of the past six months, every ball she had missed and every dance she had declined, was being taken out, turned over, and fitted with terrible neatness into a new shape. More people pressed into the doorway. Someone at the back stood on a chair while someone laughed, high and delighted.

Panic took her by the throat. She wanted to sit down on the floor of the Duke of Brawnhite’s library and howl.

She did not, of course. Twelve years of training had gone into her not showing an obvious reaction in a moment like this.

Her chin stayed level while her face settled into the pleasant blankness she had perfected long ago, the one that meant nothing whatsoever is wrong.

She shifted the baby to her shoulder, murmuring against his fuzzy head, and drew breath to speak over the lot of them. She would say, clearly and calmly, that she had found this child not ten minutes since, and that if any person present had the slightest care for the welfare of an infant left alone….

And that was when she saw her mother.

Lady Creighton stood at the very back of the crowd, half-hidden beneath the plumes of her turban, and she had gone the color of candle wax. She was not looking at the baby. She was looking at Phillipa. And the expression on her face was not anger, or even shock, but something far worse: the slow, sick horror of a woman watching everything she had spent ten years building come down around her in a single evening.

A chill slid down Phillipa’s spine, cold as a hand.

She was ruined.

By morning she would be a woman who was talked about, and there would not be a dinner table in London where it was the only thing discussed.

“What,” said a voice behind her, “is going on here?”

Every head in the doorway turned, not to her, but past her, to something over her shoulder. Phillipa turned too, slowly, with the baby crying against her neck.

A man stood in the French doors through which she had come.

He was tall, taller than she was. His eyes, which were green, swept across the crowd, and the matrons, and the child, and then came to rest on her.

Their gazes met.

Phillipa had exchanged perhaps a dozen words with the Duke of Brawnhite in her life, all of them pleasantries, and on each occasion he had been charming and entirely forgettable. There was nothing forgettable about him now. He looked at her, and at the baby in her arms, and something crossed his face so quickly she could not have named it.

She had time for one thought, ridiculous in its clarity. He knows him.

Then the Duke turned to face the gathering, and the mask came down over his features.

He spoke in a clear voice, and said the very last thing in the world that Phillipa either expected or wanted.