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In other ways, though, in the ways that mattered, Effie was the same as he’d always been. The walls of his home were hung with paintings, the press was churning out magazines, and he was living a life full of love.

“All right,” Simon said, feigning annoyance as he threw up his hands. “Let us go.”

“Goodbye, my love,” Effie said, turning to Julianna and pressing both hands to his heart. “I shall count the days.”

“There you go again with the mawkishness,” Julianna said with exasperated fondness, shooting Simon a conspiratorial eye roll. “I shall see you all in a week’s time.”

“Yes!” Effie sounded cheered, as if this were news to him, though the change in plans for this year’s Earls Trip—namely, the addition of the ladies for its second half—had been discussed ad nauseam.

In the coach on the way out of town, Effie read aloud a sonnet he had recently finished. Archie delivered a monologue about having changed the planned orientation of the new plunge pool at his hunting box so bathers would have a vista of a nearby brook.

Simon sat back and let the voices of his friends wash over him. Every year, he embarked upon Earls Trip with a divided mind. He knew he needed these trips. A dose of his friends, and of quiet—even if his friends were very talkative, these trips conferred an elemental calm on his soul—always helped him recover from the preceding session of Parliament. But at the same time, some part of him resisted the trip.

He never wanted to leave his work behind. He struggled to disengage his mind. Work was important to Simon, and he made no apologies for that. This last session had achieved mixed success. Yes, he and his allies had passed a gaols act, but they were no closer to compelling the inspections required to actually effect meaningful change. He was anxious about what could reasonably be counted on next year.

It wasn’t only work. He worried about the London house in his absence. He was always happier when he and Mother were in different locales—he in London and she at Galecroft was generally how it went these days—but he didn’t like leaving the house empty of family. What if the servants forgot to latch the door at night?

He was fretting about Galecroft, too. A storm at the estate a few weeks ago had taken the roofs off two cottages, so in addition to the unexpected expense of replacing them ahead of schedule, he had two tenant families living in quarters that were too cramped.

And of course there was that other … matter.

His head was full of concerns.

But this year, he was trying something new.

He was simply going to, through sheer force of will, leave those concerns behind.

At least for the first week.

He pulled out his novel and, after a few pages, discovered one of Miss Brown’s markers.

A thrill fluttered through his chest. He sometimes thought he enjoyed finding these markers in the novels Miss Brown lent him as much as he enjoyed the novels themselves.

But perhaps not this one, which was a small piece of paper on which she’d written the words “I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman’s feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.”

The words were a lance to his chest.

He told himself not to be so vainglorious. Why on earth would he presume to think Miss Brown was thinking of him when she jotted down those words?

She was probably thinking of … the other fellow.

Anyway, from what she’d told him about her notes, this could be quite old. Years old.

The notion did not calm him.

Simon told himself the swirling in his stomach was due to the lurching of the coach, which had cleared the cobblestones of town in favor of rutted dirt roads.

Some people said novels were the devil’s work. He was not one of those people, but it was certainly the case that novel reading could be … destabilizing.

He set the book aside and cleared his throat, drawing the attention of the others. “Isn’t it about time for the rules?”

“I suppose it is,” Archie said, handing out glasses and sloshing a few fingers of ruby-red port in each of them. “This is the part where I would traditionally say, ‘Gentlemen. Welcome to Earls Trip 1823.’ But can we call it Earls Trip anymore?”

“Certainly we can,” Simon said.

“Half of it anyway,” Effie said. “Week one is Earls Trip, and week two is, what did Clementine and Olive call it, Earls-Plus-Girls Trip?”

“They did indeed. In fact, they’ve been talking of nothing else for the past few weeks.” Archie rolled his eyes, but affection for his wife and her sister was evident in his eyes. “But you are correct, Simon, just because this year is different doesn’t mean we bin the rules.”