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He replaced the letter in the book and continued talking to the dowager about Archie’s renovations at the hunting box. Miss Brown arrived partway through his speech and, when he was finished, Lady Harcourt asked her, “Will you go into the pool with me?”

“Certainly I will.”

“You are a good girl.” So, apparently, Miss Brown was no longer playing the role of the dowager’s mother.

She was a good girl, and not in the way Lady Harcourt meant it. She didn’t mean ill, but calling Miss Brown a girl was a reflection of the differences not in their age so much as their status. Some part of the dowager must know that Miss Brown’s role was to serve her. Miss Brown, though, was good. In the moral sense. In the way she so expertly and compassionately threaded the needle of easing the dowager but not lying to her. It was quite the skill.

“I have taken the liberty of adding a second book I thought you might enjoy,” Miss Brown said, and Simon felt certain this meant he was forgiven for his indecorous behavior of two nights ago. “It is quite a departure from Miss Austen, though.”

He wanted to tell her he would read anything she gave him but held his tongue.

She sat next to him and didn’t let go of the books when Simon grasped them. She leaned toward him and said, “You said you forgot to return Pride and Prejudice last time you saw me. Can you refresh my memory as to when that was?”

He was being tested. He knew the answer—he had always been a good student.

“I suppose it must have been last time I called here.” He affected a posture of thoughtfulness. “Perhaps a fortnight ago, when you first arrived in Town?”

“And you haven’t seen me since then,” Miss Brown said, and he didn’t know if she was asking or telling.

“Just as you have not seen me since then,” Simon said, and the books being held between them seemed to conduct a river of understanding. A joint commitment to pretending the other night had never happened was being struck. Though he wasn’t sure how he was meant to forget her reported threat of being forced to marry.

As if she could see into his mind, she said, “The matter we discussed when we last saw each other has been resolved.” She paused. “If you were curious.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

Miss Brown stared at him a beat longer, and with a firm, satisfied nod, let go of her side of the books. She turned to Lady Harcourt. “As for our planned bathing expedition, my lady, I must confess that my willingness to accompany you isn’t all selflessness. I am curious as to whether the waters will help me, too.”

“What do you need help with?” Simon blurted before he could think better of it. He was about to issue a retraction, for the question had been invasive and impolite, but she surprised him by answering easily.

“I get terrible aches in my shoulders.”

“But you are so young.”

“It has always been thus, at least since a bout of scarlet fever I had as a child.”

“This is the same bout that killed your sister? But no, that can’t be right …” Simon was doing the arithmetic in his head. Miss Brown had come to Archie’s household as a young woman nearly a decade ago, whereas her sister had died more recently.

“Oh, my dear,” the dowager asked, true sympathy in her expression, “did your sister die?”

“She did, my lady. Seven years ago.”

“So there were two family bouts of scarlet fever,” Simon said.

“Yes. I had it has a child, and my sister nursed me through it, remaining unaffected. I therefore believed she was somehow … insusceptible.” Her voice had wavered toward the end of her last sentence, and she had to stop and clear her throat. “But no. She contracted it years later, and her case proved fatal.”

“I am sorry,” Simon said. “It seems cruel that fate would have spared her once only to take her from you later.”

“Was it fate?”

“What else would it be?” he asked.

“God?”

“Oh.”

“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?”

“Only that this is a different discussion than I was anticipating.”