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At least until tomorrow.

“I think, perhaps, we just have to be at home to receive any messages,” Haggs said reluctantly.

Gussie nodded. “But there will be an afterward. Whatever this is, they will need us afterward.”

Haggs smiled at her because her kindness was so total. She held out her hand to him and he took it. It felt so tiny and fragile in his fingers, and yet he was aware of her inner strength, of a battle she had been waging with herself and finally won through sheer concern for other people.

“I think so,” he said, bowing low and dropping the briefest of kisses on her gloved hand.

It was daring—too daring for a public street. He expected her to snatch her hand back in outrage. Instead, for an instant, he felt her fingers cling to his lips. And then, his heart beating far too quickly, he handed her up the steps into the carriage and closed the door on her.

***

THE DAY DRAGGED ON. April, making her own plans, began to itch for action, even while her body ached with weariness. She knew women who had been on their feet and even working the day after giving birth—they needed the money to survive. April did not and she had grown soft in her new life.

She set about a refinement to Piers’s plan, simple, but dull and time-consuming. She was pathetically glad of the bath Mrs. Park arranged, though afterward, she insisted on dressing again.

While she fed the baby, she wondered how Piers would feel about his captor, or at least his betrayer, being Darcy. She knew he had rather liked their neighbour, but he was already resigned to the belief that it had to be someone he knew. Knowing Piers, he had forced himself to consider everyone from Francis the footman to Haggs.

She didn’t make the mistake of imagining that was easy for him either, for she’d had occasional glimpses of the sensitive boy he had been, bewildered and unbearably hurt when his cousins and even his brother had turned on him for being different. They had all grown up, of course, and these things had ironed themselves out to some degree, particularly with his brother, but the original closeness of childhood had been lost, and she doubted Piers had ever allowed anyone that close since, not even Haggs or his good friends from university. Not that he’d walked around expecting betrayal, but he never forgot how people could turn.

Achingly, she wondered if he suspected her too. She had been the only one who knew for certain about his peculiar form of memory lapse or blindness or whatever it actually was. And she was the only one he always recognized without doubt, even in boy’s clothes climbing in his broken prison window...

Ruby entered softly. “Mrs. Parks says you’ve a visitor and should she send him away.”

April glanced at the clock. Two hours until she had to leave, hours she had no idea how to fill except with worry.

“Who is it?” she asked, handing the dozing baby into Ruby’s arms.

“A Mr. Darcy, my lady.”

Chapter Ten

April almost denied herself to Darcy, on the grounds that she was angry enough to kill him with nothing more obviously lethal than a pastry fork, and he wasn’t meant to know that.

Why had Mrs. Park even told her about him? It was not as if he was on the same terms with the household as Gussie or Haggs. Perhaps their recent conversation had made the housekeeper think twice about the benefits of isolation.

Keep to the point! Should April receive the man she knew had betrayed Piers’s weakness if not actually kidnapped him and held him in that terrible room away from his newborn son? Perhaps if she saw him, she could actually gauge the depth of his offence. What she must not do was put him on his guard. She would have to appear worried, distracted but not suspicious. Could she do it? Should she do it.

Oh yes.

“Stay with the baby, if you please,” she said to Ruby, and sailed off to her sitting room with grim intent. “Mrs. Park, I’ll see Mr. Darcy for a few minutes. Francis can bring him up and wait for him in the passage.”

She was seated on her armchair when Darcy breezed in, looking endearingly shy and delighted and bearing a huge bouquet of flowers.,

“Lady Petteril, how marvellous! I brought you these, though I dared not hoped to see you. I asked for his lordship, of course, but apparently he is not at home.”

“Not just at present,” April said pleasantly. She did not take the flowers from him—she could not trust herself to do so—but waved in the vague direction of the table. “They are lovely. Thank you. I’ll have them put in water.”

He laid them down obediently, his eyes searching her face with an anxiety that was surely genuine. “I only dropped in to congratulate you both on your heir and give you my best wishes. But you will want to rest.”

“Indeed,” April murmured, waving him to a chair. “And how have you been, sir?”

Darcy sat. “Oh, very well, of course, very well. Going down to visit my cousin in Hampshire next week, on a bit of a repairing lease. Looking forward to it, to be honest. I suppose you won’t be going down to Haybury Court now for a while.”

“We haven’t decided yet. What will you do in the time you have left in town?”

“I might set off tomorrow,” he said confidingly. “Travel in easy stages...”