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Benedict turned it over, and did not give voice to the answering unease that pushed at his heart. "It may well be coincidence," he said. "There are, as you say, a great many strangers about. It may be you thought you saw the same man where in truth there were two."

Lady Colbourne stopped walking, and turned to face him full on. "My eyes are not so poor as that, Your Grace." The firmness he had come to expect of her was all there in the words. "I knew the man. I saw him the day I left the office before you, standing in the very same place, watching me with the very same sharp eyes. His look did not waver." Her voice was calm, but Benedict heard the strain running taut beneath it, like a wire under a still surface.

"He may only have been waiting there," Benedict said — reaching, without quite understanding why, for the comfortable explanation, the one that let him not be alarmed. "You have had a great deal to bear, with the solicitors and the fortune and all of it. It would be no wonder if a fraught mind made a purpose out of a stranger's loitering where there was none."

He saw her eyes narrow, and understood — a fraction too late — that he had done the one thing he had promised, not two minutes since, he would not do. He had waved her fear aside as a nervous woman's fancy, and she had felt it land.

"You did not see him, Your Grace." She said it with a cold, quiet dignity that did nothing at all to hide the anger beneath. "You cannot account for his purpose any more than I can. I did not speak of him to be reasoned out of my own eyes. I spoke of him because it frightened me to be watched so — and because I had believed, until this moment, that you were a man who would take that seriously."

She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. "I believe we have said enough for one day. Pray write to me the instant you have word from Mr. Wells." She inclined her head, and gave him a brief, thin smile that was worse than no smile at all. "Good afternoon."

"Good afternoon," Benedict said, wishing to God he had some other word, some way to unsay it and be believed — but she was already turning, already walking, and there was nothing he could put in her path but more of the same folly. He watched her go, her pace steady and unhurried and unmistakably done with him, and closed his hands into fists at his sides. Her strength of will, her plain refusal to be soothed with nonsense — he admired them even now, even as they carried her away from him.

"I shall have to apologize." He said it low, to no one, dragging his hat off and shoving his fingers back through his hair. He had done exactly what a smaller man would do — met a fear he could not answer by pretending there was nothing to answer — and he knew it, and the knowing sat ill in him. He was a man who solved things by riding to them, by taking them in hand, and here was a thing he had made worse by opening his mouth.

"The last thing I want — the last thing she needs — is to have me for an enemy." He watched the steady set of her shoulders until the crowd took her and let out a hard breath.

Chapter Five

Ido not think I have ever felt more alone.

The thought settled over Harriet as the carriage carried her through the fading gold of the evening, and she could not shake it loose. She was going to her first ball of the Season — the first she had ever gone to without Edward at her side. She kept her gaze fixed to the window, watching the summer's warmth drain from the sky and the lamplighters go from post to post, coaxing up small flames that could not hope to stand in for the sun.

The air inside the carriage sat close and thick against her skin. She closed her eyes, her hands folded tight in her lap, and knew that soon she would have no choice but to step down and be seen.

Attending had seemed the sensible thing when Lady Pembroke's invitation arrived, and Harriet had been grateful for the kindness of it. Thus far she had let the strange difficulties over Lady Warrington's endowment excuse her from society altogether — they had given her leave to keep to herself, to want no gatherings, to sit alone with her worries and call it mourning.

But after her walk in the park with the Duke of Blackwood, and the manner of her leaving him, she feared there were already tongues at work. Her departure would have been noted. Their being together at all, even in so public a place as a park, would have been noted. And she would not, for anything, be reckoned by the ton as a willing widow — one only too content to let a gentleman of high standing into her life in exchange for his protection and his purse.

No. She would make it plain to every last one of them that her only reason for the Duke's company was some tiresome paperwork left by her late husband. A word to a few of the ladies present, and any whisper of herself and the Duke would, God willing, come to nothing.

As the carriage neared Lady Pembroke's, her reluctance climbed by the yard. She wanted to rap the roof and tell the driver she had changed her mind, that she would go home after all and let the ball go on without her. She gripped her hands together and did not rap, and when the carriage stopped and the door swung open, she shut her eyes for the space of one breath.

She had no choice.

She took the footman’s hand and stepped down, smoothing the skirts of her gown — a soft dove-gray, the last quiet word of her mourning, for she had not yet had the heart to go back into color.

It had been a very long time since she had last gone into such a house. Once she had come to balls on Edward's arm, his quiet presence at her side a comfortable anchor she had never known to be grateful for until it was gone. Now she arrived alone. With a nod of thanks, praying the tremor she felt at her center would not spread outward and betray her, Harriet lifted her chin and walked toward the light.

Inside, the house all but glowed. Lady Pembroke had spared no expense, and Harriet did not care to think what the hundreds of candles had cost. Warmth and brightness reached out from every doorway. A murmured greeting to her hostess, and she passed into the ballroom, where the orchestra had already taken up its playing. Voices ran together in cheerful confusion, laughter broke out here and there, and the room seemed almost to lean toward her, to draw her in.

A small relief tugged at her. In this, at least, nothing had changed. Society went on as it always had. The dancers danced, and the whispered speculations about fortunes and follies darted from group to group just as they ever did. The world had not stopped for her grief. There was a strange comfort in that, and a strange loneliness too.

Harriet swallowed and stepped further in. She nodded to a face or two she knew, and was nodded to in turn, but no conversation opened to take her in. Her nervousness climbed.

She drew toward the edge of the room and paused near one of the tall windows, where the cool of the evening air came drifting through. Her heart beat far too quickly, as though she had just come off the floor from a dance and not merely crossed a room. A fresh heaviness pressed at her, a loneliness sharper than any she had felt in the safety of her own house.

Perhaps coming had been a foolish thing after all.

"Harriet?"

She blinked and turned her head toward the voice.

"That is you, is it not?"

A sudden rush of relief and gladness ran up her spine, and Harriet threw her arms about Lady Hawkley with a gasp she could not contain. "Sara!" Her friend laughed and stepped back to hold her at arm's length, wide-eyed. "I did not expect you at all — I thought you were married and gone, that you would be —"

"On my honeymoon, as I said I should be." Sara pulled a rueful face. "Forgive me, my dear. My husband saw fit to alter our plans. He had some urgent business here in town, and so — here I am." A sigh escaped her. "I would a great deal rather be on my honeymoon, but Hawkley is far too fond of his business affairs, I am afraid."