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"There is no need." He smiled, and then the smile gave way to a quieter thing. "I told you I would take up the charge my aunt laid upon me, and I mean to. But it is not my aunt's asking that moves me now." His hand came to rest over hers for the briefest moment, there and gone, the warmth of it running up her arm to settle somewhere behind her breastbone. "I want you safe, Harriet. I want you to have every last thing you are owed. That is my own wanting, and no one else's."

She could not speak for a moment. Her throat had closed, and her eyes had gone hot, and she was grateful past measure when the ices arrived and gave her something to do with her hands. For the length of it she let herself simply sit beside him in the sun, and pretend the rest of the world was a great way off.

"It is a fine thing," the Duke murmured, "to think of anything at all but ledgers and letters no man will put his name to. Sitting here, in the sun, with an ice and with you — it is very nearly possible to forget there is any trouble in the world."

"It is my feeling also," she admitted, softly, and did not add how much of the pleasure was the with you.

But the trouble would not stay at its distance, and it was she who called it back, for that was why she had come. "I had your aunt's charge much in mind last night," she said, "and mine own affairs with it. You should know I have written to my brother-in-law. Braithwaite cannot open Edward's accounts on my word alone, only on the Earl's, the estate being his now — so I asked his consent to have them studied, and I have had my answer. He has refused it. Flatly, and with a great deal of unpleasantness, and in as few lines as he could contrive."

The Duke set down his spoon. "Refused. On what grounds?"

"On none worth the name. That he is busy. That there is nothing in it. That he will not have Edward's papers rummaged through to satisfy a widow's curiosity." She lifted her chin. "I will own to you what I did not put in my letter to him. It is not only the cruelty of it that has sat with me, though he is cruel. It is the heat of the refusal. A busy man declines a thing in a line and forgets it. My brother-in-law shut the door and set his shoulder to it. And I cannot stop asking why a man should trouble himself so hard to keep anyone from a set of accounts, unless he feared what a careful eye might find in them."

She watched him weigh it, his brow drawing down, and was glad of the colder head she had come to borrow. "It is a fair question," he said at last. "Though I would set a fair answer beside it. A proud, mean man may guard a thing for no better reason than that he was asked to give it up and cannot abide to be seen to yield. That is not guilt. That is only smallness." He turned his ice a half-circle upon the table. "But you are right that the accounts might have cleared it entirely, and he will not have them cleared. So we set that down as a fact, and lean upon it no further than it will bear — and we find another door. Braithwaite cannot open the estate's books, but Edward wrote of reviewing his own, and those are here, in the house. We do not need the Earl's leave to read what your husband kept under his own roof."

"That is precisely what I have set myself to," she said, and felt something ease in her at being reasoned with, not managed. "Though I understand not a tenth of what I turn over."

"Then we shall turn it over together, and understand a tenth each, and hope the tenths do not overlap." The corner of his mouth lifted. "It is not the worst plan I have ever heard."

A laugh escaped her before she could prevent it. "No. I have heard worse."

"Come." He rose and offered his arm. "The park is not far, and I find I am not ready to give you back to your carriage and your ledgers. Will you walk with me a little?"

She ought to have said no. A widow lately returned to society did not walk the park upon a duke's arm and give the whispers such a feast. But she was tired, and the sun was warm, and she wanted — with a plainness that would have alarmed her a month ago — nothing so much as another half-hour of him. "Yes. I should like that very much."

Within a few minutes they had left the bright bustle of Berkeley Square behind and passed in beneath the trees, where the birdsong twined with the soft rush of leaves and the noise of the town fell back to a murmur. Harriet let out a long breath. It was easier here to set aside Edward's affairs, and Lady Warrington, and the cold weight of all she did not understand, and simply walk a gravel path in the summer green, upon the arm of a man whose nearness she had ceased, somewhere in the last hour, to pretend was only gratitude.

"Might I ask how you find society, Harriet?" he said presently.

She glanced up. "What do you mean?"

"You have been away from it a long while. And you return to it only to find yourself surrounded on all sides by complications."

A quiet laugh escaped her. "That is a very considered way to describe my circumstances, Blackwood."

He smiled. "Might I also say I think you have borne them remarkably well? The ton is not a creature that likes to be ignored, and you have ignored it very thoroughly indeed."

Her steps slowed, and she looked up at him, her head tilting a fraction. "I would not have you think me ignorant of what is said. I know there are whispers about Lady Warrington's will. I know some are pleased to make free with the fact of our connection." Heat climbed in her chest, but she made herself go on. "I take no notice. I will not let it into my thoughts to trouble me. There is trouble enough there already."

The Duke's eyes lit with something warmer than approval. "I am the more impressed by it. For my own part," he added, with a slight shake of his head, "I despise the gossip of society. It does nothing but bring pain to those it fastens upon, and calls it sport."

"But do you enjoy the Season at all, aside from that?" she asked, glad of a path that led away from her own troubles and toward the plain pleasure of knowing him better. "Do you find your time here well spent?"

He gave a small shrug, and there was something almost weary in it. "I have duties that follow me into every drawing room in London. I am always watched, always spoken of, always noticed." His nose wrinkled, as at a taste he did not care for, and Harriet felt her curiosity spark.

"You do surprise me in that, Blackwood." When he glanced down with one brow lifted, she spread her hands a little. "I had imagined the Duke of Blackwood would take the greatest delight in standing at the center of every gathering. Your title is a high one. You might do very much as you pleased, and even were the ton to frown at it, you would still have as much of its admiration as you cared to hold out your hand for."

A faint smile touched his mouth. "That may be true. But I do not find even the thought of it in any way gratifying. I have a duty to keep the title clean, untouched by scandal, by disgrace. There are men enough who hold a high name and do as they like beneath it and care nothing for the marks they leave upon it. To my mind that is reckless, and worse than reckless."

Harriet felt her heart lift at the plain earnestness of it. Here was a man with his eyes fixed steadily upon what was asked of him, where so many others of his rank, rakes and idlers both, did precisely as they pleased and thought themselves the finer for it. "You are worthy of your title, Blackwood," she said. "You take up its weight without a word of complaint."

"And yet," he said, with a half-smile that did not quite reach easiness, "I have not fulfilled all it asks. I must still produce the heir, must I not?"

The remark struck her heart hard against her ribs, and she nodded, and looked away down the path. What was she to say to such a thing? Ought she agree? Ought she ask whether he had thought of marrying? Before she could settle upon anything at all, the Duke gave a light shrug.

"I do not intend to marry without affection, which is why I have not yet taken a wife." It was said so simply, so without defense, that it caught her wholly unprepared. It was more of his heart than she had thought to be shown, unguarded and a little vulnerable, and the quiet honesty of it hung in the summer air between them and turned it somehow sweeter.

"You would have a love match, then?" she asked, and could hear how her own breath had quickened. "You seek that, for yourself?"