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"Indeed." The Duke's voice was low, and the smile he fixed to his face was one Harriet knew to be a courtesy and nothing warmer. "I have very little to do with it all, much to my relief."

Lord Ashcroft cleared his throat, and the small table turned to him. "Wills and the like can carry a good deal of trouble with them," he said, and a few murmurs of agreement went round. "In my experience, financial affairs can always throw up difficulties where one least looks for them."

"I quite agree," said Lord Woodley, his eye going once about the table. "One may receive far less than one expected — or a great deal more than one had any right to."

"Or nothing at all," put in another gentleman, and the room broke into laughter.

The Duke looked to Harriet across the table, and she let herself hold his gaze a moment before returning it to her hands. The last thing in the world she wished was to be drawn into such a conversation.

"My aunt was a good and generous woman," the Duke said, and his voice carried now, easy and firm, drawing the table's attention gently to himself and away from anywhere it might have wandered. "Whatever difficulty her will has made, it is only because her sense of justice ran ahead of the lawyers' patience. I have no doubt these matters will be settled soon, and settled rightly." He sent a smile round the room that Harriet understood was meant for her alone, and took it as the comfort he intended. She let out a slow breath, took up her spoon, and waited for the talk to move on.

It did, soon enough: someone had heard that Lord Gilmerton was returning to England, and the debutantes must be warned against his charm. Relief settled over Harriet like a warm cloak, and she dined on quietly after that, listening more than she spoke.

If her gaze still strayed to the Duke more often than was wise, at least the tables had turned elsewhere. He talked well, and more than once she saw him steer the conversation deftly away from his late aunt and toward some lighter matter, carrying the company along without her. It was kindly done. She told herself she was grateful for it only as one is grateful to any thoughtful host — and did not believe herself for a moment.

When at length the ladies withdrew to the drawing room and the tea was brought in, Sara let the general talk settle before she rose and drew Harriet gently aside, under the pretext of admiring a vase of flowers set near the window.

"You will wonder why I bring you off to the side in so secretive a manner," she began, as Harriet sipped at her tea. "I should very much like to ask you about the Duke of Blackwood. What is it that draws you so to him?"

Harriet's face went hot. She set her cup back in its saucer, and both down upon the windowsill, and gave herself a moment to find an answer. "The Duke is assisting me in a particular matter concerning my endowment from Lady Warrington. That is all."

Her friend rolled her eyes and waved the words away with one hand. "I do not mean that connection, and well you know it. There is a great deal more between you than solicitors and endowments. You spent the whole dinner throwing glances at him — and he at you."

The heat in Harriet's face redoubled. "I assure you, I had no wish to give you any such impression," she said, low, so that no one else should hear. "I have come to rely on him. That is all of it."

Sara shifted so that she stood square to her, and looked at her steadily, all the laughter gone soft in her eyes. "My dear friend. You can trust me, can you not? I am not made for gossip, and I would not carry a word of this to another living soul."

Harriet knew she would not. And knowing it, she found the denial harder to hold to than she had expected. She turned her face toward the window, hoping the dim light might hide what her expression would not.

"You scarcely looked anywhere else the whole evening," Sara said gently. "If you do not wish to speak of it, I will not press you. But when feelings begin to rise in a person, I have always believed it best to speak of them, and not to leave them to sour in the dark."

With a small sigh, Harriet dropped her gaze to her hands. Her friend's understanding made denial feel suddenly futile. "I do admire him," she admitted.

Sara's mouth curved. "That is a very cautious way of naming what you feel."

"I find myself thinking of him more than I ought." She looked up, and saw nothing in Sara's face but warmth. "And I am — I am uneasy about it. Not for the reason you might think," she went on, before her friend could speak. "Not because I doubt him, nor even because I doubt whether he feels as I do — it is a fear of another kind, one that has sat on me since we found — " She stopped, and chose her words with care, for the memo, and all it held was not hers to lay upon anyone. "Since I came to understand how much of Edward's affairs I never knew."

Sara's brows drew together, but she said nothing, only waited.

"I was happy enough with Edward," Harriet said slowly. "I have never called myself ungrateful, and I never shall. He was the dearest friend I had in the world, and he was good to me, and steady, and kind. But it was never love between us — not the grand kind, the kind the poets make so much of. We both of us knew it, and neither of us grieved it. There was too much friendship in the way to leave room for grieving." She turned the ring upon her finger. "So it is not that I feel disloyal to him for wanting more now. I have made my peace with that. What sits on me is heavier than that, and the fault in it is mine."

"Tell me," Sara said.

"He carried something." Harriet's voice had dropped to near nothing. "At the end. A trouble he never once brought to me — never so much as let me see the shape of. He believed, I think, that a burden shared was a burden doubled, and that it was his part to keep the worst of everything off me. And I let him."

Her eyes stung, and she did not let the tears come. "I looked in at his study door of an evening and saw his fair head bent over the work, and thought only how good it was to have a husband who saw to things, and never once asked him what the things were, nor whether he was afraid. And he was. I am sure of it now. Afraid, and alone with it, in that room, with me not ten feet off saying my goodnights and thinking all was well."

She stopped. The flowers blurred a little before her. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier, and had turned from grief toward a thing with harder edges.

"I keep thinking I should have known. That is what will not leave me. Not guilt for wanting to be happy again — I will not call that guilt; it is only being alive. But that I lived a whole year beside a man who was carrying something too heavy to carry alone, and I never saw it, because I never troubled to look." She lifted her eyes to her friend's. "I will not do that again, Sara. Whatever I let myself feel for the Duke — whatever comes of it, or does not — I will not stand beside a man I love and fail to know him. I will not be told, after, that there was something I might have seen. Not a second time."

For a moment Sara said nothing at all. She had let go of the flowers. Her hand had found Harriet's, and closed round it. Harriet had braced, without quite knowing it, for the gentle smoothing-over a friend gives — you must not blame yourself, you could not have known, it was not your fault. It did not come.

"Then don't," Sara said.

Harriet blinked.

"You are waiting for me to tell you that you did nothing wrong," her friend went on, quietly, "and that you must forgive yourself, and lay it down. I will not, because I do not think that is what you want, and I do not think it is what you need. You have looked the thing full in the face, and named it, and made it into a resolve. That is a great deal better than absolution. Absolution would only let you set it down and be as you were." She pressed Harriet's fingers. "You do not wish to be as you were. You wish to be different. So — then don't. Do not fail to know him. It is as simple, and as hard, as that."