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Dominic froze. “Yes.”

“Who signs her work V. Sutton?”

“I have no idea,” Dominic said. He kept his expression calm only by a fierce exertion of will. “I gather that you do know my wife’s work.”

“The Academy issued an honorary invitation to Miss Victoria Sutton when the lady was not yet seventeen,” West said flatly. “Since then, she has exhibited in every Summer Exhibition, as well as any others when we can persuade her to honor us with a painting.”

Dominic’s voice emerged weightless from his chest. “I see.”

“You came here to try to buy entry for one of the greatest floral painters in England, likely the greatest, given that Mary Moser is losing her eyesight,” West said. “I thought you were speaking of a witless woman who paints daisies onto the back of a piece of glass.”

Dominic remembered his vow. “Those ladies are not witless. They are not encouraged to paint Caesar. They are only taught to paint daisies.”

“With apologies, Lord Kelbourne, you are the witless one, given your ignorance of your wife’s genius!” West snarled, with all the fury of a queen whose courtier had rudely turned his back. “I have personally begged your wife to meet the Academy students for a mere half hour, to explain her current work on time.”

“Time,” Dominic repeated, thinking of the three petals he had labeled “meticulous.”

“Miss Sutton will not sell her works. She claims that she will only give them to people she loves. I personally conveyed an offer of two thousand pounds from an American collector, and she turned him down. I know of only one artist—one!—who has had the luck to carry out extended conversations with her. What Monsieur Langlois reports of her thoughts on time dazzles and amazes.”

“I see.”

“You don’t. I myself try to capture a moment, say the moment when Caesar dies. I give the depiction as much reality as possible. I try to put history on a canvas. Miss Sutton works with ideas: rather than the precise moment a flower dies, she paints its suspension in time.”

In Dominic’s opinion, this particular duke would never get closer to admitting that there was a queen in his world.

And he, Dominic, was married to Her Majesty.

“Constraints are visited on aristocratic women that the rest of us will never endure.” West looked Kelbourne up and down. “One of those is presumably marriage to a man with so little respect that he doesn’t even know whom he wedded!”

“I agree.” Dominic bowed. “Good afternoon, President West.” He turned around and walked out.

Chapter 38

On the way to Huntington Grange, Dominic didn’t sleep overnight in an inn, as his family had done. He drove himself in his curricle, changing horses every ten miles throughout the night. Luckily it didn’t rain, and the miles spun by under his wheels as he followed the road by the light of the moon.

He thought hard the whole way about the word fool and what it had meant to him as a boy—and to Torie as a girl and then as a woman.

He also thought about her extraordinary achievements.

And his own.

Since that long-ago relative insulted Queen Elizabeth, his ancestors had taken no part in guiding the country from which they benefited so much. His father didn’t even take up his seat in the House of Lords. The most important bill of Dominic’s career appeared doomed for the moment, but he had championed other bills that protected the nation’s justice system and its finances.

Neither he nor his wife were fools, far from it. And yet the word fool had played a heartbreaking role in both their lives.

The moon paled quickly as his horses plodded up the final hill leading to Huntington Grange. At the top, he looked down onto a building that appeared to have been built in a haphazard way around a medieval castle, which made the shiny red steam engine even more conspicuous.

The groom seated beside him made an odd sound. “The door,” he said urgently. “The door is open, and I don’t see anyone up and about.”

Dominic’s heart stopped in his chest. Could the house have been attacked?

His children. His wife.

He drew in the horses only after reaching rusted gates; thereafter he slowed, because his light curricle was in danger of flipping over as he steered around pits in the road and drove over two shining steel tracks, perfectly maintained.

As he neared the engine in front of the house, Dominic caught sight of his wife.

“You’re smiling,” the groom blurted out. And hastily, “Forgive me for the impertinence, my lord!”