Chapter 1

“Do try the lemon ice, Miss Carrow. It is said to be very refreshing for ladies who have grown tired of excitement.”

Lady Cassandra Ridge said it sweetly, the way she said everything, and held out the little glass dish across the marble-topped table as though it were a kindness rather than a verdict.

Melody took it and set it before her, because to refuse would have given the table something to discuss on the drive home, and a small refusal cost more than a small surrender nearly every time, and she had finished paying the higher price years ago.

“How thoughtful,” she said. “I find I have grown very tired indeed.”

Around her the confectioner’s front room glittered with the brightness of women enjoying themselves at no one’s expense but hers. There were six of them at the long table, and Melody had once danced and gossiped and traded ribbons with most of them, before the understanding with Lord Cole Armstrong became first an expectation, then a wait, then a thing the county discussed in the past tense. Now four of them wore wedding rings, and a fifth wore a betrothal ring which she mentioned in every third sentence, and Melody wore gloves with a seam she could press her thumb against under the table where no one would see her do it.

The glass of lemon ice stood untouched, weeping drops of moisture against the afternoon heat.

“We were speaking of London,” said Mrs Holloway, who had been Miss Pratt until June and could not yet say her new name without a small proud pause before it. “Cassandra is to go for the little season.”

“Only if Mama can be persuaded the roads have dried,” Cassandra said. “She has a horror of arriving anywhere with mud on the hem. She says a woman is forgiven a great many things in town, but never an untidy entrance.”

“You will be the toast of it,” said another. “You always are.”

“One does not aim to be a toast. A toast is drunk and then forgotten.” Cassandra smiled. “One aims to be remembered.”

Melody set her spoon to the ice and did not lift it. The smell of it reached her first, sharp and yellow and faintly medicinal, and her stomach closed against it the way it always closed when a room had decided something about her before she arrived.

“You are not eating, Miss Carrow,” Cassandra said.

“I am savouring the anticipation.”

“How disciplined of you. I could never. Mama says I want patience.” Cassandra dipped her own spoon and considered it. “Though patience is a great deal easier, I find, when one is certain of being served.”

Melody tapped the spoon once against the rim, then a second time. The taps were a thing she could count, and counting gave her hands an occupation other than trembling.

“Miss Carrow has gone quiet,” Cassandra observed. “I do hope town talk does not bore you. We forget, sometimes, that not everyone finds the prospect of a season so very thrilling.”

“I find a great many things thrilling, Lady Cassandra. I simply ration my displays of it. Enthusiasm is like sugar. A little sweetens. A great deal makes the company ill.”

A laugh went round, uncertain whether it had been invited. Cassandra’s own laugh arrived a half-beat late, polished and unbothered. No room had ever yet turned to look at her for the wrong reason, and the laugh knew it.

“You always did have a way of putting things,” she said. “I have often admired it. There is such freedom in a clever tongue when a woman has nothing else she must protect.”

The remark landed and settled. The table took it in, the small intake of pleasure several of them indulged and tried to hide behind their dishes, and Melody pressed her thumb harder into the glove seam and kept her face arranged.

“You are too generous,” she said. “It would grieve me exceedingly to think that my conversation was my only quality worthy of admiration. It is the one part of me I have never had to pay a dressmaker to improve.”

Mrs Holloway choked on her ice. Cassandra inclined her head, conceding the point as one concedes a single trick at cards one fully intends to win.

The talk turned, as it always turned, to husbands.

“Mr Holloway has promised me a phaeton for the spring,” said the new Mrs Holloway. “Yellow wheels. He says I am to drive it myself in the park.”

“It is fast,” said Mrs Greer comfortably. “Mr Greer would never. He has taken a house in town instead, with the most beautiful yellow drawing room, and I am to do nothing in it but receive.”

“You are all so wonderfully settled,” sighed Miss Dean, who was not yet wed but expected to be by Michaelmas, and produced for the third time the existence of a letter from her intended so passionate she could not read it aloud. “I should blush. I could not possibly. You would none of you ever look at me again.”

“Then by all means spare us,” Melody said. “I find I am quite captivated by the very sight of you.”

That earned a small laugh, and Miss Dean preened, uncertain whether she had been flattered.

“And how peaceful it must be,” Mrs Greer said, turning to Melody in the voice people kept for the sick and the very old, “to be settled in oneself, with none of this fuss to manage. I quite envy you, sometimes. The freedom of it.”

“It is a great freedom,” Melody said.

“One has so much time to read, I imagine. And to walk. And to be useful to one’s family.” Mrs Greer warmed to it. “I always say there is a particular dignity in a woman who has made her peace.”

“You always do say it,” Cassandra agreed. “Miss Carrow is admirably content with what is offered.”

There it was, said gently, said with a small approving nod, the kind of sentence that could not be answered without seeming to confirm it. Content with what is offered. As though Melody were a mantel shelf-dog given the scraps and grateful for them. The lemon ice glared up at her.

She lifted the spoon and ate it.

It was every bit as sharp as she remembered, the cold of it wrought an ache behind her clear grey eyes, while the sourness puckered the back of her throat. She swallowed it down with her chin level and her gaze somewhere pleasant in the middle distance, because the alternative was to set the dish aside and have six women watch her not eat, and she would sooner swallow a season’s worth of lemon ice than be watched declining a single one.

It tasted, more than anything, of a garden five years gone.

She had loathed lemon ice then too. There had been an evening party at the assembly rooms, hot and overcrowded, and someone had pressed a glass of it on her, and she had stood holding the wretched thing and trying to think how to be rid of it without rudeness, when a voice at her shoulder had said, low and amused, “You look as though the lemon has insulted you.”

“It has behaved with needless sharpness,” she had told him.

“Then we shall punish it. Please allow me.” And Lord Cole Armstrong had taken the dish from her hand and exchanged it for his own, which was burnt cream, the only ice in England she actually liked, and he consumed the lemon entirely without a single flinch, whilst she looked on, unable to wholly suppress a smile. No one had seen him do it. That was the thing she had kept of it, after everything else was taken away, that he had not done it to be seen.

“Miss Carrow.”

She came back to the room. Cassandra was watching her with the mild attention of a cat at a mouse hole.

“You were a thousand miles away,” Cassandra said. “I asked whether you mean to attend the Harbury assembly.”

“I have not yet decided.”

“You must. It is so dull when the same faces only ever appear. One longs for variety.” Cassandra turned the stem of her glass between two fingers. “Though I daresay the country must feel very small to you now. After so many years of the same lanes.”

“The lanes have the great virtue of going where they say they will,” Melody said. “I have found that increasingly rare in company.”

The front door slammed loudly, rattling the small paned windows of the shop.

A young woman came in on a gust of September air, bonnet askew, colour high, the look on her face of someone carrying news too good to be made to wait for. It was Miss Pickett, the apothecary’s daughter, who was not quite of their set and knew it and forgave herself by being always first with everything.

“Have you heard,” she said, to the room at large, not troubling with whom she addressed, “have you heard? Lord Cole Armstrong is coming home.”

Something happened to the air of the room. Melody was aware of it the way one is aware of a draught, a small cold movement that touched the back of the neck before the mind had named it.

“Lord Cole?” said Mrs Holloway, delighted. “Oh, the soldier. The second son. Is it true? When?”

“Within the fortnight, they say. Mrs Coombe had it from the housekeeper at the Abbey herself. After all this time, can you very well imagine.” She put a hand to her breast, the gesture trailing off into wonder.

“Lord Cole?” Mrs Greer cut in, and her eyes had already begun the slow swivel that came at Melody like weather. “My dear, you are behind the times. There is no Lord Cole. It is His Grace now, and has been this twelvemonth and more.”

“His Grace,” Miss Pickett repeated, abashed at having got it wrong, and the rest of them tittered, the small cruel music of women who knew a thing a newcomer did not.

“The Duke of Greenstone.” Cassandra set down her glass with great care, as though the name deserved a clean surface to rest on. “One must be accurate about these things. Titles are terribly unforgiving. A man may be Lord Cole one year and His Grace the next, and the difference is the whole of his life. And ours, who must address him.”

She did not look at Melody when she said it. She did not need to. The whole table looked at Melody for her, six faces turning at once like flowers following a sun, and Melody understood with perfect clarity that this, all of it, the lemon ice and the talk of London and the peace they wished her so warmly, this had only ever been the overture.

Beneath the table, her thumb sought the seam of her glove and pressed hard against it, whilst with her other hand she smoothed a stray tress of her glossy raven hair behind her ear.

“How fortunate for England,” she said. Her voice came out even, which surprised her, a little, distantly. “I am sure the dukedom will be greatly relieved to have its master restored to it. A duke ought not to be left lying about unused. It distresses the tenants.”

For a moment no one spoke. Then Cassandra laughed, the real laugh this time, brief and genuinely amused, and Melody bitterly resented the fact that she had earned it.

“And you, Miss Carrow.” Mrs Greer leaned in, kind as a knife. “Are you relieved?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“To have him home. After everything.” The everything was a small masterpiece, an entire history folded into three syllables. “We all remember how things stood, once. It would be only natural to feel something.” She let the word hang, generously, so that Melody might fill it with whatever wound she chose.

The spoon was steady in Melody’s hand because she had made it steady. She had become, over a number of years she did not care to total, very accomplished at the management of her own hands.

“I was not aware,” she said, “that I had misplaced him.”

It was the right thing. The small silence that followed told her so, the silence of a blow that has not quite found purchase, and she held the moment by ankle and by neck and gave away none of what it cost. She tapped the spoon once more against the empty glass. Across the room a clock she could not see ticked, and she counted the ticks, four of them, five, and somewhere around the seventh she was certain again that she would not be sick and would not weep and would not give them the single thing they had dressed and powdered and driven into town to collect.

“More ices?” said the confectioner’s girl, into the quiet.

“I think we are quite finished,” said Cassandra.

They gathered gloves and reticules and the small important businesses of departure, and the talk ran on ahead of them out the door, lighter now, released. Melody was the last to rise. She found, when she stood, that her legs would hold her, which they always did, in the end, however little she trusted them in the moment.

She had reached the threshold, the bell over the door still trembling from the woman ahead of her, when she heard it. Two of them on the step outside, voices pitched for each other and not for her, the way people pitch a voice when they have forgotten or have not bothered to remember that the subject of it has ears.

“Do you think he remembers her?”

“A duke?” A small laugh. “My dear. Why on earth should he?”

Melody stepped out into the cooling afternoon. The light had gone long and gold across the cobbles, and the air smelled of coming rain, and somewhere down the street a cart was unloading apples. She did not slow and she did not turn, only walked to the waiting carriage with the spoon-rhythm still going somewhere behind her ribs, one and two and three. The question came with her the whole way home, set neatly in her lap where she could keep an eye on it, the way one carries a thing that has cut before and will cut again the moment it is given room.

Chapter 2

“Your Grace, the horses cannot be made to outrun four years of absence. They have tried. I have watched them try since Dover.”

Beale said it from the opposite seat without looking up from the strap he was mending, in the tone of a man who had earned the right to say far worse and chosen this instead. He had been Sergeant Beale at Salamanca and was something less easily named now, valet and groom and keeper of the duke’s worse impulses, and he was the only person in England who still spoke to Cole as though the title were a coat he might be persuaded to take off indoors.

“I am not trying to outrun anything,” Cole said.

“No, Your Grace. You are merely sitting very forward in your seat, as a man sits when he wishes the road would hurry.”

Cole sat back, and Beale returned to his strap, satisfied, while the carriage went on swaying through the gold end of the afternoon, past hedgerows heavy with the last of the blackberries, past fields shorn to stubble and waiting for the plough. England in September was something he had carried in his head through four winters and most of a fifth, and the real country kept failing to match the carried one, kept being smaller and softer and more indifferent to his return than the one he had defended in his imagination.

They had stopped near Maidenhead to change horses, and the landlord had come out wiping his hands and begun, “Lord Cole, we heard,” and then gone scarlet and corrected himself, “Your Grace, forgive me, Your Grace,” and bowed so low Cole had wanted to take him by the elbow and set him upright. It happened at every stage. The name went ahead of him down the post road like a herald, and the herald was a stranger, and the stranger wore his face.

He had not gone home first.

His mother would have an opinion about that, and the opinion would be correct in every point of form and wrong in the only way that mattered. A duke newly returned ought to present himself at the Abbey, receive his people, observe the proper order of things. Cole had ordered the coachman to Carrow House instead, before he could talk himself into prudence. The Abbey was a duty and Carrow House was the reason he had survived to perform any duty at all, and a man ought to know the difference between what he owed and what he wanted, even when the world had arranged the two to look the same.

The lane to Carrow House climbed between two stands of beech, and the sight of it did something to his chest he had not braced for.

He had stood with her at the top of that lane once. Summer, the year before he left, the air thick with cut grass. Melody two-and-twenty with a book held against her hip the way other women held a fan, telling him, with the grave courtesy she used only when she meant to be insulting, that he read military histories because he enjoyed being agreed with by deceased men. Living men, she had said, had the inconvenient habit of answering back. He had laughed then, and could still hear precisely how, the surprised bark of it, the way she had pretended not to be pleased and been pleased.

He found himself smiling at the beech trees as a gentle breeze wafted through his dark brown hair. His countenance, bronzed from his long months upon the battlefield, was softened by the expression, and his piercing, steel-blue eyes shone. Then, he stopped; for the smile belonged to a man who had not yet learned what waited at the bottom of the lane.

He had rehearsed any number of things on the crossing. Apologies for the years, and for the silence, though the silence had not been his. An account of Henry, if she wished one, and of what the title had cost and failed to buy. He had rehearsed the careful, unhurried way he would say that nothing had changed, that he had held to every word, that he had come the moment duty released its grip on him. He had not rehearsed a single syllable for the possibility that she might receive him as a stranger, because in none of the long imagined versions had it occurred to him that she would want to.

“We are arrived, Your Grace,” said Beale, gently, which was how Cole understood that he had gone still.

Lady Carrow met him in the hall, and the meeting nearly undid his composure before he had set down his hat. She had aged more than four years’ worth. She took both his hands in hers and could not speak for a moment, and when she did it was only his name, the wrong one, “Lord Cole,” and then, flustered, “forgive me, Your Grace, oh, we are so very,” and the sentence went nowhere and did not need to. He pressed her hands, and whatever the rest of this house held for him, this much was real.

Sir Marcus was another matter.

He stood by the cold hearth with his hands behind his back and his chin at an angle that cost him something to maintain, a baronet receiving a duke in a room whose carpet had been turned to hide the wear, and he bowed with perfect correctness and not one degree more.

“Greenstone,” he said. “You are welcome to this house.”

The flatness of it was its own kind of speech. Cole had been Lord Cole the last time he stood here, a younger son who corrected the man’s sums and ate his mutton and was understood, by everyone including Sir Marcus, to be courting his daughter. Now he was Greenstone, welcome to the house, and the welcome had a wall built into it.

“Sir Marcus. I am glad to find you well.”

“We manage.” A pause that did several things at once. “You will forgive the cold grate. We do not light fires before October in this house. Economy is a habit, and habits keep one warm in their own fashion.”

“I remember the room as a warm one regardless.”

“You remember it as a younger man’s. Rooms change with the company that fills them.” His chin stayed at its careful angle. “Melody will be down directly. She was not certain you would come today. She was not, I think, certain you would come at all.”

She came down, in the end, when the tea had been brought and Lady Carrow had asked three times whether his journey had been very tiring and he had said three times that it had not. He heard the step on the stair and was on his feet before he had decided to stand, and then she was in the doorway, and the carried version failed again, because she was not the girl from the top of the lane and he had been fool enough to half expect her.

She was seven and twenty and she wore it well and entirely without softness. There was a stillness to her now that the younger woman had not owned, a composure held the way one holds a full glass across a crowded room, and she crossed to a chair near the window and arranged herself in it before she so much as looked at him.

He bowed. “Miss Carrow.”

“Your Grace.” She curtsied to the precise depth her father had bowed, and the title came out of her smooth and cool and final, a stone set into a wall.

He should have left it there. He had told himself on the whole length of the lane that he would be patient and that he would not presume, that he would let her set the pace and meet it. The resolution lasted until he was looking at her.

“Melody,” he said.

Something crossed her countenance and then it was gone. “I do not believe,” she said, “that we are on such terms, Your Grace.”

“We were.”

“A great many things were.”

Lady Carrow began to pour, and her hand was unsteady, and Melody rose at once and took the pot from her with a quiet “let me, Mama,” and sat again with it, and began to pour herself. The stream wavered, the cup filling unevenly. Cole watched her wrist and the small fight she was having with it and said nothing for as long as he could manage, which was not very long.

“You need not pour, if your hand is tired,” he said.

“My hand is perfectly steady.”

He looked at the tea, which had slopped into the saucer. “So I see.”

Her eyes came up to his then, and there was a flash in them he remembered, the old quickness, except that it had something underneath it now that had not been there before, something that had been put there in his absence and that he did not yet have the right to ask about. She set the pot down with great care. She did not like being seen. That much he understood, and understood too that the seeing was itself the offence, that a man who had been gone four years and more had not earned the intimacy of noticing how she held her hands.

“You take an interest in my teapot, Your Grace,” she said. “I am flattered. I had not thought dukes attended to such small domestic matters.”

“I attend to the small things. It is a habit of soldiering. One learns they are generally the ones that destroy you.”

“How fortunate that you survived them all.”

“Fortune had less to do with it than I should like. Mostly it was a great deal of being told what to do by sergeants.” He set his cup down untouched. “You used to ask me about the campaigns. You wanted the maps. You said the newspapers reported only the parts that flattered the generals.”

“I was younger then. I had not yet learned how little the parts that flatter the generals cost the people who believe them.”

“And now you have learned it.”

“Now I read the last page first, Your Grace, and save myself the disappointment of the middle.”

“Melody.” He heard the wrongness of the name a beat too late, the second time he had reached for it and the second time it had landed like a hand on a closed door. “Miss Carrow. I came because I owed my first call to this house. Before the Abbey. Before anything.”

“How dutiful of you.” She handed him his cup, and their fingers did not come near each other, and the avoidance was so neat it had plainly been practised. “We must all be grateful the war ended before the obligation became entirely inconvenient.”

The bitterness in it stopped him. He had come prepared for anger, had braced for grief, and had built himself to withstand reproach for the years and the lateness and the long quiet. He had not built himself for contempt, for the cool contempt a person reserves for someone they have decided is beneath their hurt, and it took him a moment to understand that she was not angry at a man who had stayed away too long. She was scornful of a man she believed had not wanted to come at all.

“You speak as though I chose the silence,” he said.

“I speak as though there was a silence. The choosing is your own affair.”

“I wrote to you.”

Her cup stopped halfway to the saucer.

“From the Peninsula,” he said. “From Spain, from Portugal, from a tent in the rain with my hands too cold to hold the quill. After Henry. After Waterloo. I wrote to you more often than I wrote to my own mother.”

“Then your mother and I have something in common, for I received as little as she could have wished.”

“You received nothing?”

“I received the pleasure of being asked, for four years, whether I had heard from you. I received the kindness of strangers who lowered their voices when I entered a room. I received a great deal, Your Grace. None of it in your hand.”

“That is not possible. Did you receive nothing at all? In four years and more, was there never one letter, never a line?”

For a moment the whole arrangement of her composure trembled, the way the surface of water trembles before it is broken, and he saw that the question had reached something, that whatever she had decided about him sat on top of a question of her own that she had never been able to answer.

“Now,” said Sir Marcus, “you must tell us of the crossing. Was the sea kind? My wife frets terribly about the Channel. She has convinced herself the whole of it is storms.”

It was done well. It was done by a man who had spent a lifetime steering wives and creditors and difficult guests away from the edges of things, and the question dropped neatly over the other question and smothered it, and Lady Carrow took it up with relief, and Melody’s face closed again like a fan folding, and the moment was gone past recovering. Cole answered about the sea. He said it had been calm. He remembered not a word of the crossing, and still he said it had been calm, and Lady Carrow was pleased, and the talk moved on to the safe country of weather and roads and the comfort of the inns. Beneath it the unasked question lay where it had fallen and went on bleeding quietly into the carpet that had been turned to hide its wear.

He stayed the correct quarter of an hour and not a minute past it. He spoke of the parish and the harvest and a wounded sergeant’s family he meant to see settled, and Sir Marcus thawed by a degree over the practical matters, and Lady Carrow watched him with a hope so utterly undisguised, it was painful to behold, and Melody said almost nothing and looked out of the window. Twice he caught her thumb pressing into the seam of her glove, hard, a small private violence, and twice he made himself look away.

When he rose to go she rose with him, because the forms required it, and walked with her parents to see him to the hall. Beale had the carriage round. The light had gone copper across the gravel.

“I hope,” Melody said, as he took up his hat, “that Greenstone finds Your Grace everything you deserve.”

It was beautifully said. It was the sort of thing one might embroider and hang on a wall. He turned it over and found the farewell folded inside it, neat as a letter sealed and addressed to someone leaving forever, and the discovery arrived in him with a cold he had not expected, colder than the Channel he claimed to remember.

“Miss Carrow,” he said, and bowed, because there was nothing else the moment would hold.

He climbed into the carriage. Beale shut the door and swung up, and the horses leaned into the traces, and Carrow House began to slide backward into its beeches. Cole did not look at the road. He looked at the window of the front room, where a curtain had been let fall, and he sat very forward in his seat, forward as a man sits when something is getting away from him, and turned the sentence over once more in the failing light. He had crossed an ocean and four years certain of one thing above all others, that whatever else had broken, she had been waiting. For the first time it occurred to him, in the plain unhurried way that the worst things occur to a man, that she might have stopped a long time ago.

Chapter 3

“Miss Carrow. How brave of you to come.”

Mrs Greer said it from behind a half-packed hamper, a length of grey flannel folded over her arm, and she said it warmly, the way one commends a child for mastering their tears during a painful trial.

“It required no bravery at all,” Melody said. “Only a bonnet, and I happened to own one.”

The parish room behind the church had been given over for the morning to the business of charity. Three long tables ran the length of it, heaped with flannel and worsted and tea twisted into paper screws, and a dozen women of the neighbourhood moved among them packing baskets for the soldiers’ families and the poorer tenants, now that the war was done and the men were coming home in the broken pieces the war returned them in. It was good work, and Melody had always thought it good work, and she had come partly because her mother had pressed her hand at breakfast and said, with terrible gentleness, that it would do her good to be among people, and partly because to stay away would have told the neighbourhood exactly what staying away meant.

She took up a stack of folded blankets and began counting the stitches along the hem of the topmost one, quietly, behind her eyes, the way she counted most things within reach. It steadied her, the counting, for the room was all voices and a roomful of voices left her short of breath, and a hem she could always find.

“We were speaking of His Grace,” said Lady Eversley.

She was a tall woman, the Marchioness, with a long pale face and the unhurried manner of a person who had never in her life waited for anything she wanted. She kept her eyes on the flannel while she spoke, smoothing it, never once turning them on Melody, as though Melody were a draught from a badly hung door that one acknowledged only by adjusting one’s shawl.

“His Grace has been generous to the parish already,” Lady Eversley went on. “The Hatcher family, I understand. The boy who lost his foot at Toulouse. A half pay for his services, and the cottage put right. It speaks well of him. A man in his position has so many calls upon him now. London will want him by the spring, and London is not patient.”

“London never is,” said Cassandra. She had come up on Melody’s other side with a basket balanced on her hip, lovely and industrious, the very portrait of a great lady stooping graciously to good works. “It is the great cruelty of rank, I have always thought. A man may begin his life as anything he wishes, but the title catches up with him, and then he must put away the things that suited the smaller man he was. It is not unkind of him. It is simply arithmetic.”

“I admire ladies who make peace with altered expectations,” Lady Eversley said, to the flannel. “It shows such strength of character.”

“I find strength is most admired,” Melody said, “by those who have no intention of ever needing it.”

Cassandra laughed, low and pleased. “You are too quick for us, Miss Carrow. You always were. I have said to Mama a dozen times, there is no one in the county half so clever, and what a pity cleverness is not a thing one can settle a girl with. A house, a name, a competence, those one can settle. Cleverness one must simply enjoy on its own.”

“You speak of me as though I were a difficult parcel the post could not deliver.”

“I speak of you as a friend.” Cassandra laid a length of worsted into her basket, smoothing it with two fingers. “Or near enough. We were girls together, were we not, in a manner of speaking. I remember when everyone said you would do very well. It is only that the world moves, Miss Carrow, and a wise woman moves with it rather than standing in the road insisting the carriage stop.”

“And an unwise one?”

“An unwise one waits. I have always thought waiting the saddest of the occupations. It asks so much and promises nothing, and it is so very hard to give up once one has begun.”

The stitches were small and even and there were a hundred of them. Melody had reached forty before she trusted herself to answer, and she kept her thumb pressed hard into the seam of her glove where the table hid her hand, and she made her voice the smooth, light, unbothered thing she had spent four years learning to make it.

“Then I am fortunate,” she said. “Most women must wait for a house to discover whether they can bear their own company. I have had the matter settled early and cheaply.”

“Miss Carrow.”

She had not heard him come in. He stood at the door of the parish room with his hat in his hand and the rain just beginning to spot the shoulders of his coat, and he had plainly been there long enough. His eyes went from Cassandra to Lady Eversley to the basket on Cassandra’s hip and then to Melody’s face, and whatever he read there made the line of his mouth change.

“Your Grace,” said Lady Eversley, and the whole table inclined.

“Lady Eversley. Lady Cassandra.” He bowed, correct to the inch, and then, as though it were the most natural redirection in the world, “You must forgive me. I have a tedious matter of parish accounts that wants settling before I ride out, and I require Miss Carrow’s opinion on it.”

A small silence opened in the room.

“A parish matter, Your Grace?” Cassandra’s brows rose a delicate degree. “Surely the vicar can attend to the matter.”

“The vicar is an excellent man who cannot add. I have learned to apply where the sense is, rather than where the office is.” He said it pleasantly, almost idly, and it took a half-second for the edge of it to surface, the suggestion, gentle as a glove laid on a table, that sense and decoration did not always keep the same company. “Miss Carrow has a head for figures that has embarrassed better men than the vicar. If you can spare her.”

Cassandra could hardly say she could not. To object would be to insist that Miss Carrow’s morning was too valuable for the duke’s accounts, and no one in the room believed Miss Carrow’s morning was valuable at all, which was rather the trap of it.

“By all means,” she said. “We would not keep her from anything so important.”

He drew Melody to a smaller table near the window where the parish ledger lay open, and held her chair, and sat across from her, and only when the room had returned to its packing and its murmur did she let herself look at him properly.

“You need not rescue me,” she said, low.

“I did not rescue you. I consulted you.”

“With remarkable timing.”

“I have always had a gift for arriving where I am inconvenient. You used to say so.” He turned the ledger towards her. “This part, at least, is true. The relief fund will not balance and I cannot find where it goes wrong. Beale insists it is the candles. I suspect the coal.”

She looked down at the columns out of pure reflex, and the figures took her the way figures always took her, cleanly, like cold water on a hot day, and her breath came easier the moment her mind had something with edges to hold.

“It is neither,” she said after a moment. “It is here. Someone has entered the Michaelmas quarter twice and the midsummer not at all. Your candles are blameless. Your clerk cannot read his own sevens.”

“Show me.”

She showed him the place on the page. He bent over it beside her, near enough that she could smell the rain on his coat and the clean ordinary scent of him underneath it. She kept her eyes on the ledger and her finger on the offending seven and pretended, with everything she had, that the nearness was a thing happening in some other room to some other woman.

“You used to correct my sums,” he said quietly. “On the long table at the Abbey, when Henry’s tutor set us problems to keep us out of the way. You were merciless. You marked my errors in a hand half the size of mine, so I should feel the smallness of them.”

“I did not correct your sums,” Melody said. “Your sums were generally adequate. I corrected your arrogance.”

“I have often thought the two were written in the same hand.”

“They were not. Your arrogance was much larger and took up the whole margin.” She turned the ledger a quarter-inch to catch the grey window light. “You always wanted to be right before you had finished being careful. It is a failing in a boy and a catastrophe in a general, and I have spent a number of years half expecting to read your name in the casualty lists under the heading of men who were certain.”

“And were you sorry not to find it there?”

The question came lightly, but it was not a light question, and she did not look up. She could not, just then, look up, because there was a danger in the small dry pleasure of being talked to like this, like a person whose opinion had weight, and she had built her composure out of being talked at and talked about and not, for a very long time, talked to.

“I did not read the lists,” she said, which was a falsehood, and they both let it be one. “The midsummer quarter. If your clerk will write it in legibly, the fund balances and the Hatchers have their coal. There. You did not require me at all. You required a man who can read his own writing.”

“I required exactly what I asked for.” He closed the ledger. “Thank you, Miss Carrow.”

The rain settled it before she could answer. It came against the high windows all at once, hard, a grey roar of it, and through the streaming glass the lane beyond the churchyard had already begun to shine and run, the water finding the ruts and filling them. The women began gathering shawls and calling for carriages. Outside, the gig and the few carriages that had brought them stood in a sodden line, and the drivers were getting the horses turned in the narrow space, which would take time.

Melody found her mother near the door, flushed and anxious, being handed up into the Carrow carriage by the maid, who had stayed back to manage Lady Carrow’s bad knee on the wet step and could not be in two places.

“Go, Sarah, see her settled,” Melody said. “I will wait under the porch. It is three steps.”

It was three steps, and the duke crossed them with her. The alternative was to let her stand alone in the driving rain while half the county watched from their carriage windows, and that he would not do. She understood that he would not do it, and resented the gallantry, and was grateful for it in roughly equal measure.

The church porch was deep and old and dry, stone worn shallow by three hundred years of christenings and burials, and it held them out of the worst of the wet with a yard of decent air between them and the lych-gate in full view of the lane. Propriety was satisfied, and nothing else was.

Thunder broke directly overhead, a flat enormous crack that came up through the stone.

She started involuntarily, quite unable to check the impulse in time, a small hard jolt through the shoulders, and her hand closed on the strings of her reticule, and she despised the sound, and detested yet more that he had witnessed her aversion to it.

“You used to count,” he said. “Between the flash and the sound. You told me once it gave the storm a size, and a form with a size could be argued with.”

“I was young.”

“You were frightened.”

“I was calculating distance. There is a difference. One is a weakness and the other is natural philosophy.”

“Of course.” His mouth did the thing it had always done, the small grave amusement that was worse than laughing because one could not call it out. “Terror by arithmetic. Forgive me. I had forgotten the rigour of your methods.”

She almost smiled, and turned her face to the rain so he should not see how near it came. The counting started despite her, out of an old habit her body remembered better than her pride did, one, and two, and three. On four the thunder came again, softer, going away over the hills, and the storm had a size, and the size could be borne.

“Four miles,” she said. “It is leaving.”

“You see. Argued with.” He was quiet a moment, watching the rain come off the porch roof in a bright unbroken sheet. “I am sorry for a great many things, Miss Carrow. I had thought to begin apologising in some order, but I find the order eludes me. Perhaps I might simply apologise as the occasions present themselves.”

“That sounds a tedious arrangement for us both.”

“It is the only honest one I have been able to devise. A man who apologises all at once is generally apologising for the wrong things, in my experience. He chooses the grand crimes and overlooks the small ones, and it is nearly always the small ones that did the damage.”

“And which are you guilty of? The grand or the small?”

“I begin to suspect both. I had assumed only the grand, which was its own kind of arrogance, as you would no doubt tell me.” He looked at her then, plainly, without the shield of his dryness. “You need not answer. I did not bring you under a church roof to extract a verdict from you in the rain.”

“You need not apologise for the rain, in any case. Even Your Grace cannot have arranged it.”

“No. Though I confess I am not entirely sorry it came.”

She did not answer that. The carriage came round at last, the maid’s face anxious at the window. He handed Melody down the three streaming steps with a hand beneath her elbow, and then his gloved hand closed briefly over her gloved fingers as she gained the door, steadying her against the wet stone. The touch lasted no longer than such a touch should and somehow a half-second longer than that, and the warmth of it came through two layers of kid as though there had been none at all.

She got herself into the carriage. She did not look back at him, which cost her something she was careful not to count.

But she looked, once, through the rain-blurred glass as they pulled away, and saw him standing bareheaded on the church step with the water darkening his shoulders and his hat forgotten in his hand. And beyond him, at the window of the Eversley carriage, drawn up close under the yew, Lady Cassandra Ridge sat watching the porch with a small still attention that had nothing graceful in it at all.