Mr. Parsons bowed. “My lady.” He said to Luc, “Information has arrived from Mr. Firth—”

“Excellent, excellent.” Luc started toward the door. He gestured for her to follow. “My dear, this fellow’s dedication to the estate is untiring, but in good conscience I cannot keep him up past his bedtime doing business. I will see to this swiftly. Would you excuse us?”

His hand was on the door. He was dismissing her.

“Of course,” she only said, her palms cold but cheeks aflame with shame. Considering all, she had been astoundingly foolish. He wanted her in his bed; she had known since their first encounter that he wanted her like that. And their marriage must be validated by the Church of England. She was a foolish girl to dream for the first time in her life of a tender proposal and a fairy-tale marriage. She had been wrong to read what had just happened as anything but business. Nothing had changed. He would not give her his confidences.

“Good night, Mr. Parsons,” she said, and left the chamber without revealing the tempest inside her.

THE CANDLES WERE guttering when Luc opened the door between their bedchambers. He came to her bed, pushed aside the gauze curtain, and shrugged out of his dressing gown. Then he took her hand and made her stand before him, her feet buried in the thick rug. First he removed the lace cap on her head, then the pins in her hair, then her delicate nightrail.

He touched her everywhere the glow from the embers of the fire touched her skin, and then everywhere it did not. He made her need him until she wished for nothing else but him, then he thrust inside her and made her need him more.

When it was over and she lay beside him, her body soft and damp with satisfaction, she watched the shadows flicker over his body glistening with sweat, and she touched him. With her touch she silently asked him for more.

He turned her onto her belly, pulled her hips off the bed and, with great skill and breathless force, gave her quite a lot more. She pressed her palms into the headboard and cried out his name again and again as she shattered.

He kissed her shoulders, her back, and the curve of her buttock as she sank into the mattress and into sleep. He left her without having spoken a word.

In the morning the maid brought breakfast. Arabella snuggled into the covers with her cup of chocolate and the glorious soreness of her body, and took up the note on the breakfast tray. The stationery bore the embossed crest of the Comte de Rallis. With a smile—then with sinking breaths—she read.

Duchess,

I am off to town. I will return to retrieve you in three weeks.

L.

Arabella had only cried when the man she did not yet realize she loved was dying, then again when she was grieving over him. Such a little thing as virtual estrangement and abandonment could not now rouse her tears, even after he had used her in a manner in which a man might use a harlot, and even if her heart felt as though it had been wrung out with the laundry. She had allowed him that use of her body, willingly and eagerly. And she had again unguardedly allowed her heart to hope. The emptiness inside her now was her own fault.

She rose from bed, dressed, and went to find her sisters. In the corridor outside her door a liveried footman sat in a chair. He was a large young man with sun-bright ringlets, tanned skin, and somber eyes. She recognized him, but not from the downstairs staff. He was from the Retribution and he had accompanied her and Mr. Miles to Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux.

He stood and bowed. “Yer grace.”

In the breakfast parlor she found her sisters. When she left them sometime later, the curly-headed footman was waiting outside the parlor.

He followed her from place to place for the remainder of the day.

“Bella,” Ravenna said as they walked in the garden, “did you know there are two footmen following us?”

“One is in fact ahead and one is following,” Eleanor corrected.

“I think I would much rather be a poor animal doctor than a duchess after all, never mind your spectacular stables,” Ravenna said with a glimmer in her dark eyes. “To be watched all the time would be positively unnerving.”

“I don’t think they are watching her, Venna,” Eleanor said. “I think they are protecting her.”

Arabella was not quite so certain. Luc wanted an heir, and she had nearly run away once before. But long before that, aboard his ship, he had assigned the cabin boy to keep a watch on her, so that he would always know where she was, he had said.

She chewed on the inside of her lip. “Ellie, Venna?”

Her sisters shifted their attention from her liveried watchdogs to her.

“I am going to London.”

SHE DID NOT travel to town immediately. A day visiting the tenants across the expanse of Combe became two, then three, then a sennight. The farmers’ wives served her weak tea and sugarless biscuits and warily welcomed the baskets of fruit, bread, cheese, and nuts that she brought from the great house.

She delayed her journey again, and the following week visited the same houses, carrying sweets for the children, honey, and table linens. Mrs. Pickett looked on with disapproval, claiming that farmers did not need fine lace and embroidery. But the farmers’ wives warmed to Arabella, and she no longer needed to guess at their emotions to know their thoughts; they began to tell her.

During the duchess’s long absence from Combe, they said, her brother had come in her stead. On occasion he preached in the parish church.

“You’ve never seen a finer gentleman, milady, or heard such sermons as the bishop’s,” Mrs. Lambkin said, pouring tea into cracked cups. “He talked all about giving to the Lord the best of what He gives us.” Her gaze slipped to her son sweeping the hearthstone. “In thanks, you see,” she added, “so He’ll know we’re not hard-hearted and send us famine again.” Her hands quivered on the pot. The boy’s lean jaw was tight. “We can’t hope to be given bounty when we won’t first give to the Lord, can we now, mum?” Her eyes lifted to Arabella’s briefly then slipped to the burly footman-guard standing just inside the door, then out the window to the other footman leaning against a fence. The woman’s eyes were shadowed with fear.

Arabella tracked down Combe’s land steward at the mill. She made conversation about the estate and he was proud to speak at length about it. But she found could not ask him outright the question she had foolishly never thought to ask her husband; she would not shame herself or Luc in that manner.

At the house, no one had much to say about Christos Westfall. The elder servants remembered him as a beautiful little boy overly fond of drawing and prone to periods of intense thoughtfulness. All assumed that, grown, he had left England for his mother’s country, never to return.

RAVENNA ANNOUNCED THAT she must be off to check on the nannies and their pets before she joined her sisters again in London for the wedding.

“I will send an invitation to your employers,” Arabella said.

“Then they will happily attend. They adore spectacles.”

“I should be leaving as well, Bella,” Eleanor said. “Papa writes that he anticipates my return daily. I will ask him if he will travel to London with me for the wedding.”

“He will no doubt be obliged to remain with his parish. And I am certain he will be unhappy to see you go again.”

“He will.” Eleanor embraced her and kissed her on both cheeks. “But wherever you are, there too I shall be.”

She stood on the drive and waved at the coach that bore her sisters away.

“Joseph,” she said to her guard as she walked into the house. He was a giant of a young man, with arms the size of tree branches and legs like the trunks. “Tell your partner Claude that we will leave for London tomorrow.”

He bowed. “Yes, yer grace.”