Sara tore open the letter, scanned it, and handed it to Polly.

Polly frowned. “It’s pretty much the same. Greetings, he’s been remiss, would we consider a visit, how fares Allie… I don’t detect a threat in this, Sara.”

“He has those portraits, Polly.” Sara sat at the table, feeling as if her little weekend in Portsmouth happened to someone else a century ago. Somebody whom God liked and spared a little joy every once in a while—a lot of joy, in fact, and a generous portion of pleasure, too.

“He’s had years to use those portraits,” Polly replied. “He doesn’t mention them, and he may not understand what he has in them. Drink your tea, and where’s Beckman?”

“I expect he’s anywhere I’m not.” Sara did not want tea. She did not want to dissemble before her sister, either. “I think I hurt his feelings, Polly. I know I did, in fact.”

Polly was silent for a moment, stirring a fat helping of sugar into her own cup of tea.

“I used to be a nice person.” Polly sat, pushed Sara’s teacup closer, and covered Sara’s hand with her own. “Now I’m old and mean, and so I say: Better his feelings hurt than yours, Sara.”

“You’re still a nice sister.” Sara smiled wanly and sipped her tea.

“The prodigal returns.” North’s voice came not from the pool itself but from the shadows to Beck’s left, where the boulders were gathered along the water’s edge. “All that wagon travel put you in need of a soak?”

“Greetings, North.” Beck sat and tugged at his boots. “And yes, I am in need of a soak.”

“Maybe you didn’t get much rest this weekend,” North mused, “what with all that procurement to tend to?”

Beck threw his boot in the general direction of North’s voice.

“Cranky,” North observed, “but you’ve good aim. I take it Mrs. Hunt did not haul your ashes, Haddonfield, which must have come as a blow to your considerable charm.”

Beck fired the second boot at a higher velocity then nigh strangled himself getting his neckcloth undone. “She hauled everything I own or ever coveted, right out to the dung heap.”

“She’s trifling with an upright young sprout like you?” North put a world of dismay into his voice, and Beck was glad no lethal weapons were at hand.

“Stubble it, North.” Beck heard something rip as he yanked his shirt over his head. “I bloody proposed to the woman, and she bloody laughed and told me I mustn’t tease about such things on an empty stomach.”

Even North was temporarily silenced by that admission.

“You proposed?” Then, “You proposed marriage? The ‘do you, Beckman, take this woman…’ sort of marriage? To Sara?”

“That general idea.” Beck stood naked, fists clenched at his side, wanting to break something—or someone. North would have served nicely, except his back was already fragile. Then too, Beck, as usual, had no one else to talk to.

“Fast work, if you ask me.” North ambled out of the shadows, in a state of complete undress. “Maybe a little too fast. Shall we?”

“Why weren’t you already soaking?” Beck asked as he waded in. The heat felt good, but it made him realize how tense he was, how primed for violence.

“I come here to think.” North carefully negotiated the bank, and Beck could see well enough to realize the man was still moving gingerly. Very gingerly.

“You idiot,” Beck chided, “what did you do while I was gone? Patch up the west boundary wall by yourself?”

“You’ll see I did not when you ride out tomorrow and make sure the entire estate is exactly as you left it on Friday.” North eased one large foot into the water. “Now about this premature proposal you bungled so egregiously. I take it your manly charms were in adequate evidence to impress the lady?”

Beck had to smile at North in an avuncular role, or perhaps at the fool who’d heed North’s advice. “You are going to diagnose my love life?”

“Somebody had better. Sara is a sensible lady, and sensible women don’t turn down proposals from toothsome lordly pups like yourself.”

“What are you?” Beck found the underwater ledge and lowered himself to it. “Five years my senior? Three?”

“I am millennia your senior in experience, as is evident by my ability to perceive you rushed your fences.”

“I married a woman I knew far less well than I do Sara.” Which did not refute North’s point.

“And how did that turn out?” North asked, finding a seat several feet away, where the water would not be as hot.

“Disastrously, for her, anyway.” And for him. In some ways, it turned out worse for him.

“Maybe Sara doesn’t think she merits a man of your station. I, for one, am hesitant to ask any woman to shackle herself to me, and you must allow I am not the worst creature to crawl across Creation.”

“Not quite. Our womenfolk like you, so you must have some endearing qualities. In deference to your sensitive nature, I will refrain from enumerating same, but minding your sore back is not one of them.”

“A sore back will heal. A botched proposal will lie there, dying by inches, unless you revive it.”

“Or put it out of its misery. I cannot fathom why she turned me down, North. I am a toothsome lordly pup, for all she knows, and the next thing to an earl’s heir.”

North shifted to sink lower in the water. “You want to see a woman fidget, you ask her a question beginning with ‘Why did you…?’ Shuts her up faster than a loud fart in the churchyard.”

He fell silent, while Beck began to think rather than simply rant.

“I’m wealthy,” he said. “Not just comfortable, North. I’ve filthy, leaking pots of it, more than I could spend on three wives.”

“And the great good taste to keep this vulgar state of affairs to yourself.” North grunted as he shifted under the water.

“I’m not ugly.”

North sighed, as if finding a more comfortable position—or tolerating another man’s brokenhearted maundering. “I will allow you your petty conceits regarding your appearance, which is passable.”

“I have all my teeth.”

No comment.

“She’s says I’m kind, and I get on with Allie.”

“Allie is a tolerant little soul. Witness: she likes me.”

“Adores you and your horse, at least one of whom is passably good-looking.”

“A female of discernment.”

Beck swirled his hand through the steam rising from the pool. “I wonder if it’s not so much that Sara won’t marry me, and more that something impedes her from choosing freely.”

North was silent for a few heartbeats. “Haddonfield, you have your moments of inspiration, few though they are in number. Did you bring your nancy soap?”

“My future is imperiled here, and you want to scrub up?”

“I fail to see how your love life, as you call some pretensions toward romping, will benefit by my eschewing a good wash. I can be both sympathetic and clean. How much do you know about Sara’s first marriage?”

“I know Reynard was a cad who exploited her shamelessly,” Beck said slowly. “He was selfish in all the ways that matter—every one of them—and she hasn’t said it, but she was relieved when he died.” For which, Beck of all people did not blame her.

North shrugged in the water, causing concentric ripples to fan away from him. “Maybe she’s just reluctant to remarry. Were you going to get that soap?”

Beck rose in a shower of steaming water. “You don’t have to dissemble with me, your enfeebled lordship. I watched you try to navigate that bank.”

“I don’t want to go sailing onto my arse when I’m naked as the day I was born, and have only you to lend assistance.”

“Idiot.” Beck slogged to the bank, retrieved the soap, and lobbed it across the water at North. “Your back is killing you, and you are afraid if you fall, you won’t get up.”

There was silence from the water, perhaps because North was as appalled as Beckman himself at this bald pronouncement.

“Not killing me, precisely.” North put the soap to use on one muscular arm. “But muttering threats to that effect. I might have overdone it a bit riding into town on Saturday.”