Please give my very best to your grandmother, a woman whose sense and wisdom impressed me almost as much as her swift right hand no doubt impressed your fundament. Your brothers have promised to spread all manner of gossip regarding the goings on here at Clover Down, though their account of your life in Town is suspiciously dull and devoid of fraternal barbs. You must commend them for their loyalty when next you interrogate them.

I hope you fare well, dear Husband, though I hesitate to further burden you with excessive correspondence when I know how great your distaste for same can be.

Your wife,

Leah Haddonfield

She read and reread the note, not sure what she wanted it to say or not say. In the end, she added a four-word postscript in the spirit of gracious honesty Nick had set in his own epistles. She didn’t know if the addition was a kindness or not, didn’t know if Nick would appreciate or resent it. She just knew that what she wrote was the truth.

Ethan watched as Nick tore Leah’s note open and scanned its contents. His expression was fierce, then interrupted by a bark of laughter, then fierce again. Before he folded up the note, his brows rose in surprise, then his face took on a pained, thoughtful expression as he refolded the note.

“She says she misses me.” Nick wore a puzzled expression as he regarded the epistle. “In a postscript. She didn’t mean to be anything save honest, Ethan, but those four words—I do miss you—make me feel like an ass.”

“You are not an ass, exactly.” Ethan crossed Nick’s study to the decanter and lifted the stopper with a questioning gesture. “You are navigating uncharted waters and doing the best you can, with questionable results.”

“Help yourself,” Nick said. “None for me. I am off to grovel before Della.”

“Groveling won’t help,” Ethan said, pouring himself a single finger of liquor. “She doesn’t understand what you’re about Nick, separating from your wife not a month after the wedding, especially when it’s clear you and Leah adore each other.”

“But that’s the problem, Ethan.” Nick’s eyes were bleak. “I do adore her, with all the love and lust in me, which is considerable. Sooner or later…”

“Sooner or later you would have children,” Ethan finished for him softly. “And like any other pair of loving parents, you would cope, Nick. You would.”

“We would, for as long as the Lord granted us breath and sense to cope, but then what, Ethan?”

“You don’t think the family would help? Little Della is fifteen years your junior, and she’d be aunt to any offspring of yours. You need to rethink this, Nick, and before Leah gives up on you.”

Nick merely shook his head, a determined man whose commitment to a particular course would not falter because that course was difficult, lonely, and costly.

“Go see Nana,” Ethan said gently. “Maybe she can talk some sense into you.”

Lady Della was not home to Nick, which hurt more than it should. She was given to her fits and starts, but not cruel, so Nick decided to test her resolve by going around back to the kitchen and invading by stealth. He found his quarry enjoying a cup of tea with old Magda.

“You!” Della snorted at him from her perch at the worktable. “You are not welcome until you behave as a proper earl to your countess.”

“Della…” Magda’s voice bore the reproach of somebody who’d known Della in girlhood.

Della turned her glower on the older woman. “Don’t you take up for this scamp, Magda Spencer. I held my tongue while he swived the indecent half of London for years on end, and I held my tongue when his misguided papa let him hare off to Sussex, and I held my tongue when he married that poor girl as if he were some knight on a white charger, and I held my tongue—”

“So hold your tongue now,” Magda interrupted her, rising and gesturing for Nick to sit. “The boy needs understanding now, and you are the only one who can provide it. Who else will he talk to? Those brothers of his? His sisters? His married friends are all over the Home Counties, and their wives likely to skewer them for taking his part. Pour the boy some tea, and let him say his piece. And you”—Magda jerked her chin at Nick—“I told you to sit and let your grandmother pour you some tea.”

Nick sat. Della smirked—and poured him tea.

“So wiggle your handsome way out of this one, Nicholas.” Della pushed his tea at him. “You leave a wonderful woman to rusticate less than a month after the wedding, your father is barely cold in the ground, and you seek to resume your wenching already?”

“My wen—” Nick’s eyebrows rose then crashed down as he stared at the ridiculously delicate teacup in his hand. “I can say with all certainty Leah has ruined me for wenching, Nana. Of that you may be sure.”

“The bordellos should hang their windows with black crepe,” Della retorted. “So what are you about, Nicholas, to abandon your wife to gossip and scorn this way? Don’t you think she had enough of that with young Frommer? Or with her own father?”

“The gossip will eventually die down, for God’s sake, but what if we have children, Nana? What in God’s name will we do if we have children?”

He sat forward abruptly, his face in his hands, knowing Della and Magda exchanged a look of concern over his bent head.

“If you have children,” Della said carefully, “you will love them.”

“God in heaven, Nana.” Nick rose abruptly to his full height. “What if my heir turns out like Leonie? She can barely read, she must print her letters, she trusts everyone who smiles at her, she wants me to read fairy tales to her when I visit, and she will be playing with dolls until I’m an old man. Bad enough my children will be taunted for their height and size. Bad enough they’ll be assumed to be stupid oafs good only for hitching to the plow, bad enough they’ll never feel they fit in…”

He spun on his heel and went to the window, shoulders heaving with emotion before gathering his composure and continuing more softly.

“I cannot consign Leah to mothering a brood of oversized idiots,” Nick informed them. “Worse by far, I will not consign my children to the ridicule and whispering and cruelties that would have been Leonie’s lot had I not intervened. Bastards may enjoy a certain anonymity, but not the heirs of a belted earl. Though you may cease your tantrums and lectures, for I have at least resolved to explain to Leah why ours must be a chaste marriage. She deserves the truth, and I deserve her undying enmity for not having shared it with her sooner.”

He regarded two old women who’d loved him since he’d first drawn breath, both looking at him with such… such compassion. Who would regard his children like this when he was dead and buried? Leah, perhaps. His entire future hung on that possibility.

“I’m going to explain to Leah what we’d risk were we to have children, and if she leaves me once and for all, I will accept her decision.”

Silence. Dumbstruck, dismayed silence, and Nick realized he’d shouted at his grandmother and his old nurse.

“My apologies, ladies.” He bowed at the waist. “You can appreciate my concern.”

Magda’s lips were pursed in thought, but Della rose and pushed Nick back toward the table.

“Sit, you,” she said, her tone commanding. “You are under a misapprehension I would relieve you of. Magda?”

Magda nodded and slid down beside Della.

“You believe Leonie’s limitations are a function of her parentage,” Della began briskly. “They are not.”

“But Papa had a brother…”

“Who fell from his damned horse as a lad,” Della interrupted. “There are many traits that run in the Haddonfield and Harper lines, Nick, but madness and mental impairment are not among them.”

“But then, how did Leonie come to be as she is?” Nick asked, a world of miserable bewilderment in his voice. “She has been like she is since I’ve known her.”