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She had grown too fond of this man.

She had grown questionable feelings for him.

Real ones, the kind her sisters had each tried, at various points over the years, to warn her she might one day have for someone, and the exact kind she had always privately and rather smugly assumed would never happen to her, certainly never for a man she had an agreement with that was purely for convenience.

It was appalling, really, how simply and how quietly it had happened to her. There had been no single moment she could point to afterward and properly blame for it, no one clear turn she could undo if she only tried hard enough.

Only a slow accumulation of small, unremarkable things, none of which was ever supposed to mean anything at all. None of it was ever supposed to have led her here, sitting in the dark with her hand folded inside his, her heart behaving in a manner she scarcely recognized as her own.

She needed to stop this, and soon, before it went any further than a handful of private, foolish feelings she could still, with enough deliberate effort, manage to keep entirely to herself. She needed, more than that, to speak with her sisters properly, both of whom had fallen into exactly this sort of thing with exactly this sort of unwanted certainty themselves and had somehow come out the other side of it married and plainly happy rather than ruined by any of it as she had always assumed such a thing must end.

They would know, surely, how a person was meant to manage this. How to feel something so thoroughly inconvenient, so entirely beside the point of the arrangement she had actually agreed to, and still keep a sensible enough head about the whole affair that it never once became more than it already dangerously was.

She did not pull her hand away. She told herself, firmly, that this was only because Marian would certainly notice if she did, and ask questions she had no wish to answer in front of a child who repeated everything she heard to anyone within earshot.

“…And that,” Marian finished at last. “…is precisely why I will never, under any circumstances whatsoever, agree to play hide and seek in an attic.”

“That is a good lesson, grandmother,” Anthony said, and Leonora felt, rather than properly saw, the smile he aimed at her alone in the dark, his hand still folded warm around hers.

Alice, entirely unbothered by any of it, had already turned her attention to the low, dwindling fire, declaring that it was in sore need of another log before anyone could possibly tell another story, and Marian rose to see to it, leaving Leonora and Anthony sitting together in the dark for one more private moment before the rest of the evening carried on around them.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Icannot thank you enough for this, Alderney.” Anthony stood near the window of the drawing room, turning briefly from the view of the square outside to address his host directly. “I know it is an unusual request.”

“Unusual, perhaps. Unwelcome, never.” Viscount Alderney waved his hand in the air, as if waving the matter away. “Your father did a great many kindnesses for mine, back when they were both young. I am glad to return even a fraction of them to his son, especially when the son in question seems to be making rather better use of his position than most men of our acquaintance manage.” He said it with a small, approving nod. “I hear good things of you these days, Glenhaven. Whatever you are doing differently, it suits you.”

Anthony inclined his head, uncertain how to answer that without saying more than he intended to. “I am obliged to you, regardless.”

“Think nothing further of it.” Alderney moved toward the door, pausing with his hand on the frame. “Hester will be in shortly. She has been with this household longer than I have, if you can credit it, and she remembers everything that ever happened in it, whether anyone wished her to or not. If anyone can help you, it will be her.” He offered a final nod and let himself out, leaving Anthony alone in the quiet room.

He did not sit. There was a chair angled invitingly toward the fire, and he looked at it once and dismissed it just as quickly, standing near the tall window that overlooked the square, restless.

He was close now. That was the thought that kept circling back no matter how many times he tried to set it aside and attend properly to whatever task was in front of him. Close to finally giving Leonora the answers she had asked him for, close to closing the particular wound her mother’s death had torn open and left raw.

It was, he had come to realize over the course of the past several days, the only thought that reliably made him happy anymore, and he had stopped being surprised by how thoroughly it had crowded out every other concern he was meant to be attending to. His steward had asked him twice this week alone whether he intended to review the quarter’s accounts at some point, twice he had said yes and then promptly forgotten the promise entirely, his mind sliding back, every single time, to Leonora.

She had been trying so hard to seem well. He had watched her do it for days now, returning to her duties beside Marian as though nothing at all had changed, taking on Alice for the weekend and being cheerful about it, filling every available hour with some task or other so there would be no quiet moment left over in which grief could properly catch up to her. He understood exactly what she was doing, because he recognized the maneuver, having spent a fair portion of his own life performing some version of it himself.

She was not well. She was simply very good at looking as though she were, and the longer he watched her manage it, the more it mattered to him, more than almost anything else currently claiming his attention, that she should not have to keep managing it alone.

He cared for her happiness. He had stopped pretending otherwise to himself sometime in the last week, though he’d not yet said as much aloud to a single living soul, not even to Marian, who would undoubtedly have opinions about it if given the smallest opening.

Her happiness was, at present, the thing he wanted most in the world, more than the shipping contracts waiting on his desk, more than whatever his own father had ever managed to want for anyone besides himself.

First, closure. Rose’s fate, settled plainly and without any further doubt attached to it, so that Leonora could finally stop thinking about the same unanswered questions over and over in her own mind.

After that, something more. He had already begun thinking ideas, half formed and probably impractical, a journey somewhere she had never been, the seaside perhaps, or that stretch of countryside near his own estate she had once mentioned admiring from a carriage window without quite realizing she had said it aloud. He did not know yet which of them would suit her, only that he intended to find out, and that finding out had become a project he took a great deal more pleasure in.

He had, at some point, stopped asking himself why. Why he did any of it, why her happiness had become the measure against which he weighed the rest of his days, why he had never once felt anything resembling this urgency on anyone else’s behalf in the whole of his adult life.

He had thought about the question over a handful of times and found no answer that satisfied him. Finally, with something like relief, decided there was no practical use in continuing to ask it. It was simply true. His heart and his head had both arrived, independently, at the same conclusion, and arguing with either of them any further struck him as a waste of time he would rather spend elsewhere.

The door opened before he had settled on anything further, and a woman entered, somewhere past sixty by the look of her, gray haired and sharp eyed despite her years, wiping her hands briefly on her apron before she dropped into a small curtsy.

“Your Grace. I am Hester. His lordship said you had questions for me.”

Anthony had hired two separate men to look into Rose’s past, neither one aware the other existed, so that their findings could not simply echo each other. Both had been given the same starting point: her name, and the rough years she had vanished from view. Within a few days of each other, both men had come back with the same answer. This house, Alderney’s house, was the last place Rose had worked before she disappeared from service entirely.