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“You have been hiding. It is not at all the same thing.”

Leonora closed the book over her finger and finally looked at her. Lady Byron wore her gray morning gown with the high collar, and her hair was pinned as severely as it had been every day of Leonora’s childhood. Her face gave nothing away. It never had. That was what made the small crease between her brows so hard to ignore.

“I am not hiding,” Leonora said. “I am tired, that is all. It has been a trying month.”

“You have said that every morning since you came home. I could recite it in my sleep.” Lady Byron folded her hands. “You are gloomy, Leonora. You sit at windows. The paints you begged me for last winter have not left their box, and yesterday I found you standing in the hall for a full minute looking at nothing at all. You are not a girl who looks at nothing.”

“I was thinking.”

“With the corners of your mouth turned down, yes, I saw.” Lady Byron tilted her head. “I will tell you what else I have noticed, since we are being honest. You have been to Glenhaven twice since you returned. I asked the coachman, so you may spare yourself the effort of denying it. Both times you went before noon, and both times, I am told, the Duke had left the house an hour earlier.”

Leonora’s fingers tightened on the book. “How would the coachman know when the Duke left? How did you even find that out?”

“I have my ways.”

“I was there to briefly see Her Grace,” she said evenly. “The engagement will end, and when it does, I should like the house to be used to doing without me. I am keeping a sensible distance. That is all it is.”

“A sensible distance?”

“Yes.”

“From the house?”

Leonora opened her mouth and found nothing waiting in it. Lady Byron let the silence stand, then smoothed a crease from her sleeve.

“I am not going to press you. I have pressed you all your life, and I notice it has only made you better at keeping secrets.” One corner of her mouth moved. It was gone before it could become anything. “I have come to say something else, and I am not certain how to say it, so you will have to forgive me if I do it badly.”

It was not a sentence Leonora had ever heard from her. She set the book aside.

“I am not good at this,” Lady Byron said. “I was not made for it. When your fathers died and the three of you were left on my hands, I knew how to feed you and keep you from harm. I did not know how to… comfort anyone. I decided it was safer to be strict, because strictness at least had rules.” She looked toward the window. “I told myself that if I kept you from London and from men, I would keep you from being hurt. As you know… and as your sisters have proven, I was wrong about nearly all of it.”

“You were trying to protect us.”

“I was trying to protect myself from losing you. It is not the same, though I took nearly twenty years to learn it.” She turned back. “I will say it plainly because I will not manage it twice. You girls have changed me. I am not the woman who raised you, and you know it as well as I do.”

Leonora hesitated, then gave the only honest answer she had. “Yes. You are different. You laugh now. Seraphina wrote that you taught Alice to play spillikins and cheated.”

“I did not cheat. I was merely better at it.” The crease between her brows had eased. “I like to think it is because of the three of you. In all that noise, you opened a door in me that I had thought was nailed shut.”

“Lady Byron...” Leonora’s throat tightened unexpectedly. “I am glad.”

“I am not telling you so that you will be glad. I am telling you because it is too late for me.” She said it without self-pity, the way she might have remarked on the weather. “Whatever might have come to me in that way has gone by, and I have made my peace with it. But Euphemia found what she wanted. Seraphina found what she wanted even though she was not looking. I see no reason that luck should have stopped at two daughters.”

“That is not true. You are not too old for anything. You could...”

“That is not the point.” Lady Byron lifted a hand, and Leonora stopped. “The point is the pattern. Three girls raised under one roof, each as stubborn as the others. Two have been given happy endings with dukes, if you please, and I never would have chosen dukes. You three were tied together since the day you met. Why should your fortunes not be tied as well?”

“You make it sound as if it were decided in advance.”

“I am an old woman who has stopped being surprised.” She paused. “Do not look at me like that. I can see you want to ask.”

Leonora wanted to ask a great many things, and she chose the kindest one. “If all three of us marry and leave... what will become of you? You will be alone.”

“I will not.”

“Lady Byron.”

“I will not be alone, Leonora.” The words came gently, with none of the usual crispness. “I will still have the three of you. I have Alice, who thinks I am a great and terrible dragon and follows me about for that reason. I have Cordelia and Georgianna, who have just begun calling me Grandmama and do not appear to be taking suggestions. I have a new baby that Euphemia lets me hold and look after. I never imagined any of it. I thought there would be the three of you, and then there would be me, and I would die in a chair beside the fire without having known any of what other women know. Instead I have a house that is loud. I am finding there are things I like that I did not know I could.”