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It was nearly dark when they rose to go. At the door Rose caught Leonora’s hand, and her fingers went to her own collar. She unfastened the silver pin and pressed it into Leonora’s palm, closing her daughter’s fingers over it.

“I wore it so that you would know me if you ever saw me,” she whispered. “I didn’t think you would recognise it.”

“Papa gave it to you. I don’t recall when. But I know he gave it to you.”

“Yes.”

Leonora held the pin in her fist. Then, because nothing in her remembered how to be careful anymore, she stepped forward, and her mother’s arms came up around her at once. Rose had to reach up to hold her.

“I have you,” she said into Leonora’s shoulder, over and over. “I have you, I have you. Oh, look at you. Look how tall.”

“Mama.” It came out cracked. Leonora said it again into the damp wool, as if the word had been shut in a drawer for years and had to be taught to open.

In the carriage she turned the pin over and over in her fingers, and the only thing in her mind, she wanted to do next, was make her way to Glenhaven and tell Anthony.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“You are dropping your left…” William said. “…and you are breathing like a bellows. Either you have grown old since the last time we did this, or you are thinking about something.”

Anthony ducked a swing that would have taken his ear off and answered with a jab that landed on William’s shoulder. It was not a good jab. It was not even a decent one, and both of them knew it.

The sparring room at the club was long and high, with sawdust on the floor and tall windows that let in the thin gray light of late afternoon. It smelled of liniment and old leather. At the far end two older gentlemen were trading slow, companionable blows in their shirtsleeves, and neither had spared them so much as a glance. Anthony and William had stripped to their own shirts and pulled on the padded mufflers that hung on pegs by the door. For the better part of an hour they had been circling each other like a pair of boys. They had not done it in years. Not since the days when they were both young enough to believe a bloody nose was a fine way to settle an argument.

“I am not thinking about anything,” Anthony said.

“You are scowling at me.”

“That is my face.”

“It is your face when you are angry, and you’re not usually angry, so I know the difference.” William bounced on his toes, grinning.

“Hit me, William.”

“No, I think I shall wait.” William lowered his mufflers and studied him. “Something is bothering you, and it would not be fair to knock the lights out of you while your mind is elsewhere. I should win, and you would only blame the distraction for it.”

“You would not win.”

“Of course I would. I am merely being a gentleman about it.”

“You have never been a gentleman about this.”

“A fair point, well made. Do you know, I believe that is the first thing you have said all afternoon that sounded like you.” William darted in, tapped Anthony lightly on the ribs, and danced out of reach again. “That is for pining.”

“I am not pining.”

“You are moping, then. You are doing a magnificent job of it.”

Anthony swung. William leaned back out of range with an ease that was frankly insulting, and Anthony felt the heat climb his neck. His arms were heavy. His legs were heavy. He had slept in snatches for nights, and when he did sleep he dreamed of a long road with no one on it.

“Enough,” he said.

“Already? We have hardly begun.”

“I said enough.” He dropped his hands. His chest was heaving, and his shirt clung to his back. “You are correct, I am too distracted.”

“What is distracting you?”

Anthony let out a sigh. “I put men on her. To watch her.”