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“I mean it,” Hugo said. “You come before Edith. I’ve already scrapped one possible duchess whom I thought you wouldn’t like.”

Louisa raised an eyebrow.

“The Dowager Countess of Webbel.”

“You must be jesting!”

Her outraged shriek carried them out of the study and up the stairs, and he found himself grinning for the first time since leaving Ophelia’s house.

He would always feel a pang when he thought about Phee. But he was a grown man, who was long acquainted with disappointment—not to mention grief. He had a loving family, and that was the most important thing.

The only important thing, really.

Chapter Eleven

Ophelia woke the next morning suffused with melancholy. Perhaps she felt dour because she and Viola had been trapped in the house for weeks. Ever since the snowstorm, the weather had continued to be bitterly cold, with snow flurries blurring what sunshine made it through the London coal fog.

It had to be almost morning, but frost patterns scrolled over the window.

Hitching herself up against the pillows, she tried to decide why she felt so sad, and finally put it down to a combination of two things: She missed the Duke of Lindow, which was absurd, because she scarcely knew him. And secondly, there would soon be a baby in the house, but the baby wouldn’t be hers.

Maddie would be a marvelous mother; she had no doubt of that.

She sat with the second emotion for a while, surprised by it. It had never occurred to her until she sent the duke away that by not marrying again, she had consigned herself to a life with no more babies.

Viola was perfect, of course. She almost felt guilty thinking of another child. Before she met the duke, she had been completely content.

Her thoughts tangled around each other in a beastly fashion. By the time Viola came toddling down the corridor, Ophelia was desperate to leave her bedchamber and indeed, the house altogether.

“Viola and I shall go to Hyde Park today,” she told her maid later, over a breakfast tray. Her daughter was tucked beside her, and she squealed with happiness to hear it, buttered toast falling out of her mouth and landing on the linen sheet.

Ophelia brushed off the crumbs and smiled down at Viola. “You’d like to go to the park, wouldn’t you?”

“Go!” Viola said with great enthusiasm.

“The park is piled with snow,” her maid said. “Oh, madam, I know exactly what you should do: They were just saying in the kitchen that the Frost Fair opened last night!”

“On the Thames tideway?”

“Mr. Bisquet says as how there hasn’t been a Frost Fair for a quarter of a century,” her maid enthused. “You must take Miss Viola, madam. It might not happen again in her lifetime. My grandmother went to one as a girl, and she said that there were shops on the ice selling everything you can imagine, and carriages went to and fro just as if the ground were under their feet.”

“Excellent,” Ophelia said, pushing aside a sudden thought that Viola would be happy in a pack of children running and shrieking on the ice. Eight children, to be precise. “Please let Fiddle know that I intend to take Viola to the Frost Fair this morning.”

Her maid nodded, and hurried through the door to talk to the butler.

Viola was nestled against Ophelia’s side, busily making patterns in melted butter on the silver tray. “Come on, love,” Ophelia said. “I’ll show you the patterns that Jack Frost made on our windows last night.”

Out of bed, she propped her daughter on her hip and took her over to the window. “Aren’t they beautiful ferns?” she asked. Viola touched the cold windowpane and squealed.

The duke’s children would be mothered by Lady Woolhastings, who would never show them frost on a windowpane. Or take them to a Frost Fair, for that matter. Lady Woolhastings was the sort of woman who didn’t stir from her fireplace unless it was to enter her carriage and be transferred to another warm fireside.

Ophelia stared out the window while Viola used her plump fingertips to melt the ferny patterns. The duke’s eight children weren’t her problem.

After a while, her nursery maid, Betty, entered. “May I take Miss Viola to her bath, madam?”

Ophelia nodded. “Yes, thank you. Please put Viola in wool stockings and her warmest clothing. We are going to the Frost Fair.”

Viola shrieked when she realized that Betty had arrived to take her away, but Ophelia kissed her forehead. “Let me bathe and dress, poppet, and we’ll go somewhere marvelous.”