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The only sign of life was the servants’ entrance to the left. As Mayne watched, a greengrocer dropped off an order of cabbages. He nodded to the footman standing beside his carriage. “We’ll wait here a moment or two, Bantam.” If he wasn’t mistaken about the duchess’s character, she would dispatch of business matters at once.

Indeed. A footman, smartly dressed in Girton livery, emerged from a side door. Mayne smiled to himself. The footman passed a note to a groomsman; Mayne smiled again. The groomsman trotted sedately down the street on a placid old horse, and never noticed that he was being followed at some distance by a coach with an insignia on the door. Mayne smiled and smiled. He only stopped smiling when he realized precisely where the note was delivered.

What in the devil’s name was Helene Godwin doing at the Godwin residence? Why was she staying with her oh-so-estranged husband, to be blunt about it?

Twenty-six

Darling Girl

Helene’s stomach gave an odd lurch when she walked into the library before dinner and saw Lina sitting next to Rees on a small settee. Her shock was likely due to revisiting her youthful infatuation with her husband. All the better reason to forget she ever felt the emotion in the first place. It had only taken an hour after they returned from the picnic for Helene to remember that her husband had a beautiful young woman sleeping in the room next to his.

“Champagne, my lady?” Leke said now, bowing. Helene gave him a nod of assent.

“I should like to go to Vauxhall tomorrow night,” she announced in a high voice that almost cracked like shattered glass. “It’s the only place I can think of where I can go without being recognized, and I simply cannot stay in this house day and night.”

Lina looked up, startled, and Helene was gratified to see her spring further from Rees’s side. It was a sad thing indeed when one was grateful for the good manners of one’s husband’s mistress.

“Don’t have the time,” Rees growled.

“Make it,” Helene said, with a tone of pure steel in her voice.

Rees looked up from his papers. “What do you think I should put at the end of Act Two, when Captain Charteris has discovered the Princess in the Quaker village? All Fen has noted is ‘musical number.’ ”

“Some sort of dance, I expect,” Helene said, sipping her champagne. It was deliciously cold and icy, and made her feel almost as if she would sneeze.

“I could do a polonaise,” Rees muttered.

“I’d do a waltz,” Helene said. She would have wandered over to look at his paper, but she wasn’t going anywhere near the couch, even if Miss McKenna was a frigid distance from Rees’s hip now.

“A waltz? I have never written a waltz. Weren’t you working on one last summer?”

That was the odd thing about Rees. He never forgot a passing word said about music, although he had never remembered her birthday, not even during the first year of their marriage.

“Yes,” Helene said, finishing her champagne.

“How do you think the audience would take it?” he said, frowning. “I have quite a prudish contingent going to the Theatre Royal.”

“When did you ever worry about shocking someone?” Helene asked. Rees’s brother was taking Lina away to look out the far windows. That was diplomatic.

“You know I’m conventional. When it comes to music,” Rees replied with a lopsided smile. Helene’s heart skipped and steadied again. “Will you play me your waltz?”

“There’s no piano here,” she pointed out. And what if he didn’t like it?

But Rees was standing up. “We’ll go in the music room. Tom and Lina can dance for us. Tom!” he called. “You know how to waltz, don’t you?”

His brother turned around. “No, I haven’t the faintest idea how to waltz. The sight of their vicar trotting around the dance floor would likely give my parishioners apoplectic fits.”

“My father used to dance once in a while with my mother,” Lina said to him with a giggle. “Though not a waltz, of course!”

“Too fast for a vicar, isn’t it?” Rees said with satisfaction. “I can’t think why I didn’t write a waltz before. Come on, Helene. Lina, you show Tom the steps. It’s easy enough and there isn’t a single member of your godly flock here to disapprove, Tom.”

A moment later they entered the sitting room. Helene put her arm on Rees’s sleeve. “Did you forget something?” she asked, nodding at the floor.

Rees stopped and stared at the ocean of papers as if he’d never seen them before. “We can’t—” he stopped.

Helene picked up a sheet. It had three words scrawled on it: night dances past. She handed it to Rees and picked up another. It had three staves of cascading arpeggios.

“Unfortunately, we cannot dance on paper,” Tom said, looking rather relieved. “It wouldn’t be safe. Miss McKenna might slip and fall.”