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“Beautiful woman, Lady Rawlings,” Rees said. “She has a warm manner, all right. I never could understand how she could be one of my wife’s best friends. Talk about opposites.”

“Your wife is a saint compared to her.”

“My wife is a saint compared to anyone,” Rees pointed out. “Unfortunate that saints are hell to live with. I clearly remember telling Rawlings that he should have booted Esme out as I did Helene, rather than allowing her to keep the house.”

“Miles never would consider any sort of action against my aunt,” Darby said. “Nothing. Not divorce. Nothing.”

“Any idea who fathered her child?”

Darby shook his head. “She was at Lady Troubridge’s house party when Miles died. Could have been anyone.”

“Troubridge? That woman with a place in East Cliff who fancies herself an art enthusiast and cobbles together a bunch Fool for Love

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of actors and dilettanti? She’s tried to get me out there by dangling opera singers before my nose.”

“Her parties are so ripe with scandal it’s a wonder anyone is ever found in his wife’s chamber,” Darby said. “Why do you think Esme Rawlings got pregnant?”

Rees had taken a screw of paper out of his breast pocket and was scrawling on it. He didn’t look up. “Last time I heard, the bedtime waltz was still to blame for children.”

“Damn you, Rees, listen. Why do you think she got pregnant now? The woman’s been catting around London for ten years. Why’d she suddenly get pregnant now, when all the world knew that my uncle’s heart was going?”

“Think she did it to secure the estate?”

“What if she did?”

“Hard to say. You’d have to prove illegitimacy, and that’s virtually impossible. Better pray for a girl.”

Rees was scribbling away again, no doubt messing about with a musical score. “You don’t think she did away with your uncle, do you?” he said, almost absentmindedly.

“What?”

“Put him to bed with a shovel so as to cover up a pregnancy?”

“I doubt it,” Darby said, after a moment. “She’s a lightskirt, my aunt. But I can’t honestly say I see true vice in her.”

Rees’s fingers were flying across the page, and Darby could see that he’d entirely stopped paying attention. Once Rees was following the lure of a musical line, there was no getting him back until it was on paper.

Of course Esme Rawlings wouldn’t murder her husband. She was a lady, for all she was a trollop. And in an odd way, she and Miles had got along quite well. She never fussed over his mistresses—well, how could she?—and he never blinked an eye at her consorts. In fact, she seemed fond of Miles in an odd way.

But perhaps she didn’t like the idea of giving up the estate. 8 Eloisa

James

Everyone knew that Miles’s heart was about to give out. Perhaps she got the wind up about moving to the dower house, and cooked up the pregnancy.

Perhaps she wasn’t pregnant at all.

That would explain a good deal, such as why Esme retreated to the country after his uncle’s funeral. The lady rarely left London. So what was she doing in a half-forgotten estate in Wiltshire?

Walking around with a pillow under her gown, that’s what. Scouring the neighborhood for a child likely to pass as Miles’s heir.

“What if she’s not pregnant, Rees?”

His friend didn’t answer.

“Rees!”