Alexander moved back into the house. The physician gave it as his opinion that there was no need for Harry to be nursed around the clock, but Alexander nevertheless had a truckle bed made up for himself in the dressing room leading off Harry’s bedchamber so that he would be within calling distance if he was needed. Netherby approved. Harry grumbled.

Alexander’s mother and Elizabeth were relieved to have a supportive male presence, especially because Harry’s fever had not yet abated when they returned home and went up to see him. He asked if they were visiting his mother and then frowned and corrected himself.

Miss Heyden was with Alexander in Harry’s room that evening, bathing his face with cool cloths, when Cousin Eugenia, the Dowager Countess of Riverdale, Harry’s grandmother, called to see him, inevitably bringing Cousin Matilda, her eldest daughter, with her. Their attention was focused entirely upon Harry for some time, as was to be expected. But after a few minutes, Cousin Matilda noticed Miss Heyden, who had moved back to stand by the window, and gazed at her with what looked like fascinated horror.

“My dear young lady,” she said, “whatever happened to your face? I must beg leave to recommend some ointment that would clear it up in no time.”

“Don’t be a fool, Matilda,” her mother commanded. “It looks to me like a permanent blemish.”

“It is, ma’am,” Miss Heyden said, and Alexander, meeting her eyes, grimaced slightly. She favored him with a fleeting smile.

“Miss Heyden is my betrothed,” he explained, and made the introductions.

“Well, of course she is,” Cousin Matilda said. “Who else would she be? A veil might make you less self-conscious, Miss Heyden.”

Alexander closed his eyes.

“It does,” Miss Heyden said. “But I believe it is important that Lord Riverdale’s relatives see me as I am.”

“And why would she wear one at all, Matilda?” the dowager said, sounding irritated, as she often did with that particular daughter. “She is remarkably handsome apart from those purple marks, which I imagine one does not even notice after a while. Alexander has shown great good sense in not allowing such a trivial detail to influence his choice. It is time he married and started to fill his nursery. There is an alarming dearth of heirs in this family.”

Alexander wondered if his prospective bride would after all bolt for the country tomorrow morning. But she was half smiling at the old lady.

Harry, ignored for the moment, laughed weakly. “I cannot help in that department. I am sorry, Grandmama,” he said. “I am a bastard. Why is Mama not here? Everyone else is.”

“Your mind is wandering again,” his grandmother told him bluntly, “as apparently it was when you arrived this afternoon. It is a good thing Miss Heyden had the presence of mind to cool your face with cold cloths. You need to rest and then get some fat on your bones. Your mother and Abigail are quite possibly coming here for Alexander’s wedding. Althea is this very minute writing another letter to urge them to come on your account.”

“Alex’s wedding,” he said, draping his uninjured arm across his eyes. “Well, at least no one is hounding me to marry and produce heirs. That is one advantage of being a bastard.”

“You ought not to use that word in the presence of your grandmother, Harry,” Cousin Matilda said, and he laughed again.

“I am not going to apologize again,” Alexander said quietly when the dowager and Cousin Matilda had gone downstairs and Harry had dropped off into a doze. “Doubtless you would consider me a bore.”

“Doubtless I would,” she agreed. “There is going to be no one new left for me to meet on my wedding day.”

“Do not forget my mother’s family,” he said.

“I am not likely to,” she told him, pulling a face.

“You ought not to be doing this,” he said after she had straightened the bedcovers without waking Harry and rung to have the bowl and cloths taken away and fresh ones brought.

“Why not?” she asked. “Your mother needed to write to Harry’s mother on the chance that she has decided not to come for our wedding, and Lizzie did not feel she could easily get out of the private birthday dinner to which she had been invited. Why not me? I will be a full-fledged member of the family in three days’ time.”

And she was being drawn into the family, it seemed, whether she fully realized it or not.

“Harry enlisted as a private soldier the day after that ghastly meeting we all had with his solicitor,” Alexander told her. “He disappeared, and when Netherby finally found him, he had already taken the king’s shilling. How Netherby got him out of it remains a mystery, but he did. He purchased a commission instead, but Harry insisted upon a foot regiment and upon earning his own promotions without any further help from Avery’s purse.”

“Then you were right about him,” she said. “He is a young man of sturdy character who will do well with his life and be strengthened by what has happened to him. Though he is obviously deeply hurt by it all. It will not be easy.”

“No,” he said.

“But you are not to blame yourself,” she said even more softly. “That is what you must learn from all of this.”

Harry opened his eyes. “I say,” he said, looking at Miss Heyden. “You are going to be my second cousin-in-law. I have just worked it out. Though you may not want to claim me even at that distant relationship.” He gave her the ghost of his old charming, boyish smile. “It’s not a comfortable thing to have a bastard in your family, is it? Or to be one in someone else’s. Ask Mama. Ask Cam. Ask Abby.”

“Captain Westcott,” she said, leaning slightly toward him and checking the heat in his cheeks with the backs of her fingers. “Family ties are too precious to be thrown away for such a slight cause.”

“Slight?” He laughed.

“Yes, slight,” she repeated. “It is obvious you are loved by your family despite the transgressions of your father. And calling yourself a bastard, you know, hurts them as much as it hurts you. Perhaps more.”

He stared at her with a mix of confusion and awe, and then said, “Yes, ma’am.” He then promptly drifted off to sleep again.

Alexander gazed at her as she spread a cloth soaked with the freshly brought water across his forehead. Family ties are too precious to be thrown away for such a slight cause. What the devil had happened to her family? He did not even know her childhood name, did he? Heyden was the name of the man her aunt had married. And Wren? Was it her baptismal name? Good God, he did not even know her name. In three days’ time they were going to be married, yet he was still plagued by one basic question.

Who the devil was this woman he was about to marry?

A letter arrived from Viola Kingsley, the former Countess of Riverdale, the following morning. She and her daughter were coming for the wedding. It was too late now to send the letter that had been written to tell her of the arrival of her son.

They arrived at Westcott House the following day to warm hugs and welcomes—and a tearful reunion with Captain Harry Westcott, who had come downstairs, against advice, when their carriage was heard. His fever had ebbed the night before and had not returned this morning, but he was weak and tired and complaining about the broths and jellies the cook was sending up to him.

Wren watched the three of them in a tight hug together in the main hall and blinked her eyes. The ladies had, of course, been taken completely by surprise and were not willing to let him go.

It was easy to see from where Harry had acquired his good looks. His mother was blond and elegant and still beautiful, and his younger sister was fair haired, dainty, and exquisitely pretty.

Miss Kingsley was the first to turn from the group. She approached them with a smile and eyes that were bright with unshed tears. “Althea,” she said to Mrs. Westcott, “you must think my manners have gone begging. How delightful it is to see you again, and how good it was of you to invite Abby and me to come here for a family wedding when I never feel sure we ought to lay claim to membership. And Elizabeth and Alexander! You are both looking well. Present me to your betrothed if you will, Alexander. I assume this is she.” She turned her attention upon Wren.

“Yes indeed,” the Earl of Riverdale said, drawing Wren’s hand through his arm. “Cousin Viola and Abigail, I have the pleasure of presenting my betrothed, Miss Wren Heyden.”

“I say, Mama,” Captain Westcott said, “Miss Heyden sat with me throughout the bout of fever I arrived home with. She bathed my face with cool cloths and listened to my ravings without once calling me an idiot. And this morning she sneaked me a piece of toast after I have been tortured with nothing but gruels in which there is not a single lump of meat or vegetables a man could get his teeth into.”

“Physician’s orders, Harry,” Elizabeth said, laughing. “And now that you have betrayed poor Wren I daresay she will be arrested and dragged off within the hour to sit in the stocks.”

“Miss Heyden.” The former countess extended her hand, her eyes roaming over Wren’s face. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance. I thank you for the note you included with Althea’s second letter and the personal invitation to your wedding. It tipped the scales in favor of our coming. Did it not, Abby? And now I find that I am even more deeply in your debt. You have been caring for my son and preventing him from devouring beefsteaks and ale when he was feverish, the foolish boy. I will forgive the toast this morning.”

Wren thought about how difficult it must have been for her to come to the wedding of the man who now bore the title that had been her son’s. And to come here to the house that had been hers. Yet now she was shaking the hand of the woman who tomorrow would assume the title that had been her own for longer than twenty years, and she was smiling graciously as though she felt no pang at all.

“I think it will soon be time for the beefsteaks and ale,” Wren said. “You must find your son looking dreadfully thin.”

“Ah but,” she said, her eyes brightening with more tears, “he is alive.”

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Heyden,” Abigail Westcott said, stepping away from her brother’s side in order to offer her hand to Wren. “My cousin Jessica wrote to me about you. She is enormously impressed that you are a businesswoman and a very successful one. I am impressed too. Thank you for looking after my brother.”

“Everyone else has done so too,” Wren told her. “Mrs. Westcott and Lizzie and I have taken turns sitting with him during the day, and Lord Riverdale sleeps in his dressing room at night. The Duke of Netherby has come each day to spend an hour or more with him.”

“And has looked at me through his quizzing glass every time I complain about the food,” the captain said indignantly, “and informed me I am getting to be a bore. He treats me as though I were a schoolboy again.”

“I cannot believe you are here and I am not merely dreaming, Harry,” Abigail said. “You are not going back to that horrid place, are you? Promise me you are not?”

“The Peninsula?” he said. “Of course I am going back. I am an officer, Abby. A captain, no less. I was promoted—just after I had almost got my arm sliced off, in fact. I have men counting on me out there and I am not going to let them down. I don’t want to let them down.”

“I know,” she said, tossing her glance at the ceiling. “It is all a great lark. Well, I am not going to quarrel with you, Harry. Not today, anyway.”

“Come upstairs to the drawing room,” Mrs. Westcott said. “You must be ready for refreshments.”

“I shall see Harry back to his room,” Lord Riverdale said. “Would you like to come too, Abigail?”

“I will come in a short while, Harry,” his mother said.

“To tuck me in, I suppose,” he said with a grin.

“Well, I am your mama,” she reminded him. She walked beside Wren as they climbed the stairs. “I am so sorry, Miss Heyden. All the focus of attention ought to be upon you today. You are tomorrow’s bride.”

“I am perfectly contented that it be upon Captain Westcott,” Wren said. “The Duke of Netherby informed us that his captaincy was awarded for an act of extraordinary bravery. How he got that information out of your son, I do not know. He has said nothing to the rest of us. He is a modest young man and I like him exceedingly.”

“You have endeared yourself to a mother’s heart,” Miss Kingsley said. “Again.”

Word spread fast. The Duke of Netherby paid his accustomed call before the morning was out, bringing his stepmother and Lady Jessica with him. Miss Kingsley went up to the captain’s room not long after and Abigail came down. She and Lady Jessica met in the middle of the drawing room and hugged each other with exclamations and squeals of joy—the squeals were Lady Jessica’s. They sat on the window seat, their heads together as they chattered away, their facial expressions bright with animation.

Wren was not ignored. Quite the contrary. She was drawn into a group with Mrs. Westcott and Elizabeth and the dowager duchess, who plied her with questions about the wedding clothes for which she had shopped during the past week. Abigail came to sit beside her later, after her cousin had run upstairs to look in on the captain—“if I can get past Avery,” she said, pulling a face as she left the room. Abigail wanted to know about the wedding plans. Her mother made much of Wren for the rest of the day and told her how happy she was.

“Alexander has always been one of the nicest people I know even apart from those impossibly romantic good looks of his,” she said, “and I am delighted to know he is to be happily settled.”

Lord Riverdale himself stayed close to her all evening.

Belowstairs, all was apparently busy in preparation for tomorrow’s wedding breakfast.

It was a busy, pleasant wedding eve, Wren told herself all day, and indeed she enjoyed it. Yet she felt horribly lonely through it all. They were a close-knit family, the Westcotts, despite the ghastly upheavals of last year that had shaken them to the roots and threatened to break them asunder. She felt her aloneness, her lack of a family of her own, like a physical weight. Perhaps tomorrow she would feel differently. She would be a member of this family. She would be a Westcott. She would belong.

Or would she?

Even if she did, would her new family ever fill the empty space where her own family—the bride’s family—ought to be?