Emily followed Lord Blackstone and Mr. Manning as they strolled the beach, twirling a piece of sea grass in her hand and trying very hard not to appear to be eavesdropping. So far all she could make out was that Mr. Manning admired the sheltered nature of the cove, and Lord Blackstone had found, since he inherited the title, that his brother and father before him had run up considerable debts. She was a little shocked to hear a peer so openly discussing financial matters, but Lord Blackstone was not the average peer. Lord Blackstone was not the average anything.

Her walking companion, Miss Gillian Smythe, seemed to agree. And this was the problem—Miss Smythe’s excited chattering prevented Emily from devoting her full attention to eavesdropping. Unlike Sarah, Miss Smythe expected a conversation to be at least moderately two-sided.

“Why do you think he’s decided to hold this party, Miss Mirren?” Miss Smythe asked, having just recounted her mother’s theory that Lord Blackstone was finally turning his attention to the succession.

Because he has business with Mr. Manning. The thought flew into Emily’s head out of nowhere as she watched the men walking together. “I’m sure I don’t know.” She smiled at the younger girl, who, dressed in a periwinkle walking dress and carrying a matching parasol, looked every bit the fresh-faced country maiden.

Please don’t let him be involved in the slaving. Another rogue thought, arising without warning. Ruthlessly, she pushed it away. She had no reason to care what Lord Blackstone’s interest in Mr. Manning was. She turned to Miss Smythe. “Perhaps you are right. How old is Lord Blackstone?”

“I think he is nearly thirty. Did you hear him compliment Anne on her pianoforte playing last night?”

“I can’t say that I did, but she was very good. Do you play, too?”

“Not nearly as well as Anne.” Miss Smythe sighed as she gazed at Lord Blackstone with open longing.

“Surely there are qualities more important than musical ability when it comes to settling on a wife? If, in fact, that’s why you bring the matter up,” Emily added hastily, fearing that perhaps she shouldn’t have spoken so directly. She was not accustomed to the subtle rules and unspoken norms of polite society. It was impossible to keep track of what one was and was not supposed to talk about.

“Oh, do you think so, Miss Mirren?” Miss Smythe performed a little skip of excitement. “What qualities do you think are important in choosing a wife—or a husband?”

Emily glanced at Lord Blackstone. “I don’t intend to marry, so I can only speak theoretically.”

“You don’t intend to marry?” The girl furrowed her brow as if this pronouncement had been delivered in a foreign tongue. “Why ever not?”

Emily suppressed a shudder as she thought back to poor Mrs. Manning’s suffering. Even without the miserable example of the Mannings’ marriage, she had Sally to think about—and, God willing, Billy. A husband would almost certainly interfere with her ability to protect her little family. Not to mention her reform work and the fact that what money she had was her own. To marry would mean saying good-bye to everything that was important to her.

But Miss Smythe didn’t need to know all that. “I enjoy my freedom, that’s all, and I don’t plan to surrender it. It isn’t worth it, to my mind.”

“It’s not worth children? A family?”

The question hit Emily like a physical blow. But no. It wasn’t worth even that.

“All right,” said Miss Smythe, “I shall press you more on this subject at a later time, but please do tell me the qualities you think important. Theoretically speaking, I mean.”

“Hmm.” Emily gave up on her eavesdropping, “A husband should be kind.”

Miss Smythe nodded enthusiastically. “And handsome!”

“Handsome would not be unwelcome, but I don’t think looks are ultimately that important.” Lord Blackstone was getting farther ahead of them, his long legs striding easily over the wet sand. “Besides, handsome is rather subjective, don’t you find? The same person can appear differently at different times, in different light. No, I think the ideal husband would be kind, and would possess the ability to make one laugh.”

“Laugh?”

“A lifetime is very long. It could get rather boring rubbing along with the same person day after day, don’t you think? A little humor would help.”

“I daresay you’re right! What else?”

A husband should treat you like a person. A husband should be interested in what you have to say—and in what’s inside your heart.

But no doubt she’d scandalized Miss Smythe enough for one day. So she settled for saying, “Love. Love is essential.”

“A love match!” Miss Smythe exclaimed. “You would hold out for a love match!”

“Wouldn’t you?” Emily asked, even though she knew most women were lucky if love grew after they married.

Miss Smythe gazed at Lord Blackstone. “I’m not an idealist like you.” She patted Emily’s hand. “But I will say a prayer tonight that you find a love match.” When Emily started to protest, Miss Smythe winked and added, “Theoretically speaking, of course.”

Blackstone let his candle burn out, gazing at the flame as it sputtered. It was too early to expect any sleep. In this limbo between the waking world and the fraught sleep that was to come, he sometimes couldn’t tell what was real. This was when the ghosts visited, their accusations ringing in his ears. Willing the ghosts away, he ran through a list in his mind.

1. Manning needs to see some of the inland creeks. He knows the area is riddled with them, but he needs to see how easy it would be for his goods to flow to London. Tomorrow, perhaps.
2. Did they have enough men on the ground in Essex? Assuming Manning took the bait and started landing in his cove, they wouldn’t necessarily recognize Le Cafard. They’d need men to trail anyone who came off Manning’s boats. A lot of men.
3. He’d have to write to Whitehall with a report. They were close—he could feel it.
4. Confirm what the business in Bristol was. Miss Mirren is right —slaving is a crime, both moral and legal. Might as well have him brought up on charges of illegal slaving, too, when this is done.
5. Miss Mirren. It would be good to see her married. Mr. Leighton, though he’d seemed a prospect, is probably too dull for a lady like her.
6. Speak to Bailey about other prospects for Miss Mirren.
7. No, speak to Catharine about other prospects for Miss Mirren.

The door clicked open, and he sat bolt upright in his chair. Who would enter at this hour? Stanway had long since taken his leave, and the other servants knew not to bother him in the library. He peeked around the high back of his chair. Ah, who would dare to enter the library but the very person he’d insisted should make it her own?

She wore a white night rail covered by a dark wrap, the color of which he could not make out in the moonlight. Her hair fell loose over her shoulders, and bare feet peeked out from beneath the hem of her gown. Carrying a book under one arm, she made her way into the shadowy, book-lined space. He watched her return the book to a shelf on the far side of the room. Then she turned, giving him a brief view of her face, lit by the branch of candles she carried. He drew in a quick breath, belatedly praying it had not been audible. She was nothing less than stunning when unguarded, without her furrowed brow. She looked exactly like the girl in Captain Mirren’s miniature.

She must have, on a past visit, identified the book she wanted to read next, because she knew where she was going. After rolling a ladder to her target shelf, she began to climb. When she’d reached the correct height, she extended her arm toward the book she wanted. Ahh!—She could almost touch it. He held his breath as she leaned to one side to gather momentum. He could see that she meant to roll the ladder into range to reach the volume. She heaved, and the ladder rolled. It moved only a few inches to the right, but it was enough. A small hand darted out and plucked the book. He bit his tongue.

She started down. He waited until her feet touched the ground, but only just. “What are you reading?”

She shrieked, though she recovered her composure immediately, brushing her hands against her wrap. “I have just returned a book that explains how to breed horses if one wants to encourage certain characteristics.”

“And was it enlightening?”

“Not particularly.” She fastened the front of her wrap, which he could now see was moss green. “Though it was more interesting than a book I dipped into yesterday about how to tat.”

“Tat?”

“To make lace.”

“Ah. Of course. I must say, you don’t strike me as the sort of lady prone to…tatting.”

She shrugged. “One never knows if one might develop certain interests unless one does some preliminary investigative work. Your library is extremely well-endowed. I feel it’s something that I should take advantage of while I’m here.”

“I’m glad to be of service.” He had to swallow a laugh. He’d been praised for being well-endowed before, but never quite in this way. “So now that you’ve done some ‘preliminary investigative work,’ as you say, in this case we can safely conclude that tatting is not among your interests?”

She pursed her lips as if she were trying not to smile. “I think that is a reasonable conclusion.”

“And horses?” he teased, sparing a thought for whether he was flirting with her. He hadn’t intended to—flirting was not something he did, other than when necessary in service of the cause.

“Riding, yes. I do enjoy riding, though I hardly ever get to do it. Breeding horses, perhaps less so.”

He rose and went to her, reaching for the book she held and angling it toward the candlelight. “A Practical Guide to Pistols?” He couldn’t help grinning. “I would have imagined you more as a reader of novels, poetry. What can you find among all these instructional volumes to entertain you?”

“It’s not about entertainment as much as…” She paused, staring at the ceiling. “Self-betterment.”

“But you’ve discarded the last two topics.”

“Potential self-betterment,” she amended. “If one has latent interests or skills, how can one know enough to begin cultivating them without exposure to some background material?”

Blackstone sent an eyebrow up. His mood had lightened considerably. He was flirting with her—there was no denying it. And he should stop. Just that it was so easy to talk to her when they were alone like this.

“You can learn a lot from books,” she said defensively.

“And practical experience isn’t necessary?”

“Of course it is. But one must start somewhere. And isn’t it more expedient to start here in the library than to amass all the necessary items for a practical experiment?”

“You, Miss Mirren, are a veritable one-woman literary society. I suppose this is exactly how you learned to swim. Did you take the book to the lake with you, or did you make notes?”

“How is it generally done?” She still sounded a little miffed—she was delightfully easy to tease.

“I imagine most people learn to swim by having someone teach them.”

“Who taught you?”

He felt the question like a punch to the solar plexus. It was his own fault—play with fire, get burned. “I can’t remember,” he said, summoning a dismissive tone and making his way back to his chair. It was time to put an end to this discussion. “I was never much for swimming.”

“But that’s not true, is it?” Following him, she set her candelabra down on the table between his chair and its mate. “Mr. Smythe said you enjoyed swimming very much as a child.”

The mood in the room had changed from playfulness to veiled challenge. He cleared his throat in warning. She was getting too close to a topic he didn’t discuss.

“If I am not mistaken,” she persisted, “he said that you were a veritable fish.”

“You must be mistaken, then.” He could hear ice forming around his words, but dash the woman, she kept pushing. Generally, he considered himself a calm sort of person. He kept his emotions in check, channeling his anger toward the cause, using it to propel himself toward the ultimate goal: the end of the war. Harboring anger at any particular person, especially a woman who hardly signified, wasn’t like him.

Still, there it was—anger. It rose through his spine, a hot eruption, making him sit straighter. He fixed his gaze on Miss Mirren’s lips, which, even in the candlelight, appeared plump and pink.

“I’m sure if you tried, it would all come right back to you.” She sounded like a scolding schoolmarm.

“My hand makes it difficult,” he said, not taking his gaze from her mouth. She caught her lower lip with her upper teeth.

“That’s not what this is about.”

He whipped his eyes to hers, which flashed with a spark of defiance. She wouldn’t dare.

Apparently she would, because those blasted lips started up again. “The loss of hand in a robust man such as yourself shouldn’t have any bearing on your ability to swim.” Each individual word was a piece of kindling she threw on the fire of his ire. “Just as it wouldn’t have any bearing on your ability to dance.”

Then, suddenly, it hit him. He recognized what was happening. He wanted to kiss her. Oh, God, he wanted to kiss her. It wasn’t just anger that had his limbs abuzz. He wanted to press his mouth over those goddamned lips of hers, to stem this maddening and unceasing flow of words.

But he was a man who knew when he’d been bested, a practiced soldier who knew when to retreat. And, conveniently, he was also accustomed to self-denial. He tamped down the twin forces of anger and lust rising through his chest and announced the truth. “My brother died in that lake.”

He wanted to shock her, to make her ashamed that she’d pushed him so hard about such a private matter. And though it was ungentlemanly, he wanted to hurt her a little, to make her taste the bitter medicine she’d forced him to swallow.

She did not oblige him. Instead, she merely said, “I’m sorry.” Then she looked down at her hands for an instant before training those blue-violet eyes directly on his. “I liked to swim when I was a girl because it was the only time I didn’t feel alone. And because it was the one thing I had that was mine, that no one could take from me. There were several lakes on Mr. Manning’s property, and I would sneak out at night and swim in the moonlight. That’s the reason I never swam in the sea, because it was generally the middle of the night when I went swimming.”

He couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d punched him in the gut. Instead of reacting with hurt or embarrassment like any other lady would have, she had somehow recognized that he’d shared something intensely personal and responded in kind.

He wanted to ask a thousand questions. Why did you feel alone? What about the Mannings? How did you escape the house undetected? What if you’d drowned with no one there to notice? Why wasn’t anyone paying attention?

She spoke before he could decide what to say. “Drowning must be a horrible way to die. I hope your brother didn’t suffer overmuch.”

No one spoke about his brother or overtly referenced his death at all. It was rather shocking to her hear do so. He knew her words had the power to send him back to the lake that night. Sweat beaded on his brow as he resisted. He wasn’t at the lake. He was in his own house, with Captain Mirren’s daughter, and he rather thought she was trying to be kind.

Blackstone obeyed a small voice in his head that urged him to continue this conversation of confessions. “He took his own life.” He searched her face for the inevitable recoil. “Does that shock you?”

She merely shook her head.

He took her silence for encouragement, and now that he’d started talking, he found he did not want to stop. “My brother wasn’t well. It started when he was in his final year at Eton. By the time I came back from Spain, he’d become a man of extremes. He’d be wildly happy, in love with the world. ‘You can sleep when you’re dead, Eric!’ he’d shout, dragging me out before dawn to swim.” He smiled, thinking back to those giddy mornings. That’s how he wanted to remember Alec. “But then, suddenly, he’d become the reverse—sluggish, tired, and it would worsen until he could not bring himself to rise from his bed for weeks at a time. The misery that gripped him during these spells was, in the beginning, balanced by the exuberance that characterized the opposite periods. But the despair became stronger, dominant. Eventually it was all that was left.”

“The world can weigh heavily, can’t it? And perhaps more heavily on some than on others.”

She lowered herself to the chair opposite him. He realized with belated embarrassment that she had been standing though his speech while he sat in front of her, as if she were a goddess towering over him in judgment. She seemed about to speak again, but he raised a hand. He couldn’t risk her pity, because that would stop him in his tracks.

“I moved him here from the London house. He hadn’t taken up any of the responsibilities of the title, and I hoped getting to know some of the tenants might spark some feeling of obligation in him, give him something to focus on other than his demons.

“We spent a month here together—though ‘together’ isn’t really the right word. I watched him descend into a hell of his own making. He rarely got out of bed. When he did, it was to drink himself senseless or—” Good God, he couldn’t tell a gently bred maiden like Miss Mirren about the macabre madhouse they had inhabited in those awful weeks.

“What?” she asked gently.

He closed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, it might as well have been Bedlam—him a raving lunatic; me, with my maimed arm, pacing the halls all night.”

“But you got better.”

“No.” he said, more sharply than he’d intended. “He died, so that particular torture abated, and I moved on.”

“He died in the lake. I shouldn’t have said all that about swimming. I’m sorry.”

Unwilling to hear exclamations of regret, he shook his head vehemently. She didn’t need to know the horrific particulars, but he was determined to finish the broad outline of the tale.

“There was a terrible storm the night he disappeared.” He stared at the floor, remembering—and editing out—the details. “We dredged the lake the next morning and found him.” He met her eyes. “The truth is, it was partly a relief.”

There. That was it. Did he feel guilty that he hadn’t taken his brother’s condition more seriously before he went off to war? Yes. Did he torment himself every day with the thought that if he’d just acted faster that night, things might have ended differently? Yes. But the thing he was most ashamed of, most tortured by, was the relief. If Alec’s death had plunged him into an endless tunnel of grief, it had also brought with it a tiny shaft of light, the alleviation that came with the cessation of effort.

Relief. That was what he judged himself most harshly for, what he choked on at night. Even whispering the word aloud made his heart pound. He squeezed his good hand in a tight fist to still its shaking. He was waiting for judgment. Always waiting.

It seemed, though, that the creature before him was going to offer absolution instead. A tear gathered at the corner of one of her eyes and hovered for a moment. She wouldn’t be so generous if she knew about the rest of his sins. He wanted to wipe the tear away, but he didn’t want her to see how badly his hand shook.

Mesmerized by that single tear, a tiny slow-moving river down her cheek, he didn’t notice her hand until it was on his. First, she wrapped her palm around his clenched fist and squeezed. After a moment of stillness, she pried his thumb up and wormed her fingers under his, forcing his hand to open.

Then she simply held his hand. The comfort of the gesture was uncomplicated and profound. To have someone touch him with concern, with a kind of sympathy that didn’t feel like pity, nearly took his breath away. He was exhausted, hollow—but the despair was lessened.

“You are cold.” The soft, pale hand in his might as well have been an icicle.

“Yes,” she agreed.

He wished more than anything he had his missing hand back, just for a minute, so he could take her hands between his and rub some warmth into them. Rearranging his grip, he tried to cover as much of her icy fingertips as possible.

He wanted to say, “It’s your turn,” and ask why she had felt so alone as a girl, what it had been like growing up with the Mannings. The irony did not escape him. He and Bailey had discussed this very thing—finding a way to get Miss Mirren to talk about Mr. Manning. But now, here, he wanted to know for entirely different reasons. He wanted to know about her.

Instead, he settled for, “You should go back to bed. It’s late, and you’ve taken a chill.” He gave her hand a final squeeze before dropping it. “And we shouldn’t be here like this. This is…”

“Highly improper? Shockingly scandalous?” She smiled and rose, moving toward the window behind his desk. “I can see the scandal sheets now. Earl of Blackstone caught alone with heretofore-unknown spinster. They were…conversing!”

He didn’t respond at first, just took in the sight of her, a river of moonlight making her curls come alive as it painted them with diamonds. He had the idea that most gently bred ladies slept with their hair in braids, but the two times he’d encountered Miss Mirren in the house at night, her hair tumbled loose over her shoulders.

All that unconstrained hair—it suddenly felt dangerous. “It wouldn’t be good for either of us if anyone found us here.”

She made her way to the door, opened it a crack, and peeped into the hallway, lifting her candelabra to light the way. Looking back over her shoulder before she disappeared into the blackness of the corridor, she whispered, “Don’t worry. Your secrets are safe with me.”

If only that could be true.

But if Miss Mirren knew all his secrets, she wouldn’t be so kind.