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Her offerings were few in the winter, since they were nearly all expensive hothouse flowers. Ignoring the paler, humbler blooms at the front of the barrow, he bought her remaining red roses with a smile. Bending from the saddle, he collected them from her.

The girl, shivering under her too-thin cloak and hood, whispered, “Thank you kindly, sir,” and held up her hand with his change.

“You get off home and stay warm,” Piers said severely, and rode on, hoping she had enough money to be warm and fed. Winter was a dangerous season for a great many unfortunate people.

He turned his horse into the mews lane, patting the animal’s neck and wishing he rode the Professor, whom he had left at Haybury Court because he had not planned to be in London longer than a few days.

Somehow, they had remained here a month, and he was more than ready to go home to the country.

Weather permitting. So was April. Next week.

She was already packing in a slow, haphazard kind of way.

Abandoning his mount at the stables, he walked through the kitchen garden and entered the house by the back door. Here, he was encouraged by the lack of crying baby sounds, so when he encountered Park in the kitchen, he asked quite cheerfully where her ladyship was to be found.

“I believe Lady Petteril is in her bedchamber, my lord.”

Piers was halfway up the steps toward the main part of the house when Mrs. Park emerged from her sitting room with a wriggling bundle in her arms.

Damn it!

He strode on to the entrance hall and up two flights of stairs to April’s rooms. He didn’t knock, for the simple reason that the line between hers and his had blurred and he spent most of his nights in here. Or she in his room, for variety.

She stood beside the bed, gazing down at an array of what looked like old dresses and bits of bedding, her expression one of rare discontent.

She glared at him. “I can’t sew.”

“Neither can I.” He brightened. “Yes, you can. You made that little satchel for your notebook.”

“A square of cloth,” she said derisively. “I can’t sew a gown for a baby. Can you buy such things? New, I mean.”

Piers scratched his chin. “I expect so. You know we can’t keep the baby, though. It isn’t ours.”

“ He isn’t ours,” April corrected. She met his gaze. “Is he yours?”

Piers laid the flowers on the bed in front of her. “No.”

“Do you know that? For certain? He would have been conceived around March last year.”

“Around the time you burgled my house,” Piers agreed, hoping to make her smile.

She didn’t. “Would you remember?” she blurted. “Would you have taken the same care?”

“I didn’t need to,” he said, quite without arrogance. “By the time I married you I had not been intimate with any woman for over a year. I could give you the precise date and place, but I would really rather not.”

She nodded as if that was what she had expected to hear, and yet something in him ached. Lost, somehow, he watched her fingers close around the roses on the bed.

“I brought you these to salve my conscience, of course,” he said lightly. “They’re less trouble than a baby, particularly when you can make a servant put them in water.”

She played the game. “I believe the viscountess can also make a servant put the baby in water.” She picked up the roses and to his horror, he saw tears in her eyes.

“April,” he said, touching her cheek.

A funny sound, half-laughter, half-groan escaped her as she threw her arms fiercely around his neck. “Of course I know he’s not yours. But it’s what they all think, and you weren’t paying attention when I found you.”

Piers, who had certainly not been paying attention to women in those black months before April, contented himself with folding his arms around his wife and kissing her soundly. She co-operated with gratifying enthusiasm.

“Ouch,” he said as a thorn dug into his neck.

“It serves you right for leaving me alone with a baby.”

***

A PRIL, SURPRISED AND slightly ashamed of her emotional reaction to the odd situation, was relieved to have the last vestiges of suspicion removed.

Although she would never have blamed Piers for a relationship occurring before they even knew each other, the abandonment of a child had struck too close and unpleasant a chord.

It wasn’t that she put her husband on a pedestal, she told herself, as she went down to speak to Mrs. Gale’s acquaintance, the wet nurse. She just understood him. It was not so much that he had wobbled, as that she had, emotionally speaking.

Oh yes, it was time to go home. She longed for the peace of the countryside, which had once seemed so alien to her. There, she could get her balance back, feel more like herself again.

The wet nurse smelled of gin.

But since the baby was now crying piteously, April saw no solution but to let the nurse feed him.

She drew Mrs. Park aside. “Did you not find the servants through an agency? Would it have wet nurses on the books?”

“I expect so, but is it worth it? If the mother doesn’t turn up, we’ll have to inform the authorities, give the child over to an orphanage.”

“Oh no,” April said, appalled. “They are dreadful places.” Even she had known better than to go near an orphanage in her darkest hours.

Mrs. Park regarded her uneasily. “You’re not thinking of keeping him here?”

“Only until his mother comes back for him.”

“And what if she doesn’t?” Mrs. Park demanded.

“Then we’ll find her. We’re good at solving puzzles.”