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“Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”

—Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

B y the time Charity returned to Atholl House, she was in a foul mood.

The visit with the princess had been interesting, but yielded little information regarding the events of the prior evening.

Charity had ventured on to pay a call on Lady Elizabeth, with whom she had debuted.

Lady Elizabeth also happened to be a keen hoarder of gossip about the ton .

Today, however, the only person she wanted to discuss was herself.

Her parents had just announced her engagement to Lord Dunstan, a man whose blandness was only outweighed by his bank balance.

“He has promised to take me to Venice for our wedding trip,” Lady Elizabeth had gushed, while Charity pretended to enthuse delight. Everyone, it seemed, was destined for parts unknown, while Charity was left chasing shadows around London .

Charity stomped through the front door of her house, barely taking notice of her butler waiting for her wrap and gloves. She handed them over without so much as glancing his way. “Do I have any messages?”

“One, Your Grace,” Mr Pritchard replied. “A missive from your mother, I believe.”

Charity swung around, giving him her undivided attention. “She is not in town, is she?”

“No, ma’am. It arrived via post, and based on the sheer volume of fingerprints, I would think at least three people handled it along the way.”

She eyed the letter with suspicion, hesitant to pick it up.

Her mother’s swirly penmanship was marred by a splotch of ink and sharp lines.

This was no casual note, but a frantic missive.

What word had reached the countryside? The attack on her home?

Her carriage rides with Peregrine? What did it say that Charity was more concerned her mother had learned of the former and not the latter?

Pritchard inched his hand forward, proffering the silver tray holding the letter.

“Leave it in the study,” Charity said, already turning away from it. “I will answer it later.”

“Is aught amiss, Your Grace?” Pritchard asked, venturing past his normal reticence. He had been fiercely protective of her from the moment she arrived in London, and recent events had made him worse than a mother hen. Even now, he surveyed her for any signs that she might have been in trouble.

“All is well,” she assured him, even if that was far from the truth. She was well, for now anyway.

“Excellent, Your Grace. Miller is waiting upstairs in your bedroom. I believe she wishes to get your opinion on which gown you’d like to wear to dinner this evening.”

Her choice of gown hardly mattered. Right now, everything about dress choices and evening plans with nattering ladies seemed so… pointless.

Charity shook her head, trying to dislodge the worries that clung to her thoughts. Dinner parties were her battleground, the clothes and jewels her only weapons beyond her wits.

Mr Pritchard was still standing patiently, awaiting her next command. “Could you ask Cook to prepare a small tray to be sent up in an hour or so? Lady Grantham’s suppers always begin intolerably late, and it would be mortifying to swoon from hunger before the first course arrives.”

“Of course, Your Grace. If there’s nothing else, I’ll go speak with her now.”

Charity gave him a nod of approval and swept past him towards the main staircase leading to the upper floor and the family rooms. She opened the door to her suite, and like a thief, her eyes snuck towards her pink chaise lounge by the window. But it was empty.

Empty, lacking a single trace that Peregrine had ever sat there. The dust from his boots had long since been cleaned.

Good God. How foolish was she, getting sentimental that her maids had managed to remove the dirt from it?

Pushing that thought to the side, Charity made a note to ask a footman to go looking for Peregrine again and finally deliver the request that they meet. If she didn’t get some answers from him or the marchioness soon, the Queen was going to do something drastic.

Miller, her lady’s maid, managed to dress her despite her unenthusiastic aid in selecting the gown and jewellery.

Charity tried to focus on the routine instead of the gnawing at her nerves, but she met with little success.

She was dabbing on drops of perfume when a knock sounded at the bedroom door.

Mr Pritchard opened the door and stepped inside, bowing slightly in apology for the interruption. “You have a visitor, Your Grace.”

Whoever could be calling at this hour? “Someone from the palace?” she asked him.

“No, Your Grace. It is Lord Fitzroy.” Her butler’s face was a study. “Shall I tell him you are unavailable?”

Charity stood so quickly that her chair nearly toppled. Peregrine was here? And he had come through the front door? Relief that she did not have to track him down warred with both hope and cross feelings from his abrupt abandonment at Burlington House.

Do not do anything so unseemly as rush down to meet him , she ordered herself. Her mother’s voice only added a hiss of disapproval.

“Please, offer him a drink and tell him I shall be down shortly,” she told her butler. Ten minutes. That was all she would allow herself—not to gather thoughts, but to pretend she didn’t care.

However, as she approached the drawing room where he waited, she caught herself nervously twisting the ruby ring on her finger. Then, she entered the room exactly as her mother had taught her—head high, shoulders back, and with a faint, unreadable expression on her lips.

Peregrine was… he was standing, but well out of view of the windows. Dressed as if he was expecting to go see the Regent. And his face was as unreadable as hers.

What did he want? Charity glanced down at her evening gown and then back up at him. “It is well past the social hour, Peregrine. I am on my way out the door.”

“I need to ask you a question.”

Something about his request, so baldly put, chilled her.

It was only then that she noticed he was fairly thrumming with tension, from his hands clenched at his side to his shoulders tight, as if preparing for a blow.

He was distressed. And for some impossible reason, he seemed to think that she was capable of helping him.

Taken aback, she began twisting the ring on her finger again. And then she turned, dismissing the footman from the room to wait in the hallway. “What is it?” she asked him carefully.

He was watching her face so intently that she wished she had skipped eating. “Why did you not tell the Queen about who Selina was?” he asked, his voice barely louder than a breath.

“ That is why you are here, delaying my evening plans?” The words sounded more hurt and confused than Charity wanted them to. What does it even matter that I didn’t tell the Queen Selina was in the Order? She wanted to hurl at him.

But that was a childish question, borne of those injured sensibilities.

Of course, it mattered. She could see it in the line of his body.

This was a test of trust. Blinking, she tried to reorder her thoughts and bury her feelings while being held pinned by his silent gaze.

In the end, she delivered the kernel of truth that lay at the very bottom of it all in a low, clipped voice.

“I was trying to do as little harm as I could. To you. To her. Not so much because she is something of a friend to you as because…” This was too near the bone.

“Though I may not be a player at your level, I also know better than to reveal more than is absolutely necessary. I look at who will pay the price, because I was the one forced to settle the debt between our mothers. If I thought only the marchioness would bear the cost of that revelation, I would truly be as foolish as both you and she think I am.”

His shoulders eased a fraction, as if it wasn’t exactly the answer he expected, but it would do. “Would you happen to be willing to abandon your plans for the evening? I… need your help. Please.”

Charity stared blankly back at him. Peregrine Fitzroy, asking her for help?

She narrowed her gaze, searching him for any hint that this was a cruel joke.

But, no, the way his face still pinched suggested something was afoot, and with dread, she wondered what had gone wrong now.

But she merely nodded. “I assume this is something you need me to ask of the Queen? I will need a few minutes to change.”

“Of course,” he agreed.

And Charity went back to her rooms, calling for Miller, trying not to let a single breath of what she was feeling show upon her face.

Two of her guards followed them to Peregrine’s carriage waiting outside, climbing onto the footboard at the rear.

The familiar but stern face of Hodges sat in the driver’s seat, and Charity’s eyes flickered over both him and the lord whose arm she held.

Peregrine had gone back to the estate, she realised.

And had somehow made up with Selina’s spy in his house in the bargain.

Peregrine stopped, pulling her to a halt midway along the path to the carriage, where his low voice might not be overheard. “Selina is being falsely accused of the riot at Burlington House and has been taken by the Crown, and I fear only an intervention on your part will save her.”

Surprised, Charity clutched his arm hard to keep her balance.

Selina, Marchioness of Normanby, the woman who had outmanoeuvred Charity at every turn and set in motion the final events that had splintered the two of them apart.

Suddenly his question made far more sense.

But he wanted her to save Selina from the wrath of the Queen?

He waited in silence, as if he expected her to change her mind about leaving with him.