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Thorn could not blame his friend, though it seemed as though every topic of conversation that presented itself brought unwelcome thoughts with it, as was unavoidable, unless they were to talk of trivialities, such as some impending boxing mill or the latest thrilling on dit .

As the subject of a great deal of gossip himself, Marcus had not the least desire to spread scandal about others.

So he said, ‘Yes, it must be, though she puts a brave face on it. She rests in the daytime as much as she is able, but being in London is tiring enough in itself for her, without mentioning the ridiculous number of events she is obliged to attend with Helena. At least if I am there too, I can make sure she does not exert herself more than she needs.’

‘You hate it all, don’t you?’

‘Can you marvel at it? I would have to be the most unconscionable coxcomb ever born to enjoy the attention I am currently receiving – the extent of it, and the nature of it too.’ He was vehement, but there were others sitting nearby chatting or reading, and so he kept his voice low. Jeremy grimaced in understanding.

Marcus had been promoted after the Allied victory at Salamanca rather than having to purchase his Majority – promoted into dead men’s shoes, of course, as he was never likely to forget – and mentioned by name in dispatches then, and again after the disastrous retreat that was Huebra.

So had many others, of course, and with much greater cause as far as he could tell.

The true heroes of those days were most of them dead.

But it was only when he’d returned wounded to England that he’d realised how much of a public figure he’d become in his absence.

For this, he came to understand once his wound was healed and he began to mix in company, he had in great part Lavinia to thank.

She was still so lovely – she always would be – and in black, she must have been incomparable.

No wonder she dazzled wherever she went.

She had put off her full mourning now, more than a year after Ambrose’s death, but the muted colours – chiefly silver, palest blue and unadorned white – that she always wore became her ethereal beauty astonishingly well.

Her hair was such a pale blonde as almost to be silver itself, though her brows and lashes were dark, and those extraordinary violet-blue eyes were like deep, mysterious pools at midsummer dusk, in which a man might drown.

Poets wrote verses in her praise – so beautiful and so sad, and always (on appropriate occasions) accompanied by her poor fatherless child, as strikingly lovely as she was.

Ladies of a susceptible nature had been known to weep at the mere sight of them together.

Society was disposed to be interested in tragic Lavinia, of course, and once the full details of her truly heartbreaking story were widely known (though surely she had not spread it abroad herself, but only told a very few trusted friends who had shockingly not kept her confidence), she became the sensation of the Season. And so did he.

He could not help being faintly nauseated by it all.

He made a mawkish figure, he thought, in the tale – his chaste young love for her and hers for him, his noble renunciation of her at their fathers’ command, the way he had stepped aside to let his brother wed her, and the distorted, highly sanitised civilian’s-eye view of his subsequent military career.

It was to be understood that his bravery had stemmed from the fact that he no longer cared if he lived or died, like some warrior of legend, as the love of his life was forever lost to him.

And now, of course, the gossip-mongers eagerly picked over the torment he must be undergoing – and Lavinia too, poor suffering soul – to see her widowed, free to marry again, and yet tantalisingly out of his reach.

Or, came the whispers – and this was by far the worst of it as far as Marcus was concerned – was she?

When he had come home and as soon as he was well enough, his mother had put before him, expressionlessly, the legal papers that made his position perfectly clear.

He had read them with an attention almost more painful than the lingering throb of his shoulder.

But he had known it all already. It was not illegal to marry one’s deceased brother’s wife.

It could be done, and was done, no doubt, every day, in every rank of society.

But – was ever a legal judgment more perverse?

– the marriage was voidable; if challenged, ever, for as long as the parties lived, it could be set aside in an instant.

Rendered invalid, as if it had never happened.

Which meant, of course, that any children of such a union would be made illegitimate, with no remedy for it.

Marcus’s heir at present was a distant cousin he barely knew, a clever young lawyer who was not a wealthy man; who could doubt for a second that he would challenge and overturn such a match if Lord Thornfalcon were ever improvident enough to make it?

Of course he would – he had so much to gain, and Marcus so much to lose.

It was unsurprising that his mother, and his sister Helena too now that she was old enough to understand, had the strongest possible objections to such a scandalous marriage.

But he paid them the compliment of believing that they had only a fleeting concern for public notoriety and even for the future of the title, the estate and the name.

No, their worry was for him, because they loved him; for what such a life of uncertainty would do to him, and particularly the bitter knowledge of what he would be inflicting on his innocent unborn children if he chose love over duty this time.

The polite world found the whole situation highly romantic, as if his deepest feelings were some sort of play set out for public entertainment, but he had no taste for melodrama and his opinions were far, far otherwise.

He was living a species of nightmare as he smiled and danced and rode in the park and kept his face impassive all the while, and if his mother and sister hadn’t needed him, London would have been the last place in the world he’d choose to set foot in.

Lavinia, in one of their endless, tormenting conversations, just last night, had accused him of caring only for stuffy respectability and the future of his noble name.

For base inheritance and worldly gain. She could not help but marvel at it, she told him often.

She had thought she had known him, that their souls were as one, indivisible and eternal, but now she realised that she had been sadly mistaken.

‘I would give up the world for you,’ she said, those extraordinary eyes huge and tragic in her pale little face.

Who but a heartless monster could make her suffer so?

‘I would risk my reputation, everything, to have your love again, to stand beside you proudly and openly as your wife. I would defy everyone and everything, and if anyone dared to question our marriage and brand me a whore, I would accept it as long as I had you. But I understand now that you would not do the same for me. It is excessively odd,’ she went on lightly, each word worse than a bayonet-thrust, her melodious voice tinkling like silver bells, ‘that you are the hero of the hour and feted everywhere, and yet in this, I am braver than you. I can only suppose—’ and here her voice broke at last ‘—that you never really loved me. Only desired me. And even that has left you. Has it not?’

She had a room kept ready for her in his town house – she had that right, as his brother’s widow and mother of a Thornfalcon child – and sometimes, she came to sleep there.

There could be no impropriety, no whisper of scandal, since his mother and his sister lived there too.

They were all one family, or supposed to be.

The Dowager, frail and unwell as she was, must welcome the chance of spending precious time with her only grandchild, and of course someone as impeccably behaved as her daughter-in-law would not dream of denying her that.

Lavinia had been heard to say publicly and frequently that never, never, no matter that it caused her the acutest pain to pass over the threshold of the house that had once been hers, would she think of keeping grandmother and granddaughter apart.

If angelic little Priscilla should be present when these trembling words were spoken, as she often was, the fairy-like child would clutch at her mother’s hand and say, in her adorably high, piping tones, ‘Oh, Mama, dearest, I am sorry if it hurts you to be here, but do not keep me from Grandmama, I pray! I do love her so! And brave Uncle Marcus too!’ Ladies who witnessed this manner of affecting scene had often to be revived afterwards with sal volatile and hartshorn.

But on the occasions Lavinia chose to spend the night in Half-Moon Street at Thornfalcon House, it was a very different matter.

The sensitive ladies would have been shocked to see it, and the printmakers delighted.

It was all too easy to imagine what they would have made of what they witnessed.

Once her child had been put to bed, once the mansion was quiet, Lavinia would slip silently along the corridor.

Marcus could have locked his door; he should have.

But then he would have to lie there in the darkness waiting to hear the handle turn, dreading it and wanting it at the same time.

Because he knew that if the door was not barred to her, she would appear in his bedchamber in her nightgown and robe again, barefoot, beautiful as a dream, and do her very best to drive him out of his senses.