“Ever since I read that passage in the paper this morning, I knew…” She hesitated. For hours she’d been fretting over how she would explain things, and yet now, sitting face-to-face with him, she felt as ill-prepared as ever. “I won’t be the cause of you losing everything that you’ve worked for.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that…if my mere presence jeopardizes your claim, perhaps it’s best if I return home.”

His gaze darkened. “So, you are going, then.”

“You knew?”

“I paid a call on Beresford and his mother this morning. They said they were traveling down to Beasley Park tomorrow as Fred’s special guests.”

“Did they indeed.” She felt a sharp stab of irritation. The same irritation she’d felt when Fred had dropped in unannounced to tell her of his plans. “Fred’s never before made free with invitations to Beasley. The insufferable swine. I expect he’s trying to get a rise out of me.”

“Not out of you. Out of me.” A wry smile curved St. Clare’s lips. “He believes that by aligning himself with my enemies he can do me some harm.”

Maggie didn’t see how St. Clare could be so calm about it all. “Can’t he? If he takes the two of them down to Beasley and they begin to ask questions—”

“Questions about what?” He lowered his voice. “I haven’t been back to Somerset since the night I left. No one knows me as I am now.”

“They know you as you were then,” she whispered back, conscious of Jane’s and Lord Mattingly’s presence across the room. “And Lord St. Clare isn’t so different from Nicholas Seaton as you imagine. Fred might be blinded by your fine clothes and gentlemanlike manner—he could never see past the surface of things—but I knew you from the first moment I set eyes on you. And so might others at Beasley. There are still servants remaining from your time there. Mr. Entwhistle, for one.”

“That old relic,” St. Clare said. “He must be pushing ninety.”

“Eighty, more like. But there’s nothing wrong with his faculties. He’s still the steward, and sharp as a tack besides. He knows everything about everything at Beasley. If your cousin and his mother take to asking questions—”

“You believe you can prevent them? They’ll be Fred’s guests, not yours.”

Her spine stiffened. “I’m still mistress of Beasley Park. And I can handle Fred—so long as I’m not obliged to be alone with him in a darkened carriage again.”

St. Clare’s smile vanished. It was replaced by a forbidding look, almost frightening in its intensity. “What had he to say for himself on that count?”