St. Clare saw no humor in her words. Indeed, he seemed to stiffen with something very like anger. “How? Was there an epidemic in the village?”

“Nothing so dramatic as that, thank goodness. An elderly tenant on the outskirts of Beasley Park contracted a virulent strain of the fever. He lasted only four days, and after he was dead, his wife became ill. It was difficult. She had no family or friends. No one to nurse her. I couldn’t let her die alone. I wouldn’t have. My father forbade me going, naturally, but nothing could prevent me.” She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “I stayed with her until she died three days later. By that time, I had the fever myself.”

“And almost succumbed to it.”

“Yes, well, it was a very near thing until Bessie came.”

And just like that, the aristocratic façade dropped and the icy coldness of St. Clare’s countenance melted under a smoldering explosion of temper. “What in blazes were you thinking? Did your own well-being mean nothing to you? Had you no care at all whether you lived or died? My God.” He raked a hand through his hair. “To risk your own life for…who? The village pariah? A person who’d be mourned by no one? Whose death would go unremarked? I cannot credit it. And now you’re ill—”

“No!” she objected.

“You’re ill,” he repeated, glaring at her accusingly. “For nothing. For no bloody reason.”

“Oh, stop ripping up at me! It’s true, my own well-being wasn’t foremost in my mind, but it wasn’t for ‘no bloody reason.’ I had every reason to go to her when she was dying. I had an obligation.”

“Because you must play lady of the manor,” he said scathingly.

“No. No. Not that I wasn’t… But ministering to the sick was never… Oh, drat you! If you must know, I went because the tenant’s wife…” Her palms were damp beneath her gloves. “I’m sorry, Nicholas, but the tenant’s wife was Jenny Seaton.”

This time St. Clare didn’t object to her use of Nicholas’s name. He merely stared at her as if she’d said something to him in a language he couldn’t understand. “What?”

“The year after you left, she married Ned Jensen. Perhaps you remember him. The cantankerous old recluse who used to shout at us whenever we rode past his cottage?” She swallowed. “He was looking for someone to keep house for him and Jenny told him that marrying her would be less expense than hiring a woman from the village.”

“How touching.”

“It was no love match, but they contrived to rub along. Indeed, I think they were both fairly content for the years they had left.”

“They contrived to rub along.” St. Clare’s mouth curved into a slow, derisive smile. “What an epitaph.”