Stapleton nodded. “What of you?” he asked, gaze narrowing at Stephen. “I’ll support Walden’s damned bills and offer Miss Abbott handsome reparation. Tell me what I must do to ensure you leave me and mine in peace, and let’s be done with it.”

“From you, I want nothing. I act only as the agent of those I care about. Keep them happy, and you have nothing to fear from me. I’m off to find Miss Abbott.” He bowed, such as he was able to bow, and left Stapleton to Quinn, Duncan, and Hercules’s tender mercies.

“I loved him,” Lady Champlain said, as she led Abigail down a carpeted corridor. “I was an idiot. Were you an idiot too?”

Abigail did not want to exchange feminine confidences with the widow of the man who’d betrayed her. Her ladyship seemed so wan and weary, though, that to snap out some acerbic rejoinder would have been churlish.

Champlain had been Harmonia’s husband, and she had loved him. Both facts had doubtless caused her ladyship sadness. With some relief, Abigail realized that she had not loved Champlain. She’d been infatuated, smitten, enthralled, swept off her feet by the attentions of a dashing, worldly charmer who had made her feel feminine and desired.

She had not loved Champlain, but she did love Stephen Wentworth.

“I was easy to infatuate,” Abigail said. “I knew nothing of men, I was lonely, and my father had long since stopped expecting me to get up to any mischief. I had become invisible, and at nearly six feet tall.”

“While I am invisible at little over five.” Lady Champlain stopped outside a door on the third floor. “I love that sound.”

A child laughed merrily in the next room, and a man’s softer tones sounded patiently amused.

“The letters, if you please,” Abigail said, as a vast emptiness welled in the region of her heart. “I am here only to retrieve the letters.”

Her ladyship pushed open the door and stopped a few steps into the room. A large oval rug covered most of the floor, and upon the rug sat a small dark-haired boy and a handsome man of about thirty years.

“My two favorite fellows,” her ladyship said, “and you are up to mischief, I see.”

The man got to his feet easily. “A lad is never too young to try his hand at painting. We were making birds. Canaries, because they are yellow,” he said with mock gravity, “and bluebirds, because they are blue.”

“I made a green bird,” the boy said. “When you swirl the paints together they make a new color.” He cocked his head and turned a blue-eyed gaze on Abigail. “You are very tall, miss. Are you the queen?”

“Manners, child,” the man murmured, taking the boy’s hand and pulling him to his feet. “Lady Champlain, might you introduce us?”

Abigail endured the introductions, too drained by the events of the day to muster much curiosity even about the gorgeous Mr. Endymion de Beauharnais.