“I take it back. I will kill him even if he’s already dead. I knew Champlain, I know his widow. He could have plundered any number of willing citadels. He should not have trifled with you.”

“Oh, he loved me. Said so himself, wrote the words many times. I only learned he had a wife after I’d conceived. He loved his wife too, and would never give her cause to regret their marriage. But what did it matter that he was married when he would cheerfully set me up in my own establishment and make sure the child wanted for nothing?”

“I hope you hit him, Abigail. I hope you kicked him right in his courtesy title.”

So fierce, for a man who couldn’t kick anybody. “I almost burned his letters. Mon petit agneau chéri and Mein liebstes Häschen…As if I could be anybody’s dearest little lamb or favorite bunny rabbit. I should have burned them. I lost the baby a month later. A stillborn boy.”

The words were simple, the emotions complicated. She had eventually been relieved not to face endless scandal, not to visit illegitimacy on her firstborn. But the relief had been tiny, belated, and guilty—also vastly outweighed by sorrow.

“You kept the letters to punish yourself, didn’t you?” Stephen stroked her shoulder, as if they had all the time and privacy in the world. “You kept them as a reproach, and you became an inquiry agent because you wanted to preserve other young women from having to pay for trusting the wrong man.”

Perhaps she had. Abigail had never considered her motivations, beyond keeping a roof over her head and maintaining her independence.

“Champlain died within two years,” she said, “and destroying the letters seemed overly dramatic. They are mostly travelogues of his gallivanting on the Continent. Fine beer here, excellent wine there, an impressive violinist at some comtesse’s chateau. That should have told me something.”

Stephen hugged her, a quick squeeze about the shoulders, then took up the reins. “He was a shallow, vain, overly indulged heir. They are thick on the ground and a disgrace to the peerage. I am sorry about the child, Abigail. You grieved that loss irrespective of Champlain’s stupidity.”

Nobody had consoled her for the loss of the child, nobody had even known of it until this moment—nobody except Champlain and a grim-faced, taciturn midwife.

“I grieve,” Abigail said, as the horse toddled on. “I grieve, but I don’t rage as much as I used to.”

“That’s like my knee,” Lord Stephen said. “The damned thing won’t get any better, and it probably will get worse. Bloody unfair, pardon my language, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I sulk and rage, then get on with the next experiment, not that a bad knee and a lost child are of the same magnitude. Did you name the baby?”

“A stillborn child cannot be baptized.”

The gig tooled along through the pretty afternoon, the gleaming surface of the Serpentine winking through the trees. Like Lord Stephen, Abigail had shocked herself by reposing this confidence in another.