“Oh.” She flushed more deeply, and lowered her lashes. “Why—thank you. What a kind thing to say!”

“Not at all. Will I fetch you a kipper?”

They ate in a pleasant silence for a few moments, and Grey’s thoughts had begun to drift toward a contemplation of the day’s activities, when Olivia’s voice pulled him back to the present moment.

“Have you never thought of marriage for yourself, John?”

He plucked a bun from the basket on the table, taking care not to roll his eyes. The newly betrothed and married of either sex invariably believed it their sacred duty to urge others to share their happy state.

“No,” he said equably, breaking the bread. “I see no pressing need to acquire a wife. I have no estate or household that requires a mistress, and Hal is making an adequate job of continuing the family name.” Hal’s wife, Minnie, had just presented her husband with a third son—the family ran to boys.

Olivia laughed.

“Well, that is true,” she agreed. “And I suppose you enjoy playing the gay bachelor, with all the ladies swooning after you. They do, you know.”

“Oh, la.” He made a dismissive gesture with the butter knife, and resumed his attention to the bun. Olivia seemed to take the hint, and retired into the mysteries of a fruit compote, leaving him to organize his thoughts.

The chief business of the day must be the O’Connell affair, of course. His inquiries into Trevelyan’s private life had yielded more mystery than answer so far, but his investigation of the Sergeant’s murder had produced still less in the way of results.

Inquiries into the Stokes family had revealed them to be a polyglot crew descended from a Greek sailor who had jumped ship in London some forty years earlier, whereupon he had promptly met and married a girl from Cheapside, taken her name—very sensibly, as his own was Aristopolous Xenokratides—and settled down to produce a numerous family, most of whom had promptly returned to the sea like spawning efts. Iphigenia, stranded on shore by the accident of her gender, ostensibly earned her living by the needle, with occasional financial augmentations offered by assorted gentlemen with whom she had lived, Sergeant O’Connell being the most recent of these.

Grey had set Malcolm Stubbs to explore the family’s further connexions, but he had little hope of this producing anything helpful.

As for Finbar Scanlon and his wife—

“Have you ever been in love, John?”

He looked up, startled, to see Olivia looking earnestly at him over the teapot. Evidently she had not abandoned her inquiries, after all, but had merely been occupied with the consumption of breakfast.

“Well . . . yes,” he said slowly, unsure whether this was mere familial curiosity or something more.

“But you did not marry. Why was that?”

Why was that, indeed. He took a deep breath.