Hart turned to the housekeeper. “Send for the groom, if you please. I want him to hire some horses for her grace and me to ride. The best available.”

As they walked to the lake, accompanied by the tutor and a manservant, and with Finn lolloping on ahead, George took Hart’s arm and said in a low voice, “Do you think we might be dealing with the kind of man who preys on small boys?”

He glanced at her. Trust his wife to voice the unthinkable, the very thing he’d been considering but hadn’t said aloud for fear of upsetting the ladies.

“It’s possible. But let’s check the lake first. It’s just as possible that two small boys could get into trouble together.”

“Let us hope so.” She hugged his arm as they walked along, and it occurred to him he didn’t have to moderate his pace for her. Those long, lovely legs . . .

They found the lake and, as reported, the fishing gear and the little dinghy looked neat and undisturbed. Hart and George walked all around the lake, examining the mud at the lake’s edge, but the only marks were the tracks of birds and of one large, exuberant wolfhound. There were no small human footprints.

When they returned to the house, they found two horses waiting for them, decent enough hacks but nothing special, George said. And then she laughed. “Have you noticed the saddles, Hart?”

It took him a moment to realize that there was no sidesaddle for his wife. “Dammit, they should have known—”

“It’s all right, I have my breeches and my divided skirt upstairs,” George assured him. “And I’m not particularly fond of sidesaddles, so this suits me better.” And she ran up the stairs to change.

*   *   *

Danny Glover’s parents lived in a cottage a couple of miles away. It was part of a small farm where cattle and sheep grazed together. Hens scattered as Hart and George approached on horseback, and from the smell, there was a pigsty nearby.

A woman answered the door. Not wanting the fuss that would no doubt accompany an unexpected call by a duke and duchess, Hart introduced himself as merely Hartley, guardian of Phillip Wooldridge of Lakeside Cottage. Mrs. Glover immediately turned to a small boy about five years old, saying, “Peter, run and fetch your da’. Tell him gentry come calling.” The boy ran off. He was clean and neatly dressed; he didn’t look like the brother of a “rough, ignorant, wild boy.”

Mrs. Glover hesitated, then nervously invited them in. She ushered them into a painfully neat parlor, saying her husband wouldn’t be long. “Better he talk to you.” She then left them to wait, a breach of country hospitality that surprised them.

“Perhaps she’d feel more comfortable talking to you,” Hart murmured.