For a moment neither man spoke. Then Alex’s voice emerged raw, half strangled. “Charlotte was having no problem with the birth until I appeared, Patrick. You know that. You know it was my fault. Are you trying to break my heart?”

The silence was broken only by the rattle of carriages passing.

“Oh God,” Patrick said quietly. “I should just shoot myself, shouldn’t I?”

At that, Alex smiled a little. “Not without giving me a chance first.”

The two men came together in an improvised, unfamiliar hug. Patrick swallowed hard. Alex roughly patted him on the back. He didn’t know what to say.

“There’s only what—two or three months left?”

Patrick looked at his brother helplessly. “I don’t know. Sophie and I do not discuss the child.”

“The whole town is chattering about the fact that you didn’t tell Sophie that she was being made a duchess. What in the bloody hell were you thinking, Patrick?”

“I forgot. I just forgot.” He shrugged. “You know how little titles mean to me. I thought Sophie would be happy to be a duchess, but she’s furious because I didn’t inform her. We don’t really talk much anymore.”

Alex nodded, accepting silently what he had already sensed. His brother’s marriage was in a dangerously fragile state.

“I believe Sophie is beginning her seventh month,” Alex said, no trace of judgment in his tone. “She told Charlotte that she was going to stop attending public events after Lady Greenleaf’s ball tomorrow night.”

Patrick had had no idea that Sophie was giving up the rest of the season. “I’ll accompany her,” he said quietly. He knew that Sophie often joined Charlotte and Alex in the evening.

Alex nodded. “I don’t suppose it will do any good to say that you might have a conversation with your wife?”

Patrick winced. “I shall try, Alex.”

That night Clemens scratched on Sophie’s bedchamber door and informed Simone that the duke had announced his intention to eat supper at home. The master hadn’t eaten in the house for two or three weeks, and Clemens thought, rightly, that the duchess ought to know that she would be eating with her husband rather than alone.

Sophie stopped short in the middle of fastening a bracelet on her wrist. Simone’s eyes flashed to her mistress’s face, then dropped to the floor. The whole household knew, of course, that the master and mistress were estranged.