“Well, Arabella was one thing.” Braddon’s eyes were burning now. “But Madeleine is different. She’s going to be mine and mine alone, forever.”

“An unusual arrangement,” Alex observed.

Braddon swung belligerently over to Alex, for all the world like a bulldog trying to answer two masters. “Not at all. My own father kept one mistress for thirty-six years. Lord knows I’m still paying her bills. Not that I mind. She’s a good old thing, and kind. She was beautiful too, not like m’mother. I go and have tea with her sometimes, talk about m’father.”

Alex stated the obvious: “Your wife … your future wife … is a very beautiful woman.”

“It’s not the same.” Braddon was deadly serious now, trying to explain something that he had painstakingly worked out in the years since his father had first introduced him to Mrs. Burns. The former Earl of Slaslow had demanded complete respect from his heir and had sent him a look that shook Braddon to his bones when he didn’t immediately bow. And so Braddon had bowed, as deeply as if Mrs. Burns were King George himself.

And then they had sat down to tea, he and his father and Mrs. Burns, and he’d looked with fascination at the beautifully furnished house, the elegant gardens visible through wide Venetian windows. Finally at the picture of a child on the piano—his brother! Only to find out from Mrs. Burns that the brother had died, dead at age seven. His father had moved a bit creakily over to Mrs. Burns and held her shoulders tightly after she said that.

And Braddon understood, without rancor, that his father had loved that boy more than he loved Braddon himself, or his sisters. And that he loved Mrs. Burns, and not his wife.

It had taken hard thinking, something Braddon wasn’t good at. But he knew that that, what his father had with Mrs. Burns, that was something he wanted for himself too. So when his father was dying, a huge mound of flesh in the master bedchamber, he bribed his father’s valet to keep everyone out of the room for an hour. And then he smuggled in Mrs. Burns.

Before he left the room he saw her sit on the bed and lean over, and his father, who hadn’t spoken for two days, whispered “beloved.” When the old Earl of Slaslow died that night, without saying another word, Braddon’s mind was made up.

Ay, he’d get married as his witch of a mother kept demanding. And he would have the children required, as many as necessary till a boy sprouted from the pile. So far he’d asked three gentlewomen to marry him; the third had finally taken the lure. So that part of his life was taken care of. But he wanted to have a Mrs. Burns too, a Mrs. Burns of his own.

The miracle of it was that suddenly he had found a Mrs. Burns.

“Her name is Madeleine, Miss Madeleine Garnier,” he said, his jaw stiff in case Patrick tried to make some prior claim. “Do you know her?”