“You are like a general at the start of the campaign season,” he said. “You’ve come off winter quarters, unsettled by inactivity, and not yet comfortable with life on the march. Every dispatch rider is suspect, every subaltern a potential spy, and the weather itself plots against you. Jessup and Jensen are known to me from my days in the stews, and I vouch for their loyalty. Is there something you aren’t telling me?”

How gently he opened the trapdoor that led to so many bad memories. “There’s much I haven’t told you, all of it pathetic. After Harry died, I used to think I’d caught a glimpse of him, lurking beneath an awning, disappearing around a corner. Dorcas MacKay claims she had the same experiences when her mother died. She’d smell her mother’s perfume without explanation, or think she heard her mama humming a favorite hymn across the corridor.”

Marcus had the knack of holding a lady in his lap so she didn’t feel ridiculous. She felt safe and sleepy and cherished.

“I encountered my father’s ghost once,” he said, “or I believe I did.”

“Tell me.”

“After his death, I became very… contrary, I suppose you’d call it. I was forever eluding my tutors and larking off about the estate. The staff, my sister, Lydia, and tenants kept an eye on me and occasionally had to cart me home when my ambitions exceeded my energies, but for the most part, I was allowed to ramble at will. I was in the orchard, the place where Papa proposed to Mama, and I fell asleep against a venerable apple tree.”

“You’ve never told this to anybody else, have you?”

“Of course not. They would think me daft. When I woke up, Papa was leaning against the next tree, looking as handsome and wonderful as always. He smiled at me—I will never forget that smile—and he said, ‘I am so proud of you, Tremont. Never forget that. I will always be proud of you.’ I blinked and tried to speak, but then he wasn’t there.”

“And you’ve told yourself it was a dream, wishful thinking, or the product of a child’s tired, fanciful mind, but you hope it was real.”

“At the time, I knew it was real. He called me Tremont, and I wasn’t Tremont until Papa died. Ergo, I was looking at an angel, not a memory or a dream. Or so I reasoned in my boyhood. I also knew I could not lose my wits—the Earl of Tremont did not see ghosts in his orchard—and I became passionately devoted to logic and philosophy from that point forward.”

“The men say you used to quote old Greeks and Romans by the quatrain, but I haven’t heard much of that.”