Tremont tousled his hair. “Because you are desperate to get into the fresh air, but please recall that the bakery will not grace our itinerary unless your behavior is exemplary.”

“Be good,” Matilda said, wrapping a scarf about the boy’s ears, “or no biscuit.”

“I will be a saint, Mama. An angel. I will be perfect, and you will be so proud of me!”

He bolted out the door and up the steps, and true to his stated intentions, he for once stood at the top of the steps and waited for the adults to join him.

Tremont offered his arm, and Matilda had no choice but to take it. At the crossings, Tommie dutifully took her free hand, which was their rule more honored in the breach. When they reached the park, Tremont suggested that if Tommie ran to the large oak fifty yards off, Tremont would time him.

The earl produced a pocket watch, and Tommie scampered across the grass.

“Is that a trick your sister pulled on you?” Matilda asked.

“My father. I was his only son, a long-awaited miracle, or maybe he understood that he and I might not have long together. The distances gradually got longer, and I picked up speed. Papa made room in his schedule for me, and I adored him. He showed me all the best Viking sailing trees and told me Norse legends when I had nightmares. I understand why my mother so desperately grieved his passing. I suppose you miss your late husband?”

A complicated question. “I’ve been widowed longer than I was married, and yet, sometimes it feels as if I’ll come around a corner, and there Harry will be, grinning at me as if the past few years were just some sort of joke. He had a perverse sense of humor.”

“Any sense of humor must be a boon to those who have one,” Tremont said as Tommie tagged the tree and started back at a trot rather than a sprint. “I could tell you that I was just passing by your door and taken with a sudden notion for some company in the park, but I’d be prevaricating if I did.”

Matilda endured the same sinking dread she’d suffered when she’d realized her courses were late. Tremont was about to proposition her, and he was doing so honestly.

Damn him for that. “I much prefer plain speaking, my lord.”

Tommie stopped several yards away and flopped dramatically onto a bench.

“I note that your home is not well heated,” Tremont said quietly. “That the boy needs a new coat, that you accepted a coin from me that you’d rather have graciously refused. You are taking in mending, which is surely the hallmark of a lady fallen upon difficult times.”

“I am a lady.” In only the most attenuated sense, because Papa had been a vicar.