“I cannot argue with you about Dunacre,” he said slowly, “and the men have kept my confidence as well. Powell knows, as do my mother and sister. The memory troubles me far less than it used to.” And making this confession to Matilda had shoved the whole business even further from the central location in Tremont’s awareness that it had once occupied. “Would you marry the scoundrel again?”

Matilda took her time answering. “Yes, but I would have guarded my heart. I saw Harry as my savior, plucking me from the misery of the vicarage, preventing me from ruining my own good name by escorting me into the ever-respectable bounds of holy matrimony.”

“Harry was escorting himself into possession of your settlement portion.”

She nodded. “He could not get the house—that is my dower house, essentially—but before he died, he was beginning to drop hints that the time had come to sell it. Harry spent every groat he could get his hands on, and the house was the last asset I had left to bequeath to my son.”

Tremont added some jam tarts to the plate that held her sandwiches. “Battle lines were being drawn?”

“Hard for a woman to draw battle lines, my lord, when she has no money of her own, her husband stands nigh half a foot taller than she, and he is willing to use a mere infant as a bargaining chip. Harry used to call me Miss Dauntless, but the name came to feel more like a taunt rather than a fond nickname.”

Tremont made himself ask the next question. He would rather remain in ignorance of the answer, but he did not want Matilda to be alone with the truth.

“Did he beat you?”

“He did not need to.”

While she munched on a sandwich, Tremont silently counted backward from ten in Latin. “Because of the boy.”

“For all your fine manners, you are a discerning man, my lord. I considered taking Tommie and running to my aunt many times after my uncle died, but the authorities would have forced Aunt to hand me and Tommie right back over to Harry.”

If a deserter turned himself in, his punishment was usually to be shipped to the thick of the fighting, or worse, to the tropics, where disease would kill him as surely as any French bayonet could. If he did not turn himself in, he faced death upon capture. Parallels between enlisted military service and marriage began to insinuate themselves into Tremont’s thoughts.

“We get into situations,” he said, “where our choices are among bad and worse options. Did you kill your husband?” Did he hope she had?