“She’s your daughter,” Maddie pointed out. “What did you expect? Do tell me that you’ve managed to find a good nanny?”

“Not yet,” Ophelia said.

“I’ll find you one,” her cousin promised.

Ophelia didn’t want a nanny, if the truth be known. Kind people kept recommending nannies: stern, kindly, scholarly, playful . . . So far, she’d managed to find something wrong with each of them.

Peter had died a few weeks before Viola was born, so he’d never met his daughter. In his absence, she and Viola had become as thick as thieves, as her mother put it. If Ophelia hired a nanny, that nanny would know everything about caring for a two-year-old girl. She would know better than Ophelia.

There was an excellent possibility that Ophelia was making all sorts of mistakes that a proper nanny would avoid. She had nursed Viola herself rather than hire a wet nurse, for example, which one matron had told her was certain to lead to an unhealthy relationship with her child.

She had enjoyed every moment of that mistake.

Next to her, Maddie let out a little shriek. “Oh, look! I didn’t know he was coming. I haven’t seen the duke in London for a year . . . No, well over a year.” She turned to Ophelia. “Remember what I told you? There’s only one man in the world who could change my mind.”

“About what?” Ophelia asked absently. Perhaps she would take Viola to the park tomorrow. Her townhouse was only a block from Hyde Park, and Viola loved to visit the duck pond.

But her coachman had said he smelled a winter storm. Bisquet was a country man, and she trusted his nose, even though the only thing she could smell in London was coal smoke.

“You never remember anything I say,” Maddie complained. “You’re as bad as my husband, but you’re my only cousin, and you ought to be more attentive.”

“I’m sorry,” Ophelia said. “What did you tell me?”

“That I plan never to bed a man again in the whole of my life.”

Ophelia nodded. “All right.”

“Aren’t you going to dissuade me?” Maddie opened her pretty blue eyes very wide.

“Why would I? Childbirth is extremely dangerous.”

“My husband has two mistresses,” Maddie said, “so it stands to reason that I should take a lover. Or three.”

“That seems excessive to me.”

“There is one man in London who might change my mind—and it isn’t my husband; I can promise you that.”

“It would be hard to have an affaire with one’s own husband,” Ophelia pointed out.

“I would give my virtue to only one man,” Maddie said, showing her fine flair for drama. She nodded toward the other side of the chamber. “That duke.”