Once they reached the ice-carving pavilion, they began walking about, admiring the carvings taking shape under the busy chisels of master carvers. She rounded a six-foot lump of ice—destined to be a reproduction of St. Paul’s Tower, or so the carver informed them—and ran straight into the Duke of Lindow.

Not just the duke either, but Lady Woolhastings beside him, looking remarkably elegant in a sable-lined pelisse with exquisite butter-yellow gloves with long fringes at the wrist. No one would say that Lady Woolhastings was beautiful, but anyone from the Queen to a scullery maid would have known she was a lady with impeccable bloodlines. Her long face and limpid eyes had the unmistakable stamp of the peerage.

Ophelia realized instantly that her unpowdered hair had freed itself from the braided knot her maid had fixed in the morning. Red curls were waving around her eyes. Her rabbit fur hood, while warm and certainly economical, was hardly fashionable.

Edith Woolhastings’s eyes passed over it and then over Viola’s little face, framed in the same fur. She didn’t sneer; she was far too well-bred for that. But she looked indifferent, which was somehow even worse. “Is this your daughter, Lady Astley?” she inquired, as politeness compelled her to say something. “She has the look of your late husband, Sir Peter.”

Ophelia registered that Lady Woolhastings likely considered her final remark to be a compliment. She dropped a curtsy, noticing in turn that the lady graced her with no more than a nod of the head. Well, Lady Woolhastings was a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and likely took her position very seriously. Ophelia suddenly remembered Peter describing the lady as vexed by a joke, as is often the case with someone who has no sense of humor.

How terrible to marry someone with no sense of humor.

She turned to the Duke of Lindow, but he bowed abruptly and their eyes didn’t meet.

“We’re on our way to a sleigh ride,” Lady Woolhastings said languidly. “Lindow has arranged everything so that we will take sleighs up to the Thames to my house. Aren’t you tired, holding that child?” she asked Lord Melton. “Perhaps Lady Astley’s groom should return her to the carriage.”

“Not a bit of it,” Lord Melton said, bouncing Viola in his arms so that she crowed with delight.

“I came to show her the fair,” Ophelia said mildly. “I can hardly do that if she is tucked away in the carriage.”

“So this is your daughter,” Hugo said. “Viola, am I right?”

Viola gave him her cheerful grin and clapped her hands.

Ophelia met his eyes, ready to kick him in the shins if he gave Viola an indifferent look, the way Lady Woolhastings had.