“Why . . . only if you want to leave.”

“Why should I want to leave you?”

“Because it’s unclean!”

“Look,” he says, resuming the buttons, “if you don’t want me to touch you, I won’t touch you. But I’ll be damned if I spend the night in any other bed but yours. There’s a particular lump in your mattress that I simply can’t do without.”

She laughs. He stays. They whisper and cuddle and kiss each other, and she doesn’t remember falling asleep. But she does remember waking. That’s because the house starts shaking.

“What the devil?” Wilfred growls in English, bolting upright beside her.

“I think it’s the door.”

He looks out the window. “It’s not even dawn, by God. Stay here.”

“You can’t—”

But he does. Throws on his dressing gown—of course he keeps one in the wardrobe—and an expression of vicious resolve, and simply marches out the door as if he owns the place.

Elfriede stares at the door in horror, bedclothes clutched to her chest. Follow him? Stay abed and trust in Wilfred’s military training? She throws off the covers. The pounding stops. Voices rise up the stairway. Wilfred, of course.

And a woman. Who speaks in German.

Helga is a baron’s daughter, a baron’s sister, and a baron’s aunt. (Through marriage, she’s also the sister of a minor prince, though at some point you have to stop counting.) Is she appalled beyond her worst possible nightmare to discover her brother’s widow almost in flagrante with an English lover, inside this house she shares with her late husband’s mistress and bastard children, in Florida of all places? One can only imagine, because Helga’s been bred to maintain an icy resilience in the face of such outrage to decent behavior.

“I’m so sorry to arrive at such an inconvenient hour,” she says, casting a slight, proud glance at Wilfred’s dressing gown, “but I’m afraid the train was delayed for some time outside of a town named Savannah, or I should have appeared yesterday evening.”

“Think nothing of it, Fraulein von Kleist,” Wilfred says. “Would you like tea? Coffee, perhaps? I imagine the housekeeper’s awake.”

“No, thank you. Elfriede, you may show me to a spare bedroom. If you have one.” (This last with a telling, lifted eyebrow.) Then, to some patch of skin in the middle of Wilfred’s forehead: “You may bring up my luggage, sir.”

Elfriede leads Helga upstairs. Shows her the bathroom while Wilfred stacks her trunks at the foot of the bed of the second-best spare bedroom. (He still nominally occupies the best one.) An awkward moment passes as he makes his exit and they’re forced to maneuver around each other in the corridor. For some reason, the children haven’t wakened. Charlotte’s probably still unconscious.