“In which case I’d just much rather leave the entertaining until we’re together, if you don’t mind. I’d like reassurance the first time I play at lady of the manor.”

He placed his pajamas on top of the other clothes. “Well then, why don’t you go up to your family in Scotland? There will be shoots and things, won’t there?”

“Do you want to punish me as well as desert me?” I asked, making him chuckle.

“All right. I can see that a week or so with your sister-in-law would be the ultimate punishment. In that case go up to town and stay with Zou Zou. See a show. Let her buy you clothes.”

I nodded again, still not wanting my voice to betray me. I took a deep breath before I spoke. “Yes, I could do that. I do adore Zou Zou. Or you know what? I could invite my grandfather down to stay. The Times says that the London fogs have begun early this year, and you know he has a bad chest.”

“Good idea.” Darcy gave me a bright smile and my shoulder a squeeze. “Now I must be off or I won’t catch that boat train.”

So at least I knew he was going abroad. I was so tempted to ask which boat he was taking. The Berengaria? Or the ferry across the channel? Or a tramp steamer to Buenos Aires? It could be any of the above.

“I’ll drive you to the station,” I said. “I’ll have Phipps get out the Bentley.”

I constantly surprised myself how easily something like this rolled off my tongue. We had a footman called Phipps. We had a Bentley. We had a house. It seemed like only yesterday that I was camping out in my brother Binky’s London residence, living on baked beans and cleaning other people’s houses for money. Actually all this current bounty was not technically mine. It belonged to Sir Hubert Anstruther, a dashing mountaineer and explorer, my mother’s former husband, or rather one of my mother’s former husbands (she had worked her way through rather a lot of men, some of whom she had actually married). Sir Hubert had become very fond of me and wanted to adopt me. The family had not agreed to that—the family being the royal family, since my father was a grandson of Queen Victoria. You see, I’m not quite royal but related to them—too far from the throne to get a royal allowance or a palace or two, but close enough so that I had to abide by their rules. Not any longer, however. I had been permitted to renounce my place in the line of succession when I married Darcy, a Catholic. No Catholics on the throne of England, ever!