Fleur sucked in a breath, staring at the shears with horror. “I’m sorry,” she stuttered. “I’m so—I—I—” With shaking hands she set the shears down on the bench. Her movements were slow and careful, as if she were measuring them out in her head. “I’m going to go away,” she with quiet hysteria. “I shall become a widow. It will be best for everyone.”

“For the love of—” Iris cut herself off, trying to control her temper. She took a breath, and then another, letting the air out in a slow tight stream. “You are not making sense,” she said. “You know as well as anyone that if you wish to be a true mother to this child, you ought to be married.”

Fleur hugged her arms to her body, looking away, through the bower’s opening toward the distant horizon.

Iris finally voiced the question that had to be asked. “Does he even know?”

Fleur grew so stiff she trembled. With the tiniest of motions, she shook her head.

“Don’t you think you should tell him?”

“It would break his heart,” Fleur whispered.

“Because . . . ?” Iris prompted. And if she sounded derisive, well, she hadn’t much patience when she’d entered this conversation. Now it was bloody well gone.

“Because he loves me,” Fleur said simply.

Iris closed her eyes, summoning patience and an even demeanor as she asked, “Do you love him?”

“Of course I do!” Fleur cried. “What sort of woman do you think I am?”

“I don’t know,” Iris said plainly. And when Fleur drew back with an affronted glare, she added, somewhat irritably, “Do you know what sort of woman I am?”

Fleur stood stiff as a board, then finally dipped her chin with a curt, “Fair enough.”

“If you love Mr. Burnham,” Iris said with patience that was more forced than felt, “surely you see that you must tell him about the baby so that he may marry you. I realize that he is not what your family hoped for you—”

“He is a good man!” Fleur interrupted. “I won’t have you denigrating him.”

Lord help me, Iris thought. How could she talk sense when Fleur’s every sentence contradicted the last?

“I would not dream of speaking ill of Mr. Burnham,” Iris said carefully. “I was saying only that—”

“He is a wonderful man.” Fleur crossed her arms belligerently, and Iris wondered if she’d even noticed that no one was arguing with her. “Honorable and true.”

“Yes, of course—”

“Better than any of the so-called”—she sneered the last—“gentlemen I see at local assemblies.”

“Then you should marry him.”

“I can’t!”

Iris took a long, steadying breath through her nose. She was never going to be the sort of woman who cradled distraught friends and sisters in her arms and murmured, “There, there.”

She decided she was at ease with that.