“It was morning before you got here, but yes, you’re right. And I love you.”

“You’ve said it ten times,” she said, coming close for a soft, slow kiss. “But what I want to know is—how many times have you thought it?”

“Impossible to count,” he said against her lips.

“Even for you?”

“Infinite,” he murmured, sliding her back down to the mattress. “Or maybe . . .”

Infinity plus one.

Epilogue

Epilogue

Pleinsworth House

London

The following spring

Marriage or death: the only two ways to avoid conscription into the Smythe-Smith Quartet. Or perhaps more accurately: the only two ways to extricate oneself from its clutches.

Which was why no one could understand (except Iris, but more on that later) how it came to pass that in three hours the Smythe-Smith Quartet would take the “stage” for their annual musicale, and Lady Sarah Prentice, recently married and very much alive, was going to have to sit down at the pianoforte, grit her teeth, and play.

The irony, Honoria had said to Sarah, was exquisite.

No, Sarah had said to Hugh, the irony was not exquisite. The irony should have been beaten with a cricket bat and stamped into the ground.

If irony had a corporeal form, of course. Which it didn’t, much to Sarah’s disappointment. The urge to swing a cricket bat at something other than a cricket ball was positively life-altering.

But there were no bats available in the Pleinsworth music room, so she had instead appropriated the bow to Harriet’s violin and was using it in the way God had surely intended.

To threaten Daisy.

“Sarah!” Daisy shrieked.

Sarah growled. She actually growled.

Daisy ran for cover behind the pianoforte. “Iris, make her stop!”

Iris raised a brow as if to say, Do you really think I would rise from this chair to help you, my exceedingly annoying younger sister, today of all days?

And yes, Iris did know how to say all that with a quirk of the brow. It was a remarkable talent, really.

“All I did,” Daisy pouted, “was say that she could have a slightly better attitude. I mean, really.”

“In retrospect,” Iris said in a very dry voice, “that may have not been the best choice of words.”

“She’s going to make us look bad!”

“She,” Sarah said menacingly, “is the only reason you have a quartet.”

“I still find it difficult to believe that we did not have anyone available to take Sarah’s place on the pianoforte,” Daisy said.

Iris gaped at her. “You say that as if you suspect Sarah of foul play.”

“Oh, she has good reason to suspect foul play,” Sarah said, advancing with the bow.

“We’re running out of cousins,” Harriet said, briefly looking up from her notes. She had spent the entire altercation writing everything down. “After me there is only Elizabeth and Frances before we must turn to a new generation.”