“Nanny to— Oh, my.”

“Don’t laugh,” Sarah warned.

“I wasn’t going to,” Iris clearly lied.

“Honoria insisted. She thinks he won’t feel welcome if one of us doesn’t see to his happiness and inclusion.”

“And she asked you to nanny him?” Iris gave her a dubious stare, always an unsettling expression. There was something about Iris’s eyes, that watery pale blue and the lashes so fine they were almost invisible. She could be rather unnerving.

“Well, no,” Sarah admitted, “not in so many words.” Not in any words, to be truthful, and in fact, Honoria had specifically denied those words, but it did make for a better story to call herself a nanny.

At functions such as these, one had to have something good about which to complain. It was rather like those boys at Cambridge she’d met last spring. They only seemed happy when they’d been able to moan about how much work they had to do.

“What does she want you to do?” Iris asked.

“Oh, this and that. I’m to sit with him tomorrow at the wedding breakfast. Rupert’s taken ill,” she added as an aside.

“Well, that’s good, at least,” Iris murmured.

Sarah acknowledged this with a brief nod as she continued. “And she specifically asked me to entertain Lord Hugh before supper.”

Iris glanced over her shoulder. “Is he here yet?”

“No,” Sarah said with a happy sigh.

“Don’t get too complacent,” Iris warned. “He’ll be down. If Honoria asked you to watch out for him, she will have asked him—quite specifically—to come to supper.”

Sarah stared at Iris in horror. Honoria had said she wasn’t trying to make a match of the two of them . . . “Surely you don’t think—”

“No, no,” Iris said with a snort, “she wouldn’t dare try to play matchmaker. Not with you.”

Sarah’s lips came together to ask her what she meant by that, but before she could make a sound, Iris added, “You know Honoria. She likes everything to be neat and tidy. If she wants you to look after Lord Hugh, she’ll make sure he’s here to need looking after.”

Sarah considered this for a moment, then gave a nod of concurrence. Honoria was like that. “Well,” she declared, because she always did like a declarative well. “It’s going to make for a miserable two days, but I promised Honoria, and I always keep my obligations.”

If Iris had been sipping a drink, she would have sprayed it across the room. “You?”

“What do you mean, me?” Sarah demanded. Iris looked as if she was about to chortle with amusement.

“Oh, please,” Iris said, in that scornful way one could adopt only with family and still hope to be on speaking terms the next day, “you are the last person who can claim to keep all of her obligations.”

Sarah drew back, deeply affronted. “I beg your pardon.”

But if Iris saw Sarah’s distress, she did not notice. Or did not care. “Does your memory not stretch back to last April?” Iris prompted. “April the fourteenth, to be precise?”