Was he worried, then? “I’ve been failing my daughter since the day I put her into Etta Wilson’s arms, Rothhaven. I expect Ivy will be wroth with me—if I’m ever introduced to her—and that more failure awaits me in the mothering department. She’s my daughter, though, and I hope she will eventually see the advantages of attaching herself to a ducal household. In any case, her well-being must come first. I simply want to see her.”

“You long to see her, though you hope for much more.”

The coach was barely past the village, and the journey would last for hours. Perhaps rolling along in the dark, spatting and sparring, was a metaphor for marriage, but Constance believed in beginning as she intended to go on, even with the man she loved to distraction.

“If you cannot conduct a civil conversation, sir, I will ride up with John Coachman.”

Rothhaven guffawed, the first such expostulation Constance had heard from him.

“You’d do it too, and probably take the reins from him before another mile’s progress. Has it occurred to you, my love, that in addition to the fact that you and I are the aristocracy Mr. Shaw so detests, I am also afflicted with the falling sickness?”

“And why is that detail relevant?”

Rothhaven kissed her cheek, for no reason Constance could think of. “Some consider the falling sickness a curse, evidence of divine judgment, a mark of the devil.”

“Some are ridiculous.” Constance took off her bonnet and put it on the opposite seat next to Rothhaven’s top hat. “I was poor, Rothhaven. Grindingly, wretchedly poor. I picked oakum, I carried hod, I ran errands all over York in my bare feet in wintertime and was glad for the coin. The same ignoramuses who think the falling sickness is a sign of God’s disfavor think the poor are lazy and stupid. You never saw a harder-working, more resourceful, wily, self-disciplined, and determined batch of people than the nearly destitute. Before the hope gets kicked out of them, they are unstoppably ingenious and tireless in their efforts to survive.”

“Is that why you were so determined to thwart Soames’s awful treatment of his patients? Because you’d experienced oppression firsthand?”

“I had certainly been on nodding terms with despair by then. Soames was evil, treating people who should have been guests in his home like specimens or livestock.”

Rothhaven turned down the lamp so the coach was all but dark. “I fault my father for many, many things, but he at least did not give Soames guardianship of me. I later learned that Soames was legally in no position of authority over any of us.”

“He was confident that your families would not trifle with his experiments. Vile man. Is obtaining guardianship complicated?”