He touched his fingers to the brim of his top hat, a jaunty tinker flirting with a lady far above his station, as jaunty tinkers were wont to do.

Constance crossed the street to the inn and climbed the steps to the inn’s best rooms. She and Rothhaven were Mr. and Mrs. Rothmere here, only a slight distortion of the truth. She used her key to let herself into the sitting room and came upon her duke asleep on the sofa, boots off, shirt open at the neck, a pillow behind his head.

Constance refastened the lock, and when she turned away from the door, Rothhaven was regarding her.

“Don’t get up,” she said, taking the chair at an angle to the sofa. “I gave Stephen the bare outline of our call on Reverend Shaw. Stephen—properly attired—will meet us for a private dinner. He asked me what my next steps will be, and I hadn’t an answer for him.”

Rothhaven sat up and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “You must not despair, Constance. You have come far today, and Ivy herself welcomed you with open arms. For her to know that you did not willingly part from her, that you searched for her until you found her, that you want her in your life, will mean more to her than you can know.”

He spoke from the bitter experience of a boy banished by his own father for an ailment that boy could not help.

“What was the worst part?” Constance asked, shifting to take the place beside him. “When you were trapped out on the moors in that awful place, what was the worst part?”

He tucked an arm around her shoulders, as if perhaps he thought better that way, and some of the misery in Constance’s heart eased.

“Three demons converged,” he said, “to nearly steal the spark of reason from my mind and the humanity from my soul. First, I was alone. Second, I had no idea if I would ever return to a life I could enjoy living. Third, I saw no point to my continued incarceration. I wasn’t getting better, I wasn’t serving a penance for a crime I’d committed, I wasn’t earning somebody else’s happiness with my misery. The suffering of those interned in Soames’s hospital was entirely unredeemed, potentially endless, and utterly meaningless.”

“And of those three horrors—the isolation, the lack of a hopeful future, the meaninglessness of your suffering—which was the worst?”