“But you come right,” she said. “You soon regain your composure and your mind is unaffected. There are no perfect peers, Rothhaven. I’ve danced with enough of them to know. They limp, they suffer megrims, they go blind. His Grace of Devonshire is all but deaf. The king’s gout is so bad he can barely walk. Your primary burden appears to be one of guilt, which makes no sense to me at all.”

Rothhaven turned his head slightly, so more of his features fell in shadow. “No sense at all, Lady Constance? Truly?”

The craving for a brandy tried to take over her concentration, but just as His Grace battled an ailment of long-standing, so too had Constance learned to deal with the temptation of the decanter.

“You moved,” she said. “Please resume your previous posture.”

He paused a telling beat before complying. Perhaps he knew how intimately acquainted she was with the sticky weight of guilt. More likely he was making shrewd guesses and letting innuendo do the work of certainty.

His Grace might be prone to seizures, but his mind remained quite sound. Perhaps it was his heart that refused to come right, another affliction with which Constance was too well acquainted.

“Will Lord Nathaniel do, Your Grace?” Quinn asked his wife, as Althea walked with her swain at the foot of the garden.

“They humor us, Quinn,” Jane replied, taking a seat on a wooden bench. “Those two will marry, whether we approve of the match or not.”

Quinn came down beside her, wondering what Jane saw when she gazed at Lord Nathaniel and his intended.

“They seem compatible. He’s loyal to family, and Rothmere land marches with ours. I want to object to this betrothal, but my only grounds would be that Althea grew up when I wasn’t looking, and I wasn’t done cosseting her myself.”

Jane laced her fingers with Quinn’s, which had become a habit somewhere between the first and second babies.

“Is Nathaniel loyal to family, or is he deceptive?” Jane mused. “Nathaniel knew for five years that his older brother was alive. He allowed all and sundry to continue to think Robert dead, as the previous titleholder intended, when Robert had instead come to live at the Hall. I wonder if Nathaniel didn’t enjoy playing the duke.”

“Babies make you introspective.” Quinn rested his arm along the back of the bench, for when Jane was expecting, his need to touch her, to hold her close and protect her from all perils, was constant.

“Babies make me bilious and tired and weepy. This baby is turning me into the Duchess of Unscheduled Naps,” she said, smoothing her hand over the slight rounding of her belly. “I wish we knew Lord Nathaniel and his brother better.”