A combination Robert knew all too well. He tipped his chin up. “Shall we make explicit an agreement not to discuss our former association?”

Over the top of her sketch pad, she aimed the most fleeting scowl at him. “I do not violate confidences, and if I know anything about you, it’s that you don’t either. My family has no idea that we’ve met, and I prefer they remain in that blessed state of ignorance. They would speculate. Chin up.”

“Nathaniel has never asked about conditions at the hospital. Some of it, he saw for himself. Some of it, I described for him to explain my otherwise unexplainable behavior. I would not want my brother to learn the whole of it.”

This glance was different, a little bleak, a little curious. “I don’t know the whole of it, Rothhaven. I wasn’t there that long, and I had the sense you’d learned much about managing your situation before I arrived. You had newspapers, the other residents generally did not. You had that violin, you had books.”

She fell silent, her pencil pausing. Then she took up her eraser.

“Are we agreed, my lady, that our present acquaintance will appear to be one of first impression?”

“You are a duke with a known illness. That your father, born in a less enlightened age, hid you away to keep your falling sickness a secret will make a certain sense to those who learn of it. They will pity you or they will derive mean satisfaction seeing a man of high station afflicted. What explanation can there be for a duke’s sister plucking chicken carcasses and chopping leeks?”

She considered her sketch, then bent close to the paper and resumed drawing. “Why would a girl raised in dire poverty,” she went on, “actively seek out the lowliest employment in the most scandalous place she could find, once that girl’s station in life had considerably improved? Such stupidity has no plausible explanation. The scandal would be ruinous, and I owe my family too much to bring that down upon them.”

She fell silent, curling that full lower lip under her top teeth.

Robert reminded himself that the girl who’d run from her improved station hadn’t known her brother would become a duke. She’d had no idea at the time that nieces would come along whose options could be foreclosed by a scandalous auntie.

She had known, though, where she could blend in, where her family would never think to look for her. She’d been clever, that girl—and desperate.

“You have my word,” Robert said, “nobody will learn of our prior acquaintance from me.”

“Nor from me, though mind you, my siblings are abominably clever. Stephen in particular likes to solve puzzles, but Jane and Althea notice details too.”