Lady Constance turned the same inquisitive gaze on Robert. “Did he have the falling sickness?”

“I do not know.” Though Robert had speculated about every relative whose portraits graced the ancestral walls. “If he was epileptic, that might explain why he never married.”

She looked away, as if noticing a fortune in books for the first time. “I did something.”

Robert waited. Whatever she’d done, it had made the quietly dauntless Constance Wentworth uncertain.

“I asked Stephen to train a horse for you. A steady, sensible mount who will stop if the rider trembles in the saddle.”

“Thank you.” Robert would never so much as sit on the horse, but her impulse had been kind.

“You’re not offended?”

“I am epileptic. I must accommodate myself to that fact or risk aggravating the condition needlessly. If I were ever to climb on a horse again, only such a mount would do.”

He’d apparently passed a test of some sort. Her ladyship’s posture relaxed and she tugged off her second glove.

“I did something else.”

“You’ve been busy.” He opened the French doors and gestured her toward the garden.

She crossed the library and stood before the open door. “I like to stay busy, but this was…I told Stephen I’d met you at Soames’s hospital, that I’d been a maid there. He will ponder that revelation for a few days, then tell Quinn, which means Quinn will tell Jane.”

“You had a reason for this disclosure?” For himself, Robert didn’t care if Nathaniel’s in-laws were privy to the whole sordid Rothmere family tale, but Constance’s privacy mattered. She had been so young and so upset. So alone.

She stepped out onto the terrace, and Robert followed her.

“I wanted the truth known on my terms,” she said. “Quinn will pry into your family’s past. There aren’t that many private respites in the West Riding. He will recognize the name of the facility where you…stayed.”

Where Robert had been imprisoned. “There are more asylums, spas, and walled estates out there than you think. Some for females, some for consumptives, some for the violently insane. My father researched them all, and I have read his diaries.”

“He researched them?”

“Not pleasant reading, but enlightening. To the old duke’s credit, he sought a facility that purported to treat the falling sickness and other mental disorders, not merely warehouse cast-off relations. My malady has no cure, of course, but one cannot blame even a rotten father for hoping.”

Lady Constance scowled at him. “You are more forgiving than I will ever be. He had you declared dead, he deceived your family and all of society, committed fraud upon the Crown. If he were still alive, would you yet be in Soames’s institution, playing your violin and reading holey newspapers?”

How ferocious she was. “You would recall that.”