“I did, for a time. I was completely…the ice baths, the lashings, the lack of decent food, the confinement, seeing the other residents part with what reason they’d had when they arrived. I was contemplating an escape of a very permanent variety when along came a new maid. A serious, watchful girl who kept her eyes open and her mouth shut. Soames was allotting me just enough food to keep me perpetually ravenous. This maid, so quiet and so bold, managed to sneak a wedge of cheese to me between the clean linens she brought for my bed.”

Constance indulged in another brush of her fingers through his hair. “At first I thought you were slender by nature, then I realized Soames was starving you.”

“He was manipulating my diet to see if any particular food brought on seizures and, as it happens, his theory had merit. Too many sweets, too much alcohol, tobacco, strong tea, or coffee aggravate my condition, as does a lack of regular, adequate rest.”

“He did not need to starve you to test that theory. An occasional bite of cheese, a few slices of ham, fresh apples…” She’d brought Rothhaven whatever she could pilfer from the larders, and had done the same for the other epileptic resident subjected to Soames’s vile science. She’d sneaked books to Miss Sophie—nobody had a family name at that wretched place—and accidentally allowed the cat into Miss Helen’s room as often as possible.

“You saved my life, Constance Wentworth. Saved my life and also my sanity, the one being occasionally exclusive of the other.”

Rothhaven stood directly before her, and Constance was reminded that this was not the gaunt young man who’d watched her with such rage in his eyes when she’d come to sweep his hearth. The first three days she’d undertaken that chore, he hadn’t spoken a word to her. The fourth day, he’d thanked her.

Nobody thanked a char girl for hauling ashes, and Constance hadn’t expected thanks. Even as Miss Constance Wentworth of Highlane Street, York, nobody had thanked her for anything.

“I viewed it as a game,” Constance said. “Whatever misery Soames inflicted—forcing a patient to bide alone in her room, depriving her of diversions, keeping decent food away—I plotted to thwart him. I wasn’t always successful.”

“For which you were caned by the housekeeper.”

“Never very hard. She did what she could too. Compared to Jack Wentworth…”

Constance fell silent, her attention arrested by Rothhaven’s gaze. The furious, brilliant, half-mad youth yet lurked somewhere inside him, but that younger man had learned to manage his confinement. Not to make peace with it, but to tolerate a cease-fire.