He kissed her then, really, truly kissed her, wrapping her in his arms and silently vowing that he would make her happy, that he would make her dreams come true…once she confided to him what those dreams might be.

“Are we going shopping?” Althea asked. “Or am I spending most of the morning on my own, then meeting you at the coach and pretending you never left my side?”

A fair question, considering Constance had asked exactly that of her sister any number of times. Beyond the coach window, the outskirts of York went by in the usual procession of drab granite edifices and cramped cobblestone lanes.

“We will shop, but I have an errand to see to first,” Constance said. “Whenever I return here, I always fear I will see Jack Wentworth lounging outside one of the disreputable inns, trying to look handsome and rakish, and mostly looking evil.”

“I try not to think of Jack Wentworth at all.”

Constance considered her sister, who’d returned from yesterday’s outing to Crofton Ford quite late and humming Handel. “Have you succeeded in evicting Jack from your mind?”

Althea became fascinated with the dreary shops beyond the coach window. All the bright sunshine in the world could not make York look less medieval.

“I’m doing better lately,” Althea said. “Better at putting the past behind me. I’ve told Nathaniel about a lot of it. About Jack, the begging. The men. I thought telling Nathaniel the particulars would bring it all back, but instead…It’s like I handed over a heavy burden to my intended, and he was able to set it aside for me. There are good people in the world, Constance. Lots of them.”

Sometimes, goodness was not enough. “But where were those good people when Jack Wentworth broke Stephen’s leg? When Jack told us to be nice to his men friends?”

“He hadn’t any friends.”

“You know what I mean. We were children, Thea. Nobody was outraged enough to do anything for us. I can grasp that Jack was broken in his soul, mad somehow, but nobody sent him away where he couldn’t hurt us, did they? Whether we lived or died was of no moment when the alternative was to insult a poor man down on his luck.”

Rothhaven had also been sacrificed to his father’s fragile arrogance, oddly enough. This discussion helped Constance understand part of why she’d been such a disobedient maid at Soames’s hospital. Why she’d grasped the situation there without anybody having to explain it to her.

“You think Jack was mad?” Althea asked, shifting on the padded bench. “A lunatic?”