‘I am certain I know Kensington park a damned sight better than you,’ Woolvey said, ‘so as for getting out, I have a better chance than you. What is your next objection? I am ready to be as patient as you care to be, Laurence, but you are the one insisting on haste.’

Woolvey went upstairs to change his clothes, having first taken the precaution of calling down two footmen to watch Laurence and Tharkay while the coach was pulled around. ‘Can you not persuade him?’ Laurence asked Edith, low, in a corner: she had her arms folded about her waist, and her hands gripped her elbows.

‘What would you have me say?’ she returned. ‘I will not counsel my husband to be a coward. Will this not be of assistance to you?’ He could not deny it, and she shook her head and looked away, her lips pressed tight. Laurence could not work on her any further. ‘I had thought I was done with these fears,’ she added, low and unhappily, but he knew how little her personal feelings would be permitted to sway her judgment: as little as he would have allowed himself.

He moved away from her, as Woolvey came down the stairs and went to bid her farewell. The two of them stood talking quietly, hands clasped, and then he bent his head to hers.

Tharkay was watching the scene with a dry interest. ‘I beg your pardon for embroiling us so,’ Laurence said.

‘In a practical sense, we could ask for nothing better,’ Tharkay said. ‘We are not likely to be stopped in a blazoned carriage, in open view of everyone. Noticed, certainly, and he may find his neck in a noose for it afterwards, but that is his concern, and those who would weep for him.’ He looked at Laurence. ‘Although those may be of interest to you also.’

Laurence was sorry to be so transparent, and sorrier still to be shut up in a carriage with Woolvey during the half an hour drive to Holland House. There was no conversation of any kind; there was nothing that could be said between them, the rejected suitor and the husband. Laurence was silenced further by an inchoate sensation, which had no place in the present circumstances and yet insisted on making itself felt.

He had never thought very much of Woolvey; he had dismissed the man as a spendthrift idler, but in fairness, Woolvey had never been given impetus for his own improvement. With nothing to do but spend money, he might easily have developed a vicious character, a gamester or a selfish coward. But he had chosen instead to establish himself respectably, and with a wife no man could blush for; and no coward would act as he had tonight. If he were a little dull and mulish in his cups, and angry for his country's humiliation, that was not the worst thing that could be said of a man.