A Bargain with the Earl: The Wicked Baron

The gaslight above the coaching inn's back room sputtered, throwing jagged shadows across the stained deal table. Smoke from a dozen cheroots clung to the low ceiling, a grey haze that made Clementine's eyes water the moment she stepped through the doorway. The smell followed: stale ale, sweat, the sharp tang of liniment oil rubbed into bruised knuckles. Beneath it all, something darker, the sour undercurrent of desperation that she had read about in penny dreadfuls but never believed she would breathe in herself.

"Stay close," Sebastian murmured at her shoulder. His hand hovered near the small of her back, not quite touching, and the restraint in the gesture told her more than any words could. He was uneasy. The Earl of Ravenscar, a man she had known for three days, who spoke of marriage as though it were a business negotiation and looked at her with eyes like winter sky, was uneasy. That frightened her more than the room.

Tom the barman appeared from behind a hanging curtain, wiping his hands on a cloth that had once been white. He spotted Sebastian and his round face split into a grin of genuine pleasure, the kind reserved for regulars who tipped well and caused no trouble.

"Evening, my lord. Usual corner's free." His gaze slid to Clementine, and his eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. "And brought a friend. Didn't know you had any."

"I don't," Sebastian said. "This is Miss Ashcombe. She is with me."

Tom's grin widened. He leaned closer, voice dropping to a conspiratorial rasp. "Right you are, my lord. Your friend's not here yet, is he? The one with the temper."

"He will be."

"Shan't be a problem." Tom straightened, tossed the cloth over his shoulder, and gestured toward a booth in the far corner. "I've put a screen by the window. Anyone comes through the front, you'll see them before they see you. Brandy for the lady? We have a very tolerable port."

"Tea," Clementine said, before she could stop herself. "If you have it."

Tom blinked. Then he laughed, a short, surprised bark. "Tea. Right then, miss. I'll see what the kitchen can do."

He disappeared through the curtain, and Sebastian guided her toward the booth. The leather of the seat was cracked, the stuffing escaping in pale tufts. Clementine sat, and the wood creaked beneath her, and she understood with sudden, physical clarity that she was a long way from the drawing room at Ashcombe Park.

The boxing saloon occupied the ground floor of the coaching inn, and through the thin wall she could hear the dull rhythm of fists against leather, the grunts of men testing each other's strength. Occasionally a cheer went up, a ragged sound that trailed off into laughter. She fixed her eyes on the table and tried to slow her breathing.

Sebastian sat opposite her, stretching one long leg beneath the table until his boot brushed her hem. He withdrew it at once, a faint color rising along his cheekbones. "I should not have brought you here."

"And yet you have." She kept her voice level, the way her father had taught her when the creditors came calling. Pleasant. Composed. As though one were discussing the weather and not the slow dissolution of one's life. "You said Lord Vane would not meet you at the house. You said he required a public venue to feel safe."

"Safe." Sebastian turned the word over as though it were something rotten. "Vane has never been safe a day in his life. He is a man who deals in other people's ruin and calls it sport."

"Then why indulge him?"

"Because I am the one who requires the indulgence." His jaw tightened. "And because I miscalculated. Badly. Several years ago."

She wanted to ask. The questions pressed against her teeth, sharp and hot. What scandal? What mistake? What hold did this Lord Vane have over the Earl of Ravenscar that a man of his wealth and position could not simply buy his way clear of? But she had learned in three days that Sebastian Ashford gave nothing freely. One had to wait. One had to watch the way his hands stilled when a memory caught him, the way his gaze drifted to some middle distance where the rest of the room could not follow.

Tom returned with a chipped cup of tea and a glass of brandy so dark it looked like liquid mahogany. He set them down with a flourish and leaned his hands on the table.

"Two minutes, my lord. He sent a boy ahead to say he was on his way."

"Thank you, Tom."

"Thank me by not starting a brawl. Last time his lordship was in, he put his fist through my bar, and the carpenter's bill was the size of a small farm."

"He will be on his best behavior," Sebastian said.

Tom's eyebrows rose again, but he said nothing. He collected an imaginary crumb from the table, winked at Clementine, and retreated behind the curtain.

The tea was weak and faintly bitter, made in a pot that had not been rinsed. Clementine wrapped both hands around the cup and let the heat seep into her palms. Across the table, Sebastian lifted his brandy, swirled it once, and drank.

"You should know," he said, "what you are about to see. Vane is not what he appears."

"And what does he appear to be?"

"A gentleman. Well-bred. Soft-spoken. He has the manners of a duke and the soul of a moneylender. He will be charming to you. He will say kind things about your family, your looks, your situation. He will offer sympathy." Sebastian set down the glass with a click. "He is lying. Every word."

The door at the far end of the room opened, and the gaslight guttered as a draft swept through. A figure entered, tall and impeccably dressed, a greatcoat thrown over one shoulder despite the warmth of the room. He moved with the easy confidence of a man who knew that every head would turn, and every head did.

Lord Vane was handsome in the way a marble statue was handsome: cold, finished, perfect. His hair was the color of wheat, swept back from a high forehead, and his eyes were a pale, washed blue that held no warmth at all. He smiled as he approached, a smile that did not reach past his mouth, and Clementine felt something cold settle in the base of her spine.

"Ravenscar." His voice was low and pleasant, a voice that could have read poetry or issued orders for a flogging with equal grace. "How good of you to come. And you have brought a guest."

He turned the smile on her, and she had to stop herself from leaning away.

"Miss Ashcombe, I presume. Your father was a friend of mine, in a manner of speaking. I had the honor of holding some of his notes."

Clementine's fingers tightened on the cup. "My father did not have friends of your sort, my lord."

"Straight to the throat." Lord Vane laughed, a soft, appreciative sound. He slid into the booth beside Sebastian, who stiffened almost imperceptibly. "I see why you chose her, Ravenscar. She has teeth."

"She is not a choice," Sebastian said quietly. "She is my intended wife."

The word hung in the smoky air. Lord Vane's pale eyes moved from Sebastian to Clementine and back again, and something in them sharpened, a predator catching a scent.

"Is she indeed. How fascinating. And does she know, I wonder, what she is marrying into?"

Clementine set down her cup. "I know that my father owed you money. I know that my mother is at this moment sitting in a house that can be taken from her at your pleasure. I know that Lord Ravenscar has offered to settle the debt in exchange for my hand." She met those pale eyes without flinching. "I am not a child, my lord. I do not require things to be softened for me."

Lord Vane regarded her for a long moment. Then he leaned back, stretching one arm along the top of the booth, and the smile returned, wider now, more genuine.

"I begin to see why you are in such trouble, Ravenscar. The woman is formidable." He tilted his head, studying her. "Do you love her?"

The question dropped into the silence like a stone into still water. Clementine felt the heat rise to her cheeks. She did not look at Sebastian. She could not.

"That," Sebastian said, "is none of your concern."

"On the contrary. It is entirely my concern. I am being asked to release a very large sum of money on the strength of a match that has no foundation but convenience. If the lady does not love you, she may yet refuse. If she refuses, I am left with a note from a dead man and no recourse." Lord Vane's voice remained pleasant, conversational, as though they were discussing the price of grain. "I require assurance."

"You require," Sebastian said, "what I have already given you. My word."

"Your word." Lord Vane made a soft sound, almost a laugh. "Your word was what got you into this difficulty, was it not? Your word, given to the wrong person, in the wrong room, at the wrong hour."

The color drained from Sebastian's face. His hand, resting on the table, curled slowly into a fist, knuckles whitening.

Clementine watched the two men, and the room seemed to contract around her, the smoke thicker, the gaslight dimmer. The cheering from the next room had stopped, or perhaps she could no longer hear it. There was a story here, a wound, and she was standing at its edge without a map.

The silence stretched. Lord Vane let it, the way a man lets a fire burn, watching to see what would catch. His pale eyes moved from Sebastian's white-knuckled fist to Clementine's still face, and something in his expression shifted, a predator scenting a change in the wind.

"Ravenscar," he said softly. "You always were the stubborn one. Even at Oxford. Even then." He lifted his wine, drank, set it down. "I wonder if she knows what she is buying into. A title, yes. A fortune, certainly. But also a man who has already been broken once, and who carries the knife that did it in his own breast pocket."

"You go too far." Sebastian's voice was low, almost a whisper, but it cut the smoky air like a blade drawn from a sheath. His shoulders had gone rigid, the easy posture of a moment ago replaced by something coiled, dangerous.

"Do I?" Lord Vane smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. "I think I do not go far enough. I think I have been remarkably restrained, given the circumstances. Given what is owed. Given the, shall we say, unfinished nature of our acquaintance."

Clementine understood then, with the cold clarity that sometimes descends in moments of extreme danger, that Lord Vane was not here merely to negotiate. He was here to wound. He was here to remind Sebastian, in front of her, that the past was not buried, that the grave had been dug but the body not yet interred. He was here to make certain that whatever fragile thing might be growing between the Earl and herself would be poisoned at the root.

She set down her glass. The small clink of crystal against wood was the only sound in the booth. Both men turned to her, Lord Vane with a flicker of curiosity, Sebastian with something like alarm.

"Lord Vane," she said. Her voice was steady, warmer than the room, and she let it carry the particular music of a woman who has been well-bred and is not afraid to use it. "You speak of broken men and unpaid debts as though you were a poet composing a tragedy. But you are neither a poet nor a tragedy. You are a moneylender in a coaching inn, and the play you are performing is, I fear, rather a poor one."

Lord Vane's smile did not waver, but his eyes changed. The amusement in them cooled by a single, noticeable degree.

"Madame," he said, "you mistake me."

"I do not, sir. I take your measure." Clementine let the warmth drop from her voice, just a fraction, just enough to let the steel show beneath the silk. "You have come here this evening to make Lord Ravenscar uncomfortable in my presence, and thereby to ensure that whatever bargain he hopes to strike with me will be offered from a position of shame rather than strength. It is a clever tactic. I have seen it employed at cards, in drawing rooms, and once, memorably, at a livestock auction in Hampshire, where a gentleman of my acquaintance attempted to lowball a farmer for a particularly fine bull by insulting the farmer's wife within her hearing. The farmer took the gentleman outside and rearranged his features, and the bull changed hands at twice the original asking price."

A breath of silence. Then Lord Vane laughed. It was a genuine sound, surprised out of him, and it transformed his face for an instant into something almost human.

"You are wasted in the marriage market, Miss Ashcombe," he said. "You should be on the stage."

"I have considered it," Clementine replied. "The hours are better. But I find the marriage market more useful at present, as it allows me to dispose of my own affairs rather than have them disposed of by others." She turned to Sebastian, her eyes meeting his for the first time since Lord Vane had begun his assault. "My lord, if you would be so good as to pour me a little more of the brandy. Lord Vane's conversation has given me a thirst that I suspect only alcohol will properly quench."

Sebastian, to his credit, did not hesitate. His hand was steady as he lifted the decanter, though she could see, in the shifting of the light across his face, that something had changed behind his eyes. The wall he kept so carefully in place had developed a crack, and through it she glimpsed, just for a moment, something raw and unguarded.

He poured. He set the glass before her. His fingers, passing hers as she took it, were cold.

"Now then," Clementine said, turning back to Lord Vane with a smile that owed nothing to the warmth she had shown earlier. It was a smile of a different sort entirely, the smile of a woman who has decided that if she must fight, she will fight on her own terms. "You wished to discuss terms, I believe. Let us discuss them. But I should like to understand, first, precisely what it is you are owed, and by whom, and for what. I have found, in my limited experience, that men who speak in riddles are usually hiding something they do not wish to be examined too closely."

Lord Vane regarded her. The amusement had not entirely left his face, but it had settled into something more cautious, more watchful. He had expected, she suspected, a blushing girl. He had been given, instead, a mirror.

"You wish to examine my accounts, Miss Ashcombe?"

"I wish to understand the ground on which we stand, Lord Vane. I have a particular aversion to building on quicksand. As, I suspect, do you."

He studied her for a long moment. The gaslight hissed. Somewhere in the inn, a clock chimed the quarter hour, a sound thin and metallic through the walls.

"Very well," he said at last. "If the lady wishes to be informed, the lady shall be informed." He settled back in his seat, crossing one elegant leg over the other. "Six years ago, the Earl of Ravenscar made certain representations to me. Representations which he subsequently failed to honor. Representations which, had they been made by a lesser man, would have resulted in a meeting at dawn, a doctor, and a great deal of unpleasantness for all concerned."

Clementine's hand tightened on the brandy glass, but her face did not change. "What manner of representations?"

"Financial," Lord Vane said, "in part. Personal, in larger part. I had the honor, at the time, of being entrusted with a secret of some delicacy. A secret concerning a certain lady, and a certain indiscretion, which the Earl was most anxious should not see the light of day. He offered me a sum of money, a considerable sum, to ensure my discretion. I accepted. The money, regrettably, was never paid."

Clementine did not look at Sebastian. She could feel him beside her, feel the stillness of him, the absolute immobility of a man who has just been flayed in public and is refusing, through sheer force of will, to acknowledge the pain.

"And the secret?" she asked. Her voice was very even.

"Remains a secret, Miss Ashcombe. For now. Lord Ravenscar's continued solvency, and his continued ability to act as a suitable match for a lady of your expectations, depends, I regret to say, on a renewed arrangement between us." Lord Vane spread his hands, a gesture of manly regret. "Business is business. I am, at heart, a simple tradesman."

"You are," Clementine said, "a viper in a waistcoat, sir, and you overrate the value of your venom."

The words hung in the smoky air. Lord Vane's face went very still. For a moment, the mask of geniality slipped entirely, and what lay beneath was neither pleasant nor civilized. It was the face of a man who has been challenged, and who is not accustomed to the sensation.

Beside her, Clementine felt rather than saw Sebastian move. His hand, the one that had been resting on the table, lifted slightly, as though to touch her arm in warning. Then it stopped, and lowered again.

Lord Vane rose. He did it slowly, with the deliberate grace of a man who wishes to make a point of his own height, his own presence, the physical fact of his power in the room.

"Miss Ashcombe," he said, and his voice had lost its pleasant veneer entirely, "you are a spirited young woman, and I mean that as no compliment. You will find, as you go through the world, that spirit is a luxury that only the protected can afford. Your father is dead. Your estate is in ruins. Your mama, charming as she is, has not the strength to hold the wolves at bay for much longer. You may well marry the Earl of Ravenscar. You may well save your family. But you will do so, I think, with a clearer understanding of the cost than you had when you sat down."

He turned to Sebastian. The two men faced each other across the narrow booth, and the air between them seemed to thicken, to become something almost solid, something that pressed against the skin.

"As for you, Ravenscar," Lord Vane said softly. "I will give you one week. One week to make the payment due, in full, or I shall be obliged to have certain conversations with certain parties who have a vested interest in the subject of your former indiscretions. Your future countess, your future mother-in-law, your future tenants, your future servants, your future acquaintances at every ball, every dinner, every church service you attend for the rest of your natural life. I am, as I said, a patient man. But my patience, like my money, has its limits."

He placed his hat upon his head. He adjusted his gloves. He bowed, a precise and mocking inclination of his head, to Clementine, then turned and walked out of the booth. His footsteps were unhurried. The door of the private room closed behind him with a soft, final click.

The silence he left was the silence of a battlefield after the guns have fallen silent, when the living are still too stunned to know they ought to be screaming.

Clementine sat very still. The brandy glass trembled in her hand. She set it down before Sebastian could see, before he could feel obliged to comment, before the moment could become something either of them would have to address.

After a long time, she said, "I see."

Sebastian made a sound. It might have been a laugh. It might have been something else. "You see," he repeated. "You see what, Miss Ashcombe? That I have brought ruin to your door before you have even crossed the threshold? That the man you were considering allying yourself with is, in fact, exactly the kind of wretch your mama warned you against?"

She turned to him then, and found his face as she had known she would find it: pale, set, the eyes bright with a fury that had nowhere to go. The knuckles of his right hand were white where they pressed against the table, and the muscles of his jaw stood out like cords beneath the skin.

"I see," she said quietly, "a man who has been hunted for six years by something he cannot name and cannot outrun. I see a man who has been carrying a weight that would have broken most others, and who has not, so far as I can tell, complained of it once. I see a man who, when offered the chance to take the easy way out this evening, did not take it, but instead sat here and let himself be flayed alive rather than tell me a single lie."

She paused. The gaslight flickered, throwing strange shadows across his face.

"I see," she said, "a man I am more determined than ever to marry, if he will still have me."

Sebastian stared at her. The fury in his eyes did not diminish, but something else moved in alongside it, something raw and startled, like a deer catching a scent it does not recognize.

"You cannot mean that," he said.

"I can, and I do." She reached across the table, and before he could stop her, before he could think to stop her, she placed her hand over his. His skin was cold. His fingers did not move. "My lord, I have been courted by men who lied to me about their fortunes, their intentions, their very names. I have been pursued by men who saw in me nothing but a title and a settlement and a convenient means of repairing their own broken estates. I have sat in drawing rooms while my mother smiled at men who were mentally cataloguing the silver."

Her thumb moved, just slightly, across the back of his hand. It was the first deliberate, uninvited touch she had ever offered him.

"You, my lord, are the first man who has ever sat before me and told me the truth, even when the truth was poison, even when the truth was a knife in his own chest. You are the first man who has shown me, not the face he wished me to see, but the face he could not help but show. And I find, to my considerable surprise, that I prefer the latter."

Sebastian's hand turned beneath hers. His fingers, slowly, as though he were not quite certain he was allowed, closed around her own.

"Miss Ashcombe," he said, and his voice was rough, and not at all the smooth instrument she had first heard in her mother's drawing room, "I do not deserve what you have just said to me."

"No," she agreed, with a small, tired smile. "Probably not. But I have long since ceased to expect that the men in my life should deserve the kindnesses I offer them. I offer them anyway. It is, I find, more efficient than waiting for them to earn it."

He almost laughed. She saw it move through him, the attempt at amusement, and the failure of it, and the slow, reluctant softening around his eyes that came after.

"Tom," he called, without looking away from her face. "Another bottle of the brandy, if you please. The good one, not the cooking variety."

"Right you are, my lord," came the cheerful voice from behind the bar, and the sound of a cork being drawn with practiced ease.

The evening had grown old around them, and the common room had emptied in stages. First the farmers departed, their voices fading into the clop of hooves on the lane. Then the two merchants in the corner, their ledgers closed, their heads heavy with the day's accounts. Last to leave was a solitary horseman who had nursed a single pint by the hearth for near two hours, saying nothing, watching nothing, until he rose without a word and disappeared into the darkness beyond the door.

Tom extinguished two of the candles. The third he left burning, its flame guttering in some draft he could not locate, sending shadows that leaned and retreated across the low ceiling.

"Last orders in ten minutes, my lord," he called softly, the professional courtesy of a man who knew when his patrons wished to be left alone and when they wished to be attended. "Unless you'd like me to keep the kitchen fire going for a cold supper."

"Supper would be welcome," Sebastian replied, his gaze still resting on Clementine's face. "Whatever is easiest."

"Easiest is a meat pie and some cheese. I can have it up in a quarter hour."

"That will do nicely."

Tom withdrew behind his counter, and the sounds of his industry became the backdrop to a silence that was no longer uncomfortable. The fire had burned down to a deep, steady glow, and the warmth of the room pressed close, redolent of old wood and spilled ale and the clean, cold scent that had followed Clementine in from the night.

She lifted her glass. The brandy caught the candlelight, amber and deep, and she regarded it for a moment as though it contained some answer she had not yet learned to read.

"I must go back," she said. "Mama will have sent the coach, or sent a footman, or sent a very pointed note. In any case, by morning she will have constructed an entire narrative from the absence, and I would rather be present to correct it than absent while it solidifies into fact."

He nodded. He had known, of course, that this moment must come. He had been counting the minutes since the second bottle was opened, marking them against the probable pace of Lady Ashcombe's anxiety and the speed at which her household would be dispatched to retrieve her wandering daughter.

"I will take you," he said. "In the curricle. It is faster, and the moon is bright enough for the lanes."

"That would be noted," she observed. "The Earl of Ravenscar, returning Lady Ashcombe's daughter at midnight, having absconded with her after a musicale. The gossips will have a field day."

"They will have a field day regardless. I have found that the only effective strategy is to do what one intends to do and let the gossips catch up as they are able."

She laughed then, a real laugh, low and warm, and the sound of it did something to his chest that he was not prepared to examine.

"Then let us be notorious," she said. "With as much efficiency as possible."

He rose and offered his hand. She took it, and he drew her to her feet, and for a moment they stood very close, the height of him and the slightness of her, the candlelight between them, the empty room around them, and something hung in the air that neither of them named.

"Tom," Sebastian called, without releasing her hand. "The reckoning."

"Four shillings, my lord, and Mrs. Tom says you're not to argue."

"Four shillings is robbery."

"Four shillings is brandy, my lord, which you may have heard is not as cheap as it used to be. Times are hard for us common folk."

Sebastian produced a half crown and set it on the counter. "Keep the change. And if anyone should ask, we were never here."

"No one ever asks, my lord. And if they did, I should have to be deaf as well as blind, which would make serving the ale rather difficult."

They stepped out into the night. The air struck Clementine's face with a sharpness that made her catch her breath, the cold clean after the warmth of the inn, and she pulled her shawl more closely about her shoulders. The sky was enormous above them, scattered with stars in such profusion that the whole vault of it seemed to glitter and breathe, and the moon rode high, near full, casting the lane in silver and shadow.

The curricle stood where they had left it, the horse cropping at a patch of grass by the gate, its breath steaming in the cold. Sebastian saw to the animal while Clementine climbed to her seat, and then he was beside her, the reins gathered, and they moved off down the lane at a pace that was brisk but not reckless, the wheels humming on the hard-packed earth.

The Ashcombe estate lay some three miles distant, through lanes that wound between hedgerows and past sleeping hamlets where not a single window showed a light. The only sounds were the steady beat of the hooves, the creak of the carriage, and the occasional sharp call of a fox somewhere in the dark.

"Sebastian," she said, after they had traveled in silence for some time.

He turned his head slightly toward her, though his eyes remained on the road.

"You called yourself the wicked baron."

"I did."

"Was that true? Were you, in truth, what they said?"

He was quiet for a long moment. The horse's hooves marked the seconds, and the moonlit hedges slipped past like the panels of some slow-moving screen.

"I was everything they said," he answered at last. "And some things they did not say. I drank too much. I wagered too deep. I kept company with men of no character and fewer principles. I broke a promise to a woman who had the misfortune to love me, and I did it in the most public and most brutal way I could contrive, because I was young and I was cruel and I did not know, then, what any of it would cost."

"And now?"

"Now I am what the years and the consequences have made of me. I am not what I was. I am not yet what I would be. But I am not what I was."

"And the wager of which you spoke? The one you made years ago?"

His hands tightened slightly on the reins. The horse tossed its head, sensing the shift in its driver, and he gentled it with a word and a touch.

"I was three and twenty," he said. "I had just come into the title. I was insufferable. A friend, a man I believed to be a friend, suggested a wager to pass an idle hour. I accepted, because I was drunk, and because the sum was large enough to matter, and because I did not believe I could lose."

"What was the wager?"

"That I could not, in the space of a single season, seduce and abandon a woman of unimpeachable reputation, without consequence to my standing, my fortune, or my name."

Clementine sat very still beside him. The lane curved ahead, and the curricle followed it, and the moon laid its silver road before them as though clearing a path.

"And you won the wager," she said. It was not a question.

"I won the wager. She was a clergyman's daughter. She was gentle. She was not, by any measure, what she ought to have been for a man of my stamp. I ruined her. I did it for sport. I did it because I was young enough to believe that I was exempt from consequence, and foolish enough to believe that a man may do what he likes and pay nothing for it."

"And the friend?"

He did not answer at once. The wheels hummed. A barn owl crossed the road ahead of them, its pale shape gliding through the moonlight like a ghost.

"The friend was Vane," he said, at last. "Lord Vane. The same."

She drew in her breath. She had known, perhaps. She had suspected. But to hear it spoken aloud, in his voice, in the quiet of the night, was different from suspecting.

"And the scandal? The one that haunts you?"

"Is the consequence I believed I would never pay. I ruined the woman, and Vane ensured that the ruin became known. Not the ruin of her reputation, which would have been the honest wound, but the ruin of my own, by means of certain letters he had obtained, and a particular scene he had arranged, and a series of witnesses who were not, in fact, witnesses at all, but actors in a piece he had written for his own amusement."

"Why?"

"Because I had bested him, and he could not endure it. Because I had won the wager, and the winning had given me a reputation for invulnerability that he was determined to destroy. Because he is, at his core, a man who cannot abide that any other man should stand unpunished for any advantage, real or imagined."

"And the woman? The clergyman's daughter?"

"She married, eventually. A farmer. A good man, by all accounts. She is somewhere in the north, I am told, and she has children, and she is, I hope, happy. I do not know. I have never inquired, because I have no right to inquire, and because the inquiry would be a wound to her, and she has borne enough of my wounds."

Clementine sat with this for a time. The curricle turned onto the broader avenue that led to Ashcombe Park, the gravel ruts gleaming in the moonlight, the great house rising before them at the end of the drive, its windows dark except for the single lamp that burned in the hall, kept burning by some faithful servant for the return of the wanderer.

"Sebastian," she said, as the curricle drew to a halt before the steps. "You have told me this to warn me."

"Yes."

"You have told me this so that I may not enter into an understanding with you without understanding what it is I enter into."

"Yes."

"You have told me this so that I may know, fully, that the man who offers for me is a man who has done these things, and been done by, and bears the marks of both."

"Yes."

She set her hand, very lightly, upon his sleeve. The wool was rough beneath her fingers, and beneath it she felt the warmth of his arm, the steady pulse of his blood.

"And I will tell you," she said, "what I have told you already, in Tom's common room, with a great deal less privacy. I find, to my considerable surprise, that I prefer the man you are to the man you were. I find that the scars you carry are, to me, more interesting than the unblemished skin of the sort of gentleman my mama would prefer I marry. I find that you have, in the course of a single evening, trusted me with more truth than I have been trusted with by any man living, and that the trust itself is a kind of gift I had not known I was waiting for."

He did not move. The horse shifted, and the harness jingled, and somewhere in the shrubbery a nightingale, confused by the season, began a tentative phrase.

"I am not offering for you tonight," he said. "I am not offering for you at all, unless you wish it, and unless you are certain, and unless the certainty has been tested in the light of day, and in the counsel of your mother, and in the long consideration that such a step deserves."

"But?"

"But I would like, Miss Ashcombe, with your permission, to call upon you tomorrow. And the day after. And as many days after that as you will permit. So that when I do offer for you, if offer I do, it will be with your full knowledge, and with your consent, and with the understanding that what you are consenting to is not the man of the ballroom, but the man you have just ridden home with in the moonlight."

She was silent for a long moment. Then she lifted her hand from his sleeve, and she placed it, deliberately, in the palm of his hand, and she held his gaze with a steadiness that he had not expected and did not, he realized, deserve.

"Come tomorrow, my lord," she said. "Come at three. Mama will be having her afternoon chocolate. She will be delighted to receive you. She will be suspicious, of course, because she is never not suspicious, but she will receive you, and we shall see what we shall see."

He helped her down from the curricle. He walked her up the steps, and he waited while she produced her key, and he stood in the moonlight at the foot of the stair while she ascended, and she turned, once, at the landing, and she looked down at him, and she inclined her head, and then she disappeared into the lamplit hall beyond.

He stood for a moment longer, listening to the soft sound of the door closing above him. Then he turned, and he mounted the curricle, and he drove home through the silver night, alone with his thoughts, and with the extraordinary, unlooked-for, and rather terrifying hope that had begun, against all his expectations and all his resolutions, to kindle in his chest.

The lane was quiet. The moon rode on. And somewhere, in the hall of Ashcombe Park, a woman put her hand upon the banister and paused, and allowed herself, for one unguarded moment, the smallest and most secret of smiles.