“Mama,” Alice said, “that splodge in your cup looks more like a fish than a circle-”

“A fish means good news,” Mrs. Lister crowed, peering closer. “Though perhaps it might be a heart or a horn…”

“It can be whatever you wish it to be,” Alice said, taking her mother’s hand in hers. She felt so happy that she was not sure she cared what swam out of the cup.

There was a knock at the door and Frank Gaines stuck his head around. He had been at the wedding breakfast earlier with Celia, but then a messenger had arrived for him from Harrogate and Alice had seen him speaking with Celia again afterward. It had appeared that hot words were being exchanged and Alice had wondered at it, especially when Celia had walked off, head held high, and had ignored Gaines for the whole of the rest of the afternoon. Now, she thought, he looked grim and tired.

“If I might trouble you for a moment of your time, Lady Vickery,” Gaines said. He took the chair that Alice offered and sat down slowly. There was an odd expression on his face, a compound of pity and embarrassment. Even Mrs. Lister had noticed it, for she dropped her teacup back into the saucer with a clatter.

“A raven,” she whispered. “Bad news.”

“Mama,” Alice said sharply. A strange, hard knot had formed in her throat. “What is it?” she said to Frank Gaines.

Gaines shook his head. “Mr. Churchward and I have been making the arrangements for the transfer of funds to clear Lord Vickery’s debts, my lady,” he said. “In the course of our discussions-” he cleared his throat “-it became apparent that there was an ongoing charge on the Vickery estate which must be honored.” He stopped again.

“Please, Mr. Gaines,” Alice said, trying not to sound impatient at the interminable legal language.

Frank Gaines gave a slight shrug. “In truth,” he said, “it is none of my business but…Churchward and I disgreed…I said that the money was yours before it was given to your husband and so you had a right to know. I am your trustee and as such I could not do less than my duty though it pains me. I feel-” he cleared his throat and tried to loosen his neck cloth “-though it is not a fashionable view…that an intimate relationship can only succeed if based on honesty, my lady.”

“I agree,” Alice said, “but I am afraid that I still do not quite see-”

“None of my business,” Frank Gaines said again, “but I would rather that you knew-”

“Is there a list of Lord Vickery’s ex-mistresses who have all been pensioned off?” Alice inquired. She tried to keep her voice steady. She would have to be very mature about this, she thought. It might be difficult to swallow the fact that she was in effect paying off Miles’s past lovers. But that was all over and done with now. He loved her now. She knew it.

“No, madam,” Gaines said. “Not exactly.” He took a deep breath. “Lord Vickery has in his keeping a woman named Susan Gregory who was once a maidservant in his father’s house. Her rent and keep is paid from the estate on an ongoing basis, madam, and has been for eleven years.” He hesitated. “She has a child, madam, a little girl. She is said to be of Lord Vickery’s fathering. She is just over ten years old. He visits them sometimes.”

There was a long, long silence. Alice stood up abruptly, knocking over her empty teacup. Her mind was spinning.

Miles had a woman in his keeping. A maidservant. There was a child.

He had not told her. Even though he had professed to utter honesty, he had kept this secret from her.

The words repeated over and over in her head.

A maidservant. A child. He had not told her.

She grasped after something to steady herself and felt the back of her chair hard beneath her fingers. She gripped it tightly. Eleven years took them back to the time that Miles had quarreled with his father so badly that he had been banished. Eleven years before, Miles had walked out on his family, joined the army and become the hard, embittered man whom she had thought she had finally, finally reached out to touch and bring back into the light. But it seemed she had been wrong, for Miles had kept from her the most important secret of all, that of his daughter.

Mrs. Lister made a tiny noise. She seemed to have shrunk in her seat, dwindling under Alice’s gaze. She spun around accusingly on Gaines.

“You should not have told her. She did not need to know!”

“Mama,” Alice said, “Mr. Gaines was my trustee and he has my best interests at heart.”

Mrs. Lister’s face crumpled. “I saw it in the leaves,” she said. “A lamp for secrets that would be revealed. Well, you are a marchioness now, Alice.” Her voice broke. “Four strawberry leaves…You will just have to close your eyes and pretend that you do not know.”

“I am sorry, my lady,” Gaines said. “I only discovered today. Too late.”

“Too late to tell me before the wedding,” Alice whispered. She looked at him. “You told Celia that you were going to tell me,” she said, understanding at last what it was she had seen between them. “She was upset. She knew about the mistress and the child.”

“I am sorry, my lady,” Gaines said again, and Alice’s heart sank like a stone that he did not contradict her.

Celia had known. Lady Vickery must know, too. They all knew that when he was eighteen Miles had seduced a maidservant and the woman had given birth to his daughter. They must know that he was still paying for the upkeep of mother and child, but they all ignored it with the aristocratic disdain of their kind, pretending that it did not matter.

But it mattered to Alice because she had trusted Miles and thought that she knew him. It mattered because she loved him and thought that he loved her. It mattered because he had sworn himself honest and yet he had not told her.

“I need to think,” she said. “Excuse me…”

She went out into the gardens. The day was fine and the early spring buds were starting to show on the trees, new leaves unfurling bright green. The cool air kissed her face. A bird sang in the hawthorn.

A maidservant, Alice thought. That could have been me.

Miles had once told her that there would have been desire between them whether she was an heiress or a servant and it was true. Was that what had happened with Susan Gregory, the maid in his father’s house? Perhaps they had been drawn to each other in mutual desire, for despite this betrayal, Alice still believed stubbornly that Miles was not the man to force an unwilling woman.

That could have been me, she thought again, except that I am rich and so I am Marchioness of Drummond, and Susan Gregory and her bastard child have nothing but a cottage to live in and their upkeep paid quarterly. It was something, she thought. At least Miles had not abandoned them as Tom Fortune had abandoned Lydia.

She found she was in the walled garden. She sat down on the bench close to where she had walked with Miles only a few weeks before.

Her heart was so sore she wanted to cry. He had not lied to her, she thought. He had simply omitted to tell her the truth. You know that I have been a rake. I have never concealed my past from you…

But neither had he exposed it. He had kept an enormous secret from her. It was no wonder that he had never wanted to tell her the truth of his quarrel with his father.

“Alice?”

She turned. Miles had come into the walled garden and was standing a few feet away, looking at her. For a moment his face seemed so dear and familiar to her that Alice wanted to throw herself into his arms and forget all she knew. She wanted to forge a future that was un-troubled by the past. But even as she grasped after it she knew that it would be a fraud, based on lies and deception and pretence. She could not close her eyes, as her mother had suggested, and pretend that she did not know. Perhaps others would do that in her place. She could not.

“What is it?” Miles said. He came to sit beside her and took her hand. “Your mother said that Frank Gaines had said something to upset you.” He was frowning. Alice wanted to reach up and smooth the lines from his brow, as though touching him would reassure her that he was hers and hers alone. Except that he was not because there was a woman and child who had a claim on him.

“Mr. Gaines-” Her voice was so faint she had to clear her throat and start again. “Mr. Gaines told me about Susan Gregory and her child,” she said. “Why did you not tell me, Miles?” She looked up from their entwined hands to his face. He had turned chalk pale beneath his tan. “Why did you not tell me?” she said again. Her heart was breaking. “Why did you not tell me about your mistress and your child?”

“SHE WASN’T MY MISTRESS. Clara isn’t my child.”

Even as he spoke Miles knew, with a feeling of utter desperation, that there was absolutely no way in which he could prove to Alice that he was telling the truth. If she chose not to believe him-and his failure to confide in her, his failure to open up and trust her, condemned him louder than any words-then there was nothing he could do except, perhaps, to break his word and force his father’s former mistress out of her retirement and into the light. The damage that such a course of action would cause would surely expose all the secrets that he had striven to hide for the past eleven years.

Alice was watching him and he could read nothing in her face other than blankness and pain. She had not really heard him. She was hurting too much. His love for her stole his breath. From the very beginning he had been afraid to lose Alice and he had told himself it was because of the money, but now he knew the thing that he could not bear would be to lose Alice herself. The money was nothing in comparison. It was Alice’s warmth and generosity of spirit and love that he craved. He was terrified of being left in the cold again.

The thing that he feared the most was about to come true.

“I should have told you,” he said. “I should have told you about my father and our quarrel and why I have been estranged from my family for so long. Susan was my father’s mistress. Clara is his child.”

Some shade of expression came back into Alice’s eyes and a little color into her face. “Your father’s mistress,” she repeated.

“I cannot prove it,” Miles said rapidly. “I cannot prove to you that I am telling the truth, Alice. My name is on all the documents.” He felt wretched. His future hung on the slenderest thread, that of Alice’s trust, and what was so appalling to him was that he knew he did not deserve to keep her because he had not trusted her with the truth. He had never even told her that he loved her. He had meant to do it. Each day he had tried out his feelings a little further, testing his love for her and his ability to feel it, letting go of the dark past. But now the past had caught up with him and it had happened too soon because he had not told Alice the one thing that she needed to know.

“Tell me,” she said, and he could not judge from her voice whether he had a chance or not.

“I was almost eighteen,” Miles said. “I had finished at Eton and there was talk of me going to Oxford in the autumn to study theology.” He grimaced. “Not a natural choice for me, but my papa wished me to follow him into the church.” He shrugged. “Truth to tell, I was enjoying London too much to care much either way. I was young and I had a little money, and…” He looked at Alice and shook his head. “Well, even then I was no saint.”

He had not been. There had been women and drinking and gambling, all the temptations of town so new and so exciting for a youth who thought that he knew everything and in truth was young and naive and knew nothing at all.

“I arrived home early after a long night at the gaming tables,” Miles said. “I had not lost too heavily. I hadn’t even tumbled a lightskirt that night. Life was good-simple, easy. I wanted my bed, but as I walked in I heard a sound in my father’s study and I thought someone might have broken into the house, so I went over to investigate. I wish…I had not.” He looked up and met her eyes. “I had to break the door open,” he said. “The noise roused half the household.”

“Who was in there?” Alice said. “Your father?”

“My father,” Miles said. His tone was harsh. “His sanctimonious Lordship, the Bishop Vickery. The man I had admired and respected, the man who preached against sin, was fornicating with a maidservant on the study desk. You can imagine what I thought when I saw him. For all my supposed sophistication I was an eighteen-year-old boy and I could scarce believe my eyes.” He stopped. “It was a disaster,” he said, after a moment. “People were coming running, alerted by the noise I had made breaking the door down. My mother, my sister…” He swallowed hard. “My father assessed the situation very quickly for a man in the throes of passion. He reacted far more quickly than I. He saw that we had an audience and promptly denounced me for my debauchery. He claimed to have been roused from his bed by the sounds of my fornication and to have come down to put a stop to his son’s wanton licentiousness.”