Page 3 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

I was a long moment in answering. I had considered, many times, what had been said in the small private sitting room at Windsor on a June afternoon. The words had been few and the meaning unmistakable. Her Majesty did not issue decrees. She stated preferences. But a sovereign’s preference, delivered privately, was indistinguishable from any other instruction a subject might receive. I had gone into the audience knowing what I was to be told, and I had come out of it having been told.

“Her Majesty knows neither Rosalynd nor I wish to marry. So she counseled an end to our friendship before circumstances forced the issue. Rosalynd and I agreed that a complete and visible separation would serve best.”

“You are never to see each other again?”

“The season ends in a month or so. In mid-August, she will return to Rosehaven Manor in Yorkshire, and I will depart for Thornburn Abbey.” I brushed a hand across my brow. “Next year, our friendship will be a distant memory, and we will have moved on with our lives.”

Nicky sat stunned, the glass in his hand, not drinking. And then, very slowly, very deliberately, he set it down. “I have never said this before, nor even thought it. Warwick, you are a fool.”

“Don’t.”

“You have the most disciplined nature of any man I have ever known. I have always admired it. I have begun to wonder, however, whether you use that discipline to avoid the choices you are afraid to make. You love her. And I believe she loves you. For the love of God, ask her to marry you.”

“She doesn’t wish to. She doesn’t wish to break up her family.”

“She can have a family with you.”

I slammed my glass down. “No, she won’t. The day Alice died in childbirth, I swore I would never put another woman through that ordeal.”

“Alice was⁠—”

I held up a hand. “Don’t say another word.”

“My apologies.” Nicky put down his glass and rose. “Mother sends her love. I shall tell her you are eating well. Good day, Warwick.”

I simply nodded.

Milford’s footsteps followed him down the hall. The front door closed, and Steele House was silent again.

I did not return to the cabmen’s bill. I sat in the chair behind the desk and stared at the papers without seeing them. Four weeks since I had last been inside Rosehaven House. Three since I’d been near enough to Rosalynd to hold her. I had marked the dates because I could not stop counting them. I had begun to fear I had miscalculated the cost of what I’d proposed.

A footman came to the door. “Begging your pardon, Your Grace.”

I did not, at first, register the alarm in his voice. But something in it brought my head round. “What is it, James?”

“You have a visitor. Lady Ros⁠—”

I was on my feet before he finished speaking and then crossed the study, descended the staircase, and arrived at the entrance hall without conscious thought.

Rosalynd was standing just inside the door. No bonnet. No gloves. One hand pressed against the wall for support, Milford at her side. A smear of something marred the hem of her gray skirt—dust, perhaps, or chalk from a paving stone. Her hair, ordinarily impeccable, was an arrangement of copper that was no arrangement at all. Her face, when she lifted it to mine, had gone white.

I broke every discipline I had set myself in the time it took to cross the floor to her. “What’s wrong?”

She raised her gaze to me, her eyes filled with pain.

“They have taken Cosmos.”

Chapter

Two

A Vow Tested

Ihad come to hate the morning room.

It faced east across Grosvenor Square, which meant that at half past nine, with the July sun at a certain angle, I couldn’t sit at my writing desk without seeing the front of Steele House.

For three weeks I’d replied to correspondence. I’d inked through menus with Cook. I’d discussed linens with Mrs. Bateman. I had done every small useful thing a woman of my station does at a writing desk in the morning, and I’d done it all without looking at his door.