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“I-I… I am so sorry. Damn it, man, but I had not known the house was in mourning,” Ernest said hurriedly.

It’s only too bad of Chance not to mention it, he thought darkly. Now here he was, interloping, intruding on a family’s private grief…

“‘Mourning’?” repeated Michael blankly as Ernest handed over his greatcoat to the waiting servant. “Who died?”

Ernest blinked. They’d gone wrong somewhere. “You said—the viscountcy, your father—”

“Oh, the old devil has gone and given me the title,” Michael said with a sigh that made it clear the man could not have been more inconvenient. “Honestly, it’s most aggravating.”

“‘Aggravating’?” Ernest repeated weakly.

“Yes,” his friend continued. “Two of his brothers have done the same thing, given their titles to their sons before their deaths. Something, something, responsibility, something… Honestly, I wasn’t really listening.”

Ernest smirked. He’d known about the Chances doing things differently—he supposed he just hadn’t been made aware of their latest eccentricities. “You surprise me.”

Michael returned his smile. “I know, it’s galling, isn’t it, to find that one’s character is fixed so imperfectly? So you’ll stay at least a week, then?”

At least a week. A week in London with the Pernrith Chances, a family about which Ernest had always harbored a certain curiosity.

They were nobility, yes, but there had been a great deal of hushed-up scandal around the Chance family, all four branches of it. Even he’d heard about their shenanigans in Yorkshire, and that was never a good sign.

And he did need to find a bride. The land wouldn’t pay for itself, worse luck, and every Frasemere baron… Almost every Frasemere baron had married enough money to keep it going for the next generation. And now it was his turn.

Ernest tried to smile. “You are certain I’m not going to be an inconvenience, are you? I’m not going to be in the way? I won’t be interrupting anything?”

“Oh, nothing happens in this family,” Michael said, clapping his friend around the shoulders and apparently blissfully unaware of how false that statement was. No other lord inherited before his father’s death, for one thing. “Nothing much, anyway.”

They stepped into a chamber that was clearly a drawing room, utterly packed with people, just as a pretty young woman with startlingly raven hair and sapphire eyes announced, “I am delighted to announce that I am engaged to the Marquess of Ravenshurst!”

The room fell silent. Silent for too long.

The woman was smiling, her expression taut. “I said, I am engaged to the Marquess of Ravenshurst!”

One could have heard a pin drop. If one had a pin, of course, and Ernest was entirely without pins.

He was, however, filled with a rising sense of horror. How the hell had Chance managed to drag him into such a private family celebration?

“To… To be married?” said a young woman with wide, blue eyes weakly by the pianoforte.

“To Lord Ravenshurst?” said an older gentleman who looked so like Michael, Ernest had to assume he was the Viscount Pernrith. The previous Pernrith? Dear God, this was going to get confusing.

“Well, obviously, to Lord Ravenshurst,” said the first woman, her cheeks pinking in clear defiance. “Who else?”

“Yes. Yes, we could hardly contain our excitement all the way home,” said another woman, who hardly seemed that excited. Though lovely, she was the oldest of the women here and Ernest presumed this had to have been the Viscountess Pernrith—no, wait, did that title now belong to Michael’s wife?

He would have to ask the damned fellow exactly how all this worked. She couldn’t have been the Dowager Viscountess Pernrith because her husband was still living… Then again, now that he thought about it, ‘dowager’ simply referred to the mother of the current lord, didn’t it? And hadn’t he heard about both a ‘dowager duke’ and a ‘dowager marquess’ when word had reached him about Society’s latest gossip? He should have realized it was the Chances at work.

“It is good news, isn’t it?” the woman in the center of the room insisted—quite vehemently, from what Ernest could tell.

Which was intriguing in and of itself. Why, a marquess was a significant step up from a viscount. An even bigger step up from a baron, though as Ernest had never expected to inherit a title of any sort, it was all much of a muchness.

No matter how the young woman might insist that it was good news, she did not appear particularly pleased. Ernest’s focus raked over her. Curvaceous and pretty, with her dark hair slightly mussed in its pins and her sapphire-blue eyes determined, this had to have been one of Michael’s sisters.

One of them—but which one?

“Well. Congratulations,” said the woman’s father, as a pair of ladies who were—based on their wedding rings—the married and therefore previous Misses Chances spoke hurriedly in undertones on a sofa. “Yes. Very good. Very good.”

“Michael,” Ernest muttered, pulling the man to the window and glancing out of it as though the street view outside were the most interesting thing he had ever seen. “What the hell is going on?”