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long, expressive eyes, a strong nose, and lips that were really too sumptuous for a man, but somehow still managed to look chiseled and interesting on his face. And Lizzy loathed him with a passion that other women reserved for spiders that had crawled up their stockings.
    She hated the showy and complicated knot of his necktie, the too fashionably snug cut of his coat, the sheen and luster of his hair that couldn’t have been achieved without regular applications of lemon juice and egg yolk. She deplored that her dear Stuart trusted and depended on this peacock to the extent that he did. And it made her grit her teeth that as Mr. Marsden was no mere plebeian, but a son of the seventh Earl of Wyden, she couldn’t very well ignore him and leave him waiting in the vestibule, but must receive him in her drawing room.
    “Mr. Marsden, how good of you to come. Thank you for taking the trouble,” she said, her words a winter’s worth of ice under a thin gloss of politesse. She hadn’t wanted Mr. Somerset’s secretary to travel with them, but her father had been very much in favor of the idea.
    “It’s my honor and my pleasure,” said Mr. Marsden, smiling slightly.
    In her more lucid moments, she was somewhat alarmed at the intensity of her antipathy, given that Mr. Marsden had never done her any harm, nor even uttered an objectionable word in her presence. But then Mr. Marsden would smile, and her lucidity would find itself out in the back settlements of Australia.
    Because it was a horrid smile, all filth and smut beneath a varnish of courtesy: a smile that said he knew something intolerable about her. And since it so happened that there was a wide swath of Lizzy’s recent past that could not be known without getting her banished from Society, her loathing was contaminated with fear—and an almost nauseous awareness that she never found him more handsome than when he had on one of those reviled smiles.
    Then his smile went away, and he looked at her with something that would have passed for genuine concern on the part of any other man. But on him, it only made her even more wary.
    “Are you well, Miss Bessler?” he asked.
    The quiet intimacy of his tone disconcerted her entirely. Though they’d been introduced two years ago, it had been shortly before she’d shut herself off from the outside world for the next seventeen months. Their acquaintance was of the most incidental variety and she saw no reason for him to care whether she was well.
    Her father came into the drawing room. Mr. Marsden turned and greeted him. The men proclaimed their mutual pleasure at seeing each other again, while Lizzy silently breathed a thanksgiving that she was no longer alone with Mr. Marsden.
    “Shall we get going, then, Papa?” she said brightly.
     

     
    Stuart had forgotten how beautiful Fairleigh Park was, even so late in the year. The gardens had been planned with the progression of the seasons in mind; the estate abounded in foliage the colors of wine and gold, warm and vivid against a backdrop of mossy evergreens.
    Twenty years it had been, since he left for India at seventeen, furious at both his father and Bertie. But it felt even longer. The scent of Fairleigh Park in deep autumn—of falling leaves and the stillness of the countryside between the end of harvest and the bustle of yule—was one he associated with his earliest years in Yorkshire, before he started public school and came back home only during Christmas, Easter, and the months of summer.
    He walked the mile from the gates of the estate to the village. The sun shed an anemic light, but it was still a clear, crisp day. The village had been built upon an incline, its biscuit-colored houses hugging the sides of a tributary to the Ure. A stone bridge from the sixteenth century spanned the fast-flowing brook.
    As he passed through the village, curtains fluttered; curious faces appeared from around corners and behind drystone walls. The villagers had guessed his