The May morning had dressed Hyde Park in its finest greens and golds, but William Ashby, sixth Duke of Rexam, noticed none of it. He rode a coal-black gelding along the Row, his posture perfect, his countenance arranged into the polite boredom expected of a man of his station. Beside him, perched on a dappled mare, Lady Anoria Devo laughed at something he had not said, her gloved hand brushing his sleeve with practiced ease. She was a handsome widow with copper hair and a voice that carried too far.

Rexam kept her company because she demanded little and expected less. Their arrangement suited him, a polite fiction of companionship without the inconvenience of emotion. They passed Stanhope Gate, and Anoria was describing a ball gown that had offended her sensibilities when the Duke's attention snagged on a figure near the Serpentine. A woman walked along the gravel path, her gown the color of soft rain, her bonnet trimmed with a single ribbon of faded blue.

She held herself with a stillness that seemed to part the crowd around her, as though the other strollers sensed some invisible boundary. Two children flanked her, a boy and a girl, neither more than five years of age. The boy had hair the exact shade of the Duke's own, a dark brown that caught the sun like polished walnut. The girl tipped her chin upward, and the gesture struck Rexam with the force of a forgotten melody.

He had seen that exact lift of defiance in the portrait of his mother that hung in Ashford Chase's great hall. He pulled his horse to a halt so abruptly that Anoria's mare sidestepped, and she let out a sound of annoyance. He did not hear her. The woman turned her head, perhaps sensing his stare, and the world contracted to a single point.

Catherine, his wife, the woman he had banished from his life five years ago, branding her an adulteress on the strength of a letter and a servant's whispered testimony. She had stood in the cold morning light of his study, her face paper-white, and denied everything. He had not believed her. He had sent her away with a settlement and a name so blackened that no decent house would receive her.

Now she stood not twenty yards distant, and the children at her sides were living portraits of the Ashby bloodline. Catherine's eyes met his. For the span of a single breath, something flickered there, recognition perhaps, or the ghost of an old wound. Then it vanished, replaced by a composure so absolute it felt like a door closing.

She bent her head to murmur to the children and, without haste, turned them toward the trees and walked away. Rexam sat frozen in his saddle. The boy's stride matched his own boyhood gait, a slight bounce in the step. The girl's profile was a cameo of his grandmother as a young woman.

"Your Grace," Anoria's voice cut through his reverie. "Have you seen a specter? You look positively ill."

He did not answer. His mind was a storm of dates and calculations. Five years. The twins were not babes in arms.

If they were five years old, then Catherine had been carrying them in the final months of their marriage when he had accused her, when he had flung her from his house, when he had refused her every attempt to contact him afterward. The carriage rolled away in his memory, and he saw again the way she had pressed a hand to her midsection as she climbed inside. He had thought it a gesture of grief. He had been a fool.

Anoria was speaking again, something about refreshment at Gunter's, but Rexam gathered his reins and turned his horse without a word. He rode past her, past the line of carriages, his eyes fixed on the distant figures disappearing into the green shade. The Duke of Rexam, who had not run from anything since boyhood, pressed his heels into his horse's flanks and galloped toward a truth he was not certain he had the courage to face.

By the time he reached the Serpentine's bend, Catherine and the children were gone. The park resumed its pleasant murmur. A nursemaid pushed a perambulator. A pair of young bucks argued over a racehorse, and the Duke stood alone at the water's edge, his heart hammering against his ribs like a prisoner demanding release, knowing his life had just cleaved into the years before this moment and whatever came after.

Part Two

The house in Bloomsbury sat on a quiet square where the plane trees dropped their leaves in lazy spirals. Rexam's man of business had needed only two days to locate Catherine and compile a report that left the Duke staring at his study wall for an hour. She had given birth seven months after leaving Ashford Chase. Twins, a boy and a girl, christened Henry and Margaret, bearing her maiden name of Linton.

She lived with her widowed aunt, Mrs. Dorothea Crane, and kept to herself. Seven months. Rexam had done the arithmetic until the numbers blurred. A woman could deliver healthy twins at seven months, though it was rare.

The more damning calculation placed conception squarely within the weeks when she had still shared his bed, his name, his table, before the letter arrived, before his brother Reginald had come to him with sorrowful eyes and a maid's testimony. He drew a breath and knocked on the door of the narrow townhouse. A maid opened it, her expression shifting from curiosity to guarded recognition when he gave his name. She left him standing in the hall, a cramped space with faded wallpaper and a vase of wildflowers on a side table.

The flowers caught his eye. Cornflowers and daisies, nothing hothouse or cultivated. Catherine had always preferred wild things. She appeared at the top of the stairs and descended without hurry.

The years had etched fine lines at the corners of her eyes, but her bearing remained the same, straight, measured, unhurried. She wore a gray wool dress with white cuffs, her dark hair drawn back in a simple knot. She looked like a governess in her own home, and the thought stung him.

"Your Grace," she said. Her voice was level, empty of welcome. "You should not have come."

"I saw you in the park." He heard the roughness in his own voice. "I saw the children."

She did not flinch. "Then you have seen them. There is nothing more to discuss."

"Catherine." He stepped forward, and she stopped on the bottom stair, putting her eyes level with his. "Are they mine?"

The question hung between them. Something moved in her face. Not anger, but a weariness that spoke of years spent bracing for this moment.

"They are mine," she said. "They have been mine since the day you ordered your footmen to see me off your property. They have been mine through every fever and every fright, every birthday candle, and every night I sat beside their beds wondering how to explain why they had no father."

"I did not know."

"You did not wish to know." She folded her hands before her. "I wrote to you three letters. Your secretary returned them unopened."

"I sent word through my aunt, and your solicitor informed her that any further communication would be considered harassment. You made your position clear, Your Grace. The world believed me guilty, and you allowed it."

The words landed like stones. He remembered those letters, or rather, he remembered the absence of them. Reginald had intercepted the post. He understood now.

He had been so willing to let his brother manage the unpleasant details. "I was wrong," he said.

Catherine's composure did not crack. "That is a small word for a very large destruction."

Footsteps pattered above. A child's voice called, "Mama, who is there?"