The Earl set down his coffee cup with great care.
"Are the servants talking?"
"My dear fellow, no. Not to me. I would not allow it. But one hears things, in the kitchens, in the stables. A lady and a gardener, alone, every morning for months, in a building with the door shut. It is nothing, I am certain. A harmless friendship. And yet…" He sighed. "You know how people are. Hale is a very personable young man. Very well-made. And your own absences, if I may say so, have been long."
Lucian looked at his cousin for a long moment. Gerard looked back with an expression of tender concern, and the Earl, who was not a fool and who knew his cousin's character better than most, nevertheless felt the stone behind his ribs shift and grow heavier.
"Thank you, Gerard," he said at last, in a voice as flat as a plank. "That will be all."
"Of course. Of course. Forget I said anything."
But of course Lucian could not, and Gerard, who had not been a gambler for twenty years without learning to read a man's face, smiled into his napkin when the Earl looked away.
He had been waiting a very long time for the moment to say it.
Chapter Four: What the Countess Knew
Cecilia came home at nine with mud on her hem and a glow on her cheeks, and found her husband standing in the hall.
"My lord!" She stopped dead. "You are back. I did not know. Nobody told me."
"Nobody knew," he said. "I came early."
"Oh." She pulled the shawl from her hair and her hands trembled slightly, because she was thinking of the notes in her book and of what she had been about to tell him, and of how impossible it was to tell him anything when he stood there in the hall like a statue of himself. "I hope the journey was not too tiring."
"It was well enough." His eyes went to her muddy hem, and to the book under her arm. "You have been walking."
"In the garden. Yes."
"Early."
"I like the morning."
"So I hear."
The words were not quite a question, and not quite an accusation, and she looked up at him, startled. But his face was closed, as it always was, and she could read nothing there. Her heart sank as it so often did in his presence, like a stone dropped slowly into a well.