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war, he’d been achingly thin, with distressingly dark
     shadows beneath his eyes. Less than a season later, he was better groomed, with his
     fair hair combed neatly off his forehead, and his fine suit expertly tailored to conceal
     the full extent of his frailty. But the shadows remained, lingering in his voice,
     his manner, and his weary gaze.
    It shamed her, but in all that time she hadn’t sent him a single letter. He had been
     suffering—she could see it now, as clearly as the lines on his face—but had she even
     once bothered to let him know she was glad he’d survived? To let him know she had
     missed him? She had asked after him in her letters to Lilly, and once or twice had
     asked to be remembered to him; but that wasn’t enough, and she knew it.
    Embarrassment had stilled her hand: a pathetic excuse, really, but it was the truth.
     The night of his return, she had all but fainted at his feet when he walked through
     the door of her and Lilly’s boardinghouse. She’d known that Robbie was expected home,
     but the reappearance of Edward, their Lazarus risen from the dead, had been a shock
     she couldn’t ever have foreseen.
    She had recovered her composure before long, and somehowmade it through the strange, rather awkward hour that followed. They had gathered
     in Mrs. Collins’s shabby little sitting room and had, all four of them, spoken of
     carefully neutral items: the recent weather, the men’s journey home, the peace negotiations
     in Paris.
    So much had been left unsaid. How had he survived? Why had there been no news of him
     for nearly a year? Instead he had bid her good evening, thanked her solemnly for her
     good wishes, and had returned to Ashford House, no doubt to give his parents the shock
     of their lives when he walked through the door.
    Consumed by the details of her coming move to Liverpool, Charlotte had left London
     a fortnight later without once seeking him out. She thought of him often, but she
     really had been so terribly busy, and of course he was occupied with his family and
     the many bureaucratic complications of having been declared dead and without issue.
    She had meant to write to him, but the days had crept by, days that turned into weeks,
     and the longer she waited the heavier her pen had become.
    Yet his eyes now held no trace of reproach.
    “I owe you an apology,” he said as he sat beside her. “Robbie has informed me that
     once again my mother and other sisters have behaved abominably.”
    “Then why are you apologizing?”
    “I ought to have prevented their being rude to you. I assumed, wrongly, that they
     would be civil.”
    “Never mind. I’ve a thick skin. They weren’t particularly rude, besides. Simply .
     . . disapproving.”
    “I am sorry, though. Especially since you took the trouble to come so far.”
    “You shouldn’t worry about me, not when you have so many other concerns. How are you
     bearing up?”
    “Well enough. Despite his faults I was fond of the old fellow. The rest of it I could
     do without. The solicitors, the estate managers, the hangers-on . . . most of all
     my mother and sisters, Lilly excepted. Moaning and complaining and clinging at me
     endlessly. It’s almost enough to make me wish I were back in Belgium.”
    “Don’t say that,” she whispered. “Don’t ever say that.”
    “Why not? It’s true enough.”
    “They weren’t unkind to you there, were they?” she asked, and immediately regretted
     her presumption. To ask him about such a thing when he was mourning his father, and
     when they were surrounded by a roomful of people, was the very height of insensitivity.
     Yet he didn’t seem to mind, or even notice.
    “Not at all. They cared for me very well indeed.”
    “Then why didn’t they repatriate you sooner, or at least send word?”
    “Because I refused to tell them my name. I had lost my identity disks and my uniform
     had been cut off and discarded. They had no way of knowing who I was.”
    It