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cost.”
    “No, I mean about Billy. Your son. Or have you forgotten about him again?”
    The earl supposed he deserved the sharp edge of her tongue, but there were limits to what he would endure. “William”—he emphasized the boy’s proper name—“is no longer your concern, madam. I shall see that he is properly reared, as befits my son. He is somewhat young for Eton, but I am certain there is a school that will take him.”
    “You would send a five-year-old child away from home, to live with strangers?”
    Rockford might have said he was tossing the brat in the moat, by the look of horror on the widow’s face. “No, I would have him educated properly among his peers, the same way I was.”
    He could tell she was biting her lip to keep from blurting an opinion of the results in front of her. Instead she asked, “Wouldn’t Billy do better here in the country, among friends, learning about the land and people, the heritage he will inherit someday?” Again she refrained from stating the obvious, that perhaps the earl might have been a better landlord if he were more familiar with his holdings.
    The earl heard what she did not say, nevertheless. He did swipe at his begrimed coat sleeve. To hell with her floors. He’d pay someone to come in to mop the damn things. Still inspecting his sleeve, he said, “I regret to inform you that William will not inherit Rock Hill. He is not my heir, not the firstborn son.”
    “You have another son?” She looked out the window, as if he were hiding the boy in the old carriage. “That is, I believe I heard it once mentioned that you had another son from an earlier marriage, but he was sickly. When I never heard of him again, and he never appeared, I suppose I assumed he had perished.”
    “In that case William would have become Viscount Rothmore,” he said, iterating what any true lady of the ton would have learned along with her letters. “Instead my son Hugo holds the honorary title. He is twelve.”
    “And thriving?”
    Thriving? How the deuce could he admit to not knowing? Rockford made a safe guess: “Hugo is doing as well as can be expected for a lad with a weak chest.”
    “Oh, I am so sorry he is afflicted. My husband died of a congestion of the lungs, you know.”
    He did not know that either. “My condolences.”
    She nodded. “And mine on the loss of your wife. Wives.”
    “Yes, well, my losses were some years ago.” Mrs. Henning seemed to expect more, so he continued. “Hugo’s mother died in a carriage accident a year after his birth.” He did not say that she was fleeing with her lover at the time. Nor did he say that she had not been a virgin on the eve of their arranged match. Hugo bore his name, which was all anyone had to know. “And William’s mother”—whom Rockford had married to beget another, healthier heir, in light of Hugo’s frailty—“died birthing him.”
    While calling out another man’s name.
    “How sad for you,” Mrs. Henning said, a quaver in her voice.
    Yes, it was, having to claim two sons possibly sired by other men. Rockford did not want the widow’s sympathy, though, not for two unfaithful wives he’d never desired in the first place. “Yes, well, Hugo lives with his grandparents in Sheffield.”
    Before the widow’s green eyes could turn from concerned to censorious again, he went on: “He was a sickly infant, under constant attendance by physicians there. What could I have done for him, widowed as I was, with no experience of children whatsoever? My wife’s parents begged to be allowed to keep the boy, to assuage their grief over their beloved daughter.”
    And their guilt.
    “But I mean to fetch him back now,” Rockford went on, as if it were his idea. “Like Nanny, Lord and Lady Chudleigh are getting on in years. He has the rheumatics and her sight is failing. I believe they wish to take up residence in Bath, for the waters, without a growing boy to look after. Now that I think of it, I will take William