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abruptly as the door opened.
    The marquis entered, talking as he came, his normally neat auburn hair rumpled as if he had been running his hands through it. “Phyllida, I cannot find—” He broke off. “Ingram!” He strode forward, relief patent in every line of his drawn countenance.
    The scowl evaporated from the captain’s face to be replaced by honest concern. A pang of longing shot through Phyllida, for such a friendship, with such a friend…
    Lord Ingram clasped the marquis’s hand. “How do you go on, Allbury?”
    “Better for seeing you, my dear fellow.”
    Ingram’s searching gaze rested on his old friend’s face. “Is there anything I can do?”
    Allbury’s lips twitched into a wry smile though his eyes remained bleak. “Come have a glass of wine with me. Tell me what you’ve been about. It’s been three years, hasn’t it?” Almost desperately, he fastened on this new topic like a dog with a meaty bone. “Have you been fighting on the Continent all that time? I thought you’d sell out, sooner or later, after your brother died. Terrible thing, that. No one expects to meet one’s end with a fall on the hunting field.”
    He took Lord Ingram’s arm and led him from the salon. “What a thing to do, to just walk in on us like that last night. Thought you’d have written before now.” His next sentence faded as the door closed behind the two gentlemen.
    Phyllida sank onto her chair, feeling buffeted by her exchange with Lord Ingram. Why did he dislike her? Or did he hold all females in abhorrence? A shrewd intuition told her that was not the case—despite his forthright manners. For some obscure reason, Captain Lord Ingram’s antipathy had been directed at her, personally. And she intended to find out why.

Chapter Three
     
    Phyllida returned to the writing desk, drew forth a fresh card then stared unseeing at it for a very long while. No, she could make no sense of Lord Ingram’s antagonism. Nor of her own determination to alter it. A lingering wistfulness clung to her, refusing to release its hold.
    She should just be grateful, she scolded herself, that someone had called who could divert the marquis’s thoughts from the loss of his wife. She would like very much to be diverted herself.
    That reminded her, she ought to check on Constance Yarborough. If the dowager ran the staff ragged with unnecessary errands, then Jane would be needed in her role as upper parlor maid, leaving Constance alone.
    She found the girl lying in her darkened room, staring blindly at the curtained window. Phyllida hesitated just over the threshold. “Constance? Are you feeling worse?”
    The girl turned her large, tear-filled pansy eyes to stare at Phyllida. “What’s to become of us?”
    Phyllida went to her and sat on the edge of the bed, taking her hand in a sustaining clasp. “You need not worry about that now. It can wait until you are better.”
    “Can it?” The girl sniffed then had recourse to the rumpled handkerchief she clutched. “I didn’t give it any thought before, I was too overcome by… But now it is all I can think about. Louisa didn’t offer us much but at least it was a place to live. The dowager will turn us out without so much as a roof over our heads.”
    “No, Constance, I am sure—”
    “You know she will. How can we stop her? Oh, why didn’t I think of this before—” She broke off abruptly with a soft cry of alarm and buried her face in her hands.
    Phyllida’s stomach clenched. Before what? Before she killed her benefactress?
    She forced down her rising horror. The fear had been in the back of her mind—it must have been for that terrible thought to raise its ugly head—but the reality of it simply hadn’t dawned on her until now. One of the people in that box last night had actually murdered Louisa. Someone she knew.
    She shook her head, unable to accept it, unable to believe such a thing. Yet the rational part of her mind knew it to be all too true. She closed her