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of it, like flirtation—which everyone knew was an early step on the path to seduction.
    Why had he failed to—
    He slapped his head.
    Idiot.
    He’d sensed experience . That was what had thrown him off course. He’d sensed and reacted to it without articulating it to himself.
    Though it was never easy to determine a woman’s age precisely, any moron could identify a green girl.
    This girl was not fresh from the schoolroom.
    Darius was surprised, however, when he found out exactly how old she was.
    He did so, he was sure, merely to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. This was no different than his curiosity about the dragonflies. He approached the matter as he would any other scientific inquiry, though he was more discreet about it.
    At the Unicorn, while his manservant, Goodbody, sighed over the grass stains and mud on his trousers, Darius encouraged the pair of not-unattractive maidservants to gossip.
    This was how he learned that Lady Charlotte Hayward was seven and twenty years old.
    Seven and twenty and unwed!
    Darius could not make sense of it.
    She was the only daughter of a marquess.
    She was beautiful.
    Her father was no impoverished aristocrat but a high-ranking, well-liked, and wealthy one. What family in England would not wish for the connection? What gentleman seeking to fill his nursery would not wish to breed with such prime blood-stock? How was it that none had done so?
    Darius was so perplexed—not to mention exasperated—that he forgot about bedding the maidservants. Instead, following a wash, shave, and change of clothes, he left Goodbody to brood over his boots and continued his investigation in the Unicorn’s taproom.
    Here he found that theories—or rather, rumors—abounded.
    “A terrible tragedy, that one,” said the innkeeper’s wife as she served his pint. “Lady Charlotte had her heart set on an officer, but he got blown to bits at Waterloo.”
    “Nothing to do with Waterloo,” one of her patrons insisted. “He was killed at Baltimore during that war with the Americans.”
    “Wasn’t no officer,” another argued. “A Count Somebody come to London with the Tsar of Russia for the victory celebrations. Caught a fever and died.”
    An argument ensued.
    At the inn’s stables, a less romantic point of view prevailed. Lady Charlotte had not buried her heart in any dashing officer’s or foreign nobleman’s grave. The reason she wasn’t wed was simple enough: No one was good enough for her.
    “I see,” Darius said. “Her suitors were an inferior lot of fellows.”
    “Oh, no, sir,” said one of the stablemen. “She had a duke after her. And a marquess.”
    “There was that earl’s eldest son last year,” said another. “The perfect one.”
    One of his fellows nudged him and muttered something. The man looked abashed.
    Darius didn’t need the hint. They referred to his eldest brother Benedict, Lord Rathbourne, also known as Lord Perfect.
    “Well, if Lord Perfect wasn’t good enough for her, perhaps she has an excessively high opinion of herself?” Darius said. She had been quite haughty with him, and perhaps made his pride smart a very little bit—because he wasn’t used to that sort of nonsense, he told himself.
    “Not proud at all, sir,” said the first stableman.
    “Sweetest lady in the world,” said another.
    “Never a unkind word for anybody.”
    “Always a smile and thanks, even for the smallest thing you do for her.”
    “All the servants say the same.”
    “The ladies, too. They all like her—and you know what cats they can be.”
    Then followed stories of Lady Charlotte Hayward’s various kindnesses to her fellow creatures, from the great to the insignificant.
    Darius tried to reconcile the picture they painted with the woman he’d met. It wouldn’t reconcile. This couldn’t be the same lady. Yet it must be.
    He turned the problem over in his mind. He looked at it from first one angle then another. The conundrum remained.
    This was annoying. He had