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current circumstances.
    “But…Monsieur Joseph?”
    “What is it, Baptiste?”
    “Well, when I was sniffing around for information down there, I kept bumping into your father’s valet Jacques. And Jacques was asking a lot of the same questions I was. Especially about where she sleeps.”
    If it had been any other girl, he might have been amused. The rule about keeping pretty servants away was his sister-in-law’s invention, a straitlaced and rather spiteful way of imposing authority over an anarchic household. Let the old man do as he wants , he might have thought. Let him live as he always had—selfishly, reprehensibly—in the little time left to him.
    If it had been any girl but this one.
    He hadn’t a clue what to do. But he knew he was going to do something.
    “Suppertime, Monsieur Joseph.”
     
     
    He supposed the food was quite good. His parents had always set an excellent table, even as his father’s debts eroded the family fortune, weeds choked the chateau’s moat, and the mistral blew shards of slate off the roof and stone from the battlements. He sipped his soup, a chilled sherried consommé with morels. He was too agitated to taste it, but he suspected that it was splendid. All the food was probably splendid now that his sister-in-law was in charge of things. She’d brought an immense dowry with her, along with an ironclad determination to restore the family to its former glory. There were plasterers and carpenters everywhere, busily transforming the rough-hewn thirteenth century chateau to a mini-Versailles.
    An easier job, Joseph thought, than making an elegant gentleman out of Hubert. His brother—six years older and a head shorter—had never been much for social graces, or even simple table manners. Joseph watched a tall, muscular footman refill his plump brother’s wineglass and then his soup bowl. Hubert proceeded to slurp one and slop the other; his lace cuffs would be a multicolored marvel by the time the meal was done.
    “And do tell me all the news of Madame de Rambuteau.” Amélie leaned solicitously toward him, the better to hear what he might say, and to give him a closer look at a not-unreasonable bosom. She had sharp greenish eyes and pointed features, excellent height and carriage, and no family to speak of. Her father’s title had been all too recently purchased, with an obscene fortune bled from sugar plantations in Haiti. His sister-in-law was rather a joke with the family’s oldest intimates—Madame de Rambuteau had entertained him more than once with her devastating parody of the lady’s arriviste affectations. “Ah, well,” his mother had sighed this morning in the coach, “she was the best we could find for Hubert.”
    He hoped that Hubert was less inept in bed than he was at the table. But he doubted it, his own particular theory being that while a hearty and gourmandizing eater was a good lover, a helpless glutton was not. All of which made him more sympathetic than he might otherwise be toward the Comtesse Amélie, this high-strung, energetic woman whom the marriage market had placed in such an awkward position. If only she wouldn’t take out the frustrations of her situation on her servants. He’d seen the way she’d glared at Marie-Laure this afternoon, and heard the cold, threatening tone in which she’d ordered “Marianne” to serve the family their tea.
    She was still waiting for an answer from him, bosom still thrust under his nose.
    “Madame de Rambuteau is gracious as ever,” he told her. “She spoke often of you, too, and the pleasure she takes in your company.”
    She returned a gratified (if somewhat surprised) nod. “She must have been sorry to have to let you go.”
    He smiled. “Actually, Madame, my departure was most felicitously timed. Well, perhaps just a trifle belated…” He turned toward Hubert, hoping to slip in a barbed reference to all the anxious months spent waiting to hear that it was safe for him to venture outside of Madame