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of you to have kept Charles and myself waiting.”
    â€œI’m sorry. I was with Robin in the nursery,” Isobel murmured.
    Honoria’s frown deepened. “You baby that boy far too much. You should limit your visits to one per week, and for a few minutes only. You fly in at the most awkward times and interrupt his lessons.”
    Isobel stared at the plate of soup before her. It was cream of leek, which was Charles’s favorite and therefore served regularly. Isobel detested it. She let her lip curl for a moment.
    â€œYou fill the boy’s head with nonsense, telling him fairy stories,” Charles added, snapping his napkin in the air before laying it on his lap. “He needs more time with his tutors. His Latin is abysmal.”
    Isobel forced herself to swallow a mouthful of the hated soup to keep from asking her brother-in-law just how good his own Latin was. She recalled Robert telling her that Charles had been at the bottom of all his classes at school. Yet Robert had made him responsible for managing their son’s affairs until he came of age. She, of course, was not permitted to know the details of how the earldom was being managed.
    Resentment tasted as vile as the soup. She would order Robin a dozen new storybooks from Hatchard’s the moment luncheon ended, and not a single one of them in Latin.
    â€œJane said she found you rolling on the floor of the nursery, your gown disheveled and filthy. She said your hair needed combing. Is this the way you believe you should appear before an impressionable child?” Honoria demanded.
    Isobel bit her tongue so hard she tasted blood, but didn’t argue. There was no point in making her mother-in-law angry. Especially today. She felt hot color creeping over her cheeks, and the knot of anger in her throat made swallowing more soup impossible.
    â€œBlood will tell, I suppose,” Honoria added, shooting the familiar barb at Isobel’s mother.
    Isobel concentrated on placing her spoon just so on the edge of her bowl before she clasped the linen napkin in her lap and twisted it, imagining it was Honoria’s fat neck.
    It was hardly her fault that her mother had run off with an Italian musician, abandoning her cold marriage when her daughter was only ten. She had chosen happiness and love, two things Isobel would eternally lack, thanks to Robert’s will and Honoria’s twisted ideas of proper behavior.
    At least she had her secret tryst with Blackwood to soothe the sting of Honoria’s comments today. She suppressed a smile as a tingle bubbled through her tainted blood.
    Her mother-in-law was expounding on the right way to raise a boy, and Isobel stopped listening. Honoria had no right to tell anyone how to be a mother, having raised two such odious, unfeeling, self-centered sons as Robert and Charles.
    She let her mind drift back to the delights of Evelyn’s garden, the delicious anonymity of it all. Perhaps she truly was like her mother, and it just took a man like the notorious—
    â€œMarquess of Blackwood,” Charles said out loud, and Isobel looked up at her brother-in-law in horror. He laughed at her, his piggy eyes disappearing into pouches of sallow skin.
    â€œWoolgathering again, were you?” He laughed. “I can imagine the blackguard’s name would shock you, and rightly so.” She continued to stare, and he rolled his eyes at her lackof comprehension and stabbed a finger at the newspaper beside his plate.
    â€œIt says Blackwood’s youngest sister is making her debut this season. For all she’s the granddaughter of the Duke of Carrington, she’ll not find it easy to get a proposal from a decent gentleman, with Blackwood’s name associated with her own.”
    â€œPoor girl,” Honoria said. “I’m sure you understand what she will endure, Isobel, with your mother’s reputation what it was. You would have faced the scorn of good society yourself, if