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gravel voiced. “I love you, Jenna.”
    â€œThen I would suggest that you rethink who needs to apologize to whom before this weekend is over. What I have ‘a mind to do’ depends upon it.”
    The rest of the afternoon was uneventful. Jenna returned to her suite to rest and change for dinner, which was to be held at eight. Lady Hollingsworth insisted she wear her embroidered dinner gown of sage green patterned silk, citing that it tinted her silver-gray eyes the color of seawater. Jenna would have preferred her burgundy voile, with the rosebud trim, but she allowed the green to avoid an argument. It was to be her first dinner
à la russe
since she had come out of mourning, and it was a treat to wear any color at a formal affair after a dismal year of paramatta, black bombazine, and crepe.
    She was seated between Crispin St. John and Rupert. Kevernwood sat diagonally across the table from her, flanked by Lady Evelyn and Rosemary Warrenford. Jenna tried not to look in the earl’s direction, but his eyes, like magnets, drew her own.
    Liveried footmen served the courses from food laid out on the sideboard. Menus were posted at every third place on porcelain menu plates. There would be multiple courses, beginning with Soup à la Reine, followed by turbot, salmon, and trout, all appropriately sauced. There would then be game hens, roast saddle of mutton, ham, braised beef, and spring chicken. Fruit compote, apple charlotte, and Neapolitans would be served for dessert along with the usual assortment of sweet dessert wines.
    To Jenna, it all tasted like sawdust.
    The table was spread with elegant damask linens, fine crystal, and flowers: pink and lavender sweet peas overflowing round silver bowls. She studied her distorted reflection in the bowl between herself and the earl. To her dismay, her face was deeply flushed, and she’d hardly touched any wine.
    Lady Evelyn chattered incessantly. Nobody seemed to mind. It was plain that the gentlemen all found her quite charming in her rose-colored silk gown and coronet of matching silk ribbon rosebuds. Lady Hollingsworth had chosen a pale green plume for Jenna’s hair ornament, insisting that it was exquisite against her strawberry blond hair, but she felt like a circus horse straight out of Astley’s Amphitheatre in it. Why had she settled for the green? Why hadn’t she dug in her heels and held out for the burgundy?
    The dinner went well until after the third course. The footmen had removed everything on the table, including the tablecloth, and the butler began setting out the ratafia and sweet wines, while the under-butler and maids busied themselves laying down the dessert plates and silver at each diner’s place. It was when the footmen began to serve the desserts that the conversation became dangerously political.
    The earl and Sir Gerald Markham were discussing the economy. Much was being made of the economic decline amongst the upper and lower classes since the war with the Colonies.
    â€œSince the postage rates went up again, my tenants can’t afford it,” Sir Gerald said. “They come begging to me, when their letters arrive, to pay the post. And arrive they do. The lower classes breed like rabbits. They have relations scattered all over the Empire. I myself do not receive such a quantity of mail. And as if that isn’t enough, they steal from me. How do you deal with your cottagers, Kevernwood? You’re an absentee landlord for the most part. How do you keep your tenants from poaching and robbing you blind? I’ve had to set out mantraps and spring guns, and hire overseers myself.”
    â€œMy tenants do not steal because they do not have to,” the earl replied succinctly, almost smiling.
    â€œThere’s wisdom in that somewhere I suppose,” Rupert chided.
    â€œThere is,” the earl agreed. He did smile then, but it was a cold smile that chilled Jenna to the bone. “Cottagers become unruly