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leave me behind, but we could not safely travel with Papa. Very soon, we could not safely travel at all. Mother died that winter, without ever seeing her husband again. She was my first experience with the casualties of war, for I believe she died of a broken heart, not a simple ague.”
    So he’d gone from being an English schoolboy, albeit a wellborn schoolboy, to a Frenchman’s grandson with inconvenient paternal antecedents, all in the course of a few bewildering months.
    He steered the phaeton past Apsley House, that imposing edifice inhabited by no less personage than the Duke of Wellington.
    “Tell me more about these aunts,” St. Clair said. He did not so much as glance at the duke’s handsome residence. “Did they tipple? Did they flirt with the curate? The baroness would lose all heart had she no flirts.”
    What to say? That Milly did indeed feel like an orphan—more of an orphan than ever? That she was frightened to be so alone, more frightened than she’d been since her own parents died? He’d listen to those sentiments, and he would not judge her for them.
    St. Clair viewed the world with a surprising sense of compassion, and yet, despite her own need for silence, despite the lump in her throat, Milly launched into a spate of chattering about Aunt Hy’s flowers and Aunt Mil’s shortbread.
    To spare St. Clair from his own thoughts of an orphaned, angry, bewildered past, she talked.

Three
    As Sebastian listened to Miss Danforth prattle on about quilting parties and old women who held “knitting meets” with their familiars, he wondered if Wellington himself might not be behind the recent series of duels.
    Sebastian’s first year of repatriation had been calm enough. The worst he’d suffered had been scornful looks, the cut direct here and there, a smattering of snide asides—the very same fare served him during his initial months with the French Army. A few months ago, the tenor of the abuse had become more lethal, as if somebody important had gone down a list of post-war grudges and come to Sebastian’s name.
    “I have not seen you knitting, Miss Danforth, for all that you claim to have won these knitting races.” Inane talk, this, but she was trying not to cry, and Sebastian would aid her as best he could.
    “I knit at night now, when I can’t sleep. I do the piecework during the day, when the light is better.”
    “I have seen the old sailors, sitting with their tankards, knitting away as if their hands belonged to somebody else. I have seen the old women, too, knitting while cannonballs flew over their heads. Knitting must be powerful medicine for the mind.”
    “Why on earth would old women be knitting in the midst of cannon fire? Why would old women even be within hearing of cannon fire?”
    Her indignation was a tonic. Every soul on earth ought to regard the combination of old women and cannon fire with outrage. The human race should go to bed each night praying to le bon Dieu such a tragedy never befell any of their members again.
    Though it would, human nature being incorrigibly foolish.
    “I commanded a small garrison in the mountains of southwestern France. For much of the war, we had little to do but serve as a place for troops going into Spain to eat and rest.” He told this lie smoothly, because he’d rehearsed it often in his mind, which made it no less mendacious. “Some officers brought their wives to the post, and we had our share of laundresses and cooks, the same as any army.”
    Whores, most of them, and God bless them for it.
    “I cannot fathom women in the midst of warfare.”
    Miss Danforth looked less grim and peaked to contemplate this topic than to contemplate the loss of her aunts. Sebastian brought the phaeton to a halt in deference to a donkey disinclined to proceed into an intersection. The ragman at the beast’s head was cursing fluently, but in such a thick Cockney accent, Sebastian doubted Miss Danforth could comprehend it.
    “Look around you, Miss