“You are very welcome indeed to this family, Anne,” the earl said, stepping forward and offering her a large hand. “But Sydnam has some explaining to do to his mother. Why have we known nothing at all of you until this moment?”

“We were married quietly in Bath yesterday by special license, my lord,” she said.

“By special license?” The earl frowned at Sydnam. “But why the great hurry, son? And why Bath of all places?”

“I was teaching at a girls’ school there until two days ago,” Anne explained, relaxing just a little. It looked as if after all his family was prepared to take her to its bosom. “Sydnam did not want to delay the wedding.”

“I did not,” he agreed, laughing. “I am s-”

“My mother is going to have a baby,” David said quite distinctly in his treble voice, drawing everyone’s shocked attention his way.

There was a very brief silence, during which Anne closed her eyes and then opened them again to find David looking uncertainly up at her. She tried to smile at him.

“In a little more than six months’ time,” Sydnam told his family. “We are enormously happy about it, are we not, Anne? I am going to be a father.”

The atmosphere had undergone a distinct change in less than a minute. The chill of autumn seemed to have sliced through the unseasonable warmth of the day.

“And Mr. Jewell passed away how long ago?” the countess asked, her manner suddenly stiff and formal.

Ah. All hope of a gradual introduction to Sydnam’s family was dashed.

“I have not been married before yesterday, ma’am,” Anne said.

“David Jewell!” the viscountess exclaimed suddenly. “But of course! Miss Jewell. You were at the Duke of Bewcastle’s Welsh estate this summer, Anne. Christine has spoken of you. She said that you were a friend of Sydnam’s.”

There was a short, awkward silence, during which they must all have realized that the two of them had been more than just friends during the summer.

“Well,” the viscount said with false heartiness, “if we stand out here on the terrace much longer, darkness will be falling. I am for my tea, and I am sure Anne and Syd must be after the long journey from Bath. Shall we go inside? David, my boy, would you like to come with Andrew and me and we will find you a room close to his? How old are you?”

“Nine, sir,” David said. “Going on ten.”

“Nine going on ten! An elder cousin indeed,” Kit said. “And I had better be Uncle Kit to you since that is what I am. What are you clever at? Mathematics? Cricket? Standing on your head?”

He set Andrew down and took Sophia from his wife’s arms. David laughed and detached himself from Anne, leaving disaster behind him, and went off with them, a new spring in his step. Andrew was gazing worshipfully up at him.

The viscountess linked an arm through Anne’s and led her up the steps into the house. Sydnam followed, between his mother and father.

There was a horrible, heavy silence to succeed the loud delight with which they had all greeted Sydnam’s return home just a few minutes ago and his announcement that he was married.

“Children!” the viscountess said softly and with apparent sympathy. “They would hang one every time, would they not? Even when they are nine years old. Or perhaps especially when they are nine years old.”

The rest of the day did not get any easier for Anne.

It continued with her second quarrel with Sydnam-one day into her marriage.

“If only I could have been swallowed up in a black hole out there on the terrace and never been heard from again,” she said after they had been taken up to his old suite of rooms and left alone there to freshen up before going to the drawing room for tea, “I would have been happy.”

“Don’t be angry with David,” he said. “He merely wished to assert himself as a member of our group. Anyway, Anne, do you not think that on the whole it was for the best that the truth came out right at the start as it did?”

“What must they think of me?” she asked him, pulling off her bonnet and dropping it onto the bed. “First they were introduced to me and my son, then they were told that we married in haste without even informing them, then they were told that I am with child, and then they learned that I have never been married before.” She slapped the points off on her fingers. “But perhaps what they think is no more than the truth. I had no business marrying the son-”

“Anne!” he said sharply. “Please don’t. Whatever they think of you over this pregnancy they must think of me too. It took both of us to make the child.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “you really do not understand, do you? It is always the woman who is to blame-even when she has been raped.”

“Are you trying to say that I took you by force at Ty Gwyn?” he asked her, his hand clutching the bedpost, color flooding into the left side of his face.

“No, of course not,” she said. “Your family will see it quite otherwise, in fact. I will be the one who seduced you.”

“Nonsense!” he said. “They are going to love you as soon as they get to know you and as soon as they see how much you mean to me.”

He did not understand at all. He was at home with his family, secure in their love and the familiarity of his surroundings and their presence. He could not see her through their eyes-or the situation through hers.

“Show me where I can straighten my hair and wash my hands,” she said. “They will be expecting us.”

“The trouble with you, Anne,” he said when they were ready to leave the room, “is that you do not trust anyone else but yourself and your own small circle of friends.”

“The trouble with me,” she said tartly, “is that I did not believe disaster could strike me twice. I am a slow learner, it would seem.”

“Is our child a disaster, then?” he asked softly, though she could hear anger trembling in his voice. “Is David a disaster?”

“And the trouble with you,” she said, almost suffocated with anger herself, “is that you do not fight fair, Sydnam Butler. That is not what I meant. You know it is not what I meant.”

“You do not need to yell,” he said. “You do not need to signal to the whole house that we are having a disagreement. What did you mean?”

She was normally an even-tempered woman. As a teacher she had been renowned for it. She was usually sensible and reasonable too. She really did not know quite what had got into her. She did not even recognize the note of bitterness in her voice. The unaccustomed anger drained from her now, as it had the night before.

“I do not know what I meant,” she said. “I just want to go home.”

Except that she did not know where home was. It had not been the house in Gloucestershire for a long, long time. She no longer belonged at the school in Bath. She had been to Ty Gwyn on just one memorable occasion. There was no home-no safe home-to go to.

Sydnam was right, perhaps. She did not trust, she did not belong. But this time her predicament was entirely her own fault.

“I’ll take you there soon,” he said, his manner softening too. “But since we have come here, we might as well stay for a few days, would you not agree?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

She opened the door and preceded him from the room. He offered his arm as they descended the stairs and she took it. But the shadow of an unresolved quarrel and a marriage shakily begun lay dark between them. It was not helped by her awareness that she had been petulant and self-pitying. She did not know what his family thought of her, did she?

Everyone was remarkably polite during tea and again later at dinner. Conversation did not flag. But the warm delight with which Sydnam and she too had been greeted on their arrival was definitely gone. No one ignored Anne. Indeed, she was drawn firmly into the conversation.

The earl questioned her and discovered that her father was a gentleman, that she had a younger sister and an elder brother, that the expense of sending her brother first to Eton and then to Oxford had put such a severe strain on her father’s purse that she had offered to seek a governess’s position for a few years before marrying.