Luc didn’t care. Arabella was nowhere to be seen. The malicious gossip circulating throughout the party must have reached her.

He lifted his glass, accepted the sympathetic nods of his actual friends, and bowed. Then everyone began talking. He set down the champagne and wove his way through the guests, searching, his limited field of vision never more frustrating.

She might be devastated. No. Not his sharp-tongued little governess. She would be more likely to throw the incivility back in a gossip’s face than accept an outright lie spoken about her.

He knew it was a lie. Rational thought fled when he was with her, but he knew her all the same.

“Looking for your stunning bride, Westfall?” A shipmaster he’d known during the war stepped into his path. “P’raps she’s flown the coop now that she’s heard she’s not to be a duchess after all, hm? Poor sod, losing your title and wife on the same day.” He laughed and clapped Luc on the back. He was drunk. Luc saw it in his reddened eyes. He was roasting him. All in fun. Tasteless and callous, but innocently so.

But accurate?

Aloof. Evasive. Unavailable. She had been all of these since coming to town. And before that . . . In France she had tried to escape him.

He could not believe it. She must know that wherever she ran, despite his blindness he would find her.

GIVEN HER RAW nerves, it was with considerable energy that Arabella descended from the carriage before the Bishop of Barris’s modest house on the edge of Richmond. It sat alone at the back of an extensive park far from the main road and another quarter mile from the next house, which seemed to be a school of some sort. The river came close behind the house, offering a natural border at the property’s rear.

Buoyed by determination, she went toward the door. “I should not be too long, Joseph. An hour, I suspect.”

“I’d like to come in there with you, milady.”

“No. This is an errand of extraordinary delicacy. If you come in with all your imposing size and glower, it will alarm the bishop’s staff.”

His brow descended over his serious eyes.

“Wait here in the carriage for me. The comte would be perfectly happy with you if he knew of it.” The comte would turn Joseph off if he knew of it, then throttle her soundly. Verbally, of course. He had never touched her violently, not even roughly when she had not begged for it.

With heat high in her cheeks, she went toward the door, tugging her cloak about her shoulders. She had not paused to change from her wedding gown; she wasn’t quite ready to discard it yet. She wanted Luc to remove it, slowly, on their wedding night. Rather, tonight. The church ceremony was supposed to have taken place an hour earlier, and she had not been present. So tonight would not be his wedding night either.

But they could pretend it was . . . if he ever spoke to her again after being abandoned at the altar just when he learned he would not be the duke.

What had she done?

But the tenant families must not continue to suffer. The bishop was now trustee to the little duke and in control of Combe. She wouldn’t have this chance again.

She banged the plain brass knocker. Despite the bishop’s elegant dress, his house lacked ostentation. An elderly thin woman in gray muslin opened the door.

“Inform his excellency that Mrs. Bradford is calling.”

“His excellency’s not in. You’ll have to come back later.” The woman made to shut the door. Arabella stopped it with her hand.

“I shan’t mind waiting.” She slipped through into the whitewashed foyer.

The housekeeper gave Arabella’s fine gown and cloak and the ruby and gold earrings peeking out from her hair a perusal. Then she gestured her toward a door. “You can wait in here, mum,” she said, opening it to a parlor. “I’ve no idea when he’ll return. His nephew’s getting married today in town.”

“Yes.” Arabella ran a fingertip along an unadorned table in the center of the room. “I think I had heard that. I shall read while I wait. What a marvelous collection of books.”

“I don’t know, mum. Not a reader myself. Will you have some tea?”

“Oh, you’re very kind. No thank you.”

The housekeeper nodded and closed the door behind her.

Arabella sprang up and went to the door. But there was no key in the lock. She searched about the room for a drawer that might hold a key, but the only furniture were the bookcase, table, and three straight-backed chairs upholstered in faded red velvet. If the bishop was siphoning money off Combe’s tenant farmers, he certainly wasn’t using it on his house.

She peered between books. It seemed the most obvious place to hide precious papers. She found nothing except dozens of tomes on religious matters marked with endless margin notes taken in an exceedingly neat hand.

She looked behind the two pictures hanging on the walls.

Nothing. But she had never imagined the parlor would offer up treasures anyway.

She opened the door as though she wished to recall the housekeeper then stood very still, listening. No footsteps sounded anywhere. The house was quiet.

Removing her shoes, she shut the door behind her. At least the hinges were well oiled. On silent feet she padded to the next door and went completely motionless again. No sound came from within. There was nothing like creeping around someone’s house in one’s stocking feet to rouse suspicion; in the event that the room was in fact occupied, she donned her shoes again.

It was a dining chamber, immaculately clean like the foyer and parlor, but likewise small and plain, without even a closed sideboard in which to hide a chamber pot. Useless. And her nerves were a quivering shambles. Skulking around had never been her forte. She preferred to meet matters head on.

Except lately. Since reading Luc’s secretary’s letters she had been in hiding, running away from what he might tell her if she allowed him opportunity.

No more. When this unwise adventure was over and she returned to London, she would beg his forgiveness and finally tell him everything.

Slipping off her shoes again, she backed out of the dining chamber and shut the door, this time with a creak in the hinge, quiet as a mouse’s squeak but it may as well be a gong banging in the silent house. She flinched and listened.

Thirty seconds became a minute. Nothing stirred. The housekeeper must have fallen asleep somewhere.

She crept toward the stair, praying they were as uncompromising as the rest of the bishop’s home. Her prayers were answered: the steps did not squeak. She mounted the landing and pressed her ear against the first door. No sound. She put her shoes on yet again and opened the panel.

Success.

She slipped into the bishop’s study and left her shoes at the door. The floors were plain wooden boards covered with an equally plain red carpet that masked the sound of her steps. A massive desk occupied at least half of the chamber. The only objects atop it were an inkwell, pen and blotter, and a single sheet of blank paper. The was another bookcase like those in the parlor, a small table, and two straight-backed chairs. The only object to disturb the drabness was a picture on the wall of an impressively austere building set on a broad park. The caption read:

WHITECHAPEL SCHOOL

READING, BRITAIN

EST. 1814

The curtains were partially drawn, the afternoon sun slanting directly into the chamber. Anyone outside would see only reflection from the pane.

She went around the desk and tried the center drawer. It opened smoothly. Within, she saw a stack of plain stationery, a letter opener shaped like a long, slender cross, a knife to sharpen pens, and a small pistol. Without pause, she grabbed up the knife and pistol and dropped them into her cloak pocket.

The drawers to either side of the chair were locked fast. Of course they were. Without locks on the doors the bishop must have some way of keeping his private matters private from prying servants. She reached up under the center drawer, her fingers searching for a hidden key but without hope of finding one. She pushed her arm deeper into the back of the drawer and her fingertips brushed metal. She drew forth a key.