The Duke of Haverford slammed the door on his way out, but it wasn’t his temper that left his duchess trembling in her chair, her limbs so weak she could do nothing but sit, her chest hurting as she tried to force shallow breaths in and out. She had grown so used to his tantrums that she barely noticed.

“Your Grace?” Her secretary held out a hand as if to touch her then drew it back. The poor girl — a distant cousin just arrived from Berkshire — was as white as parchment. “Your Grace? Can I get you something? Can I pour you a pot of tea?”

Brandy would be welcome. A slight touch of amusement at Millicent’s reaction to such a request helped soothe Eleanor’s perturbation. “I should like to be alone, Millicent,” she managed to say. A lifetime of pretending to be calm and dignified through grief, anger, fear, and desperate sorrow came to her rescue. “Can you please send a note to Lady Carew to ask her to hold me excused today? Ask her if tomorrow afternoon would be acceptable.”

Once the girl left the room, casting an anxious glance over her shoulder, Eleanor stood and crossed to her desk, stopping before the mantel when her reflection caught her eye. If Millicent had been pale, Eleanor was worse — so white that dark patches showed under her eyes, eyes in which the pupil had almost swamped the iris.

It was the shock. Perhaps she would have that cup of tea before she fetched the box.

She poured it, and then added a spoonful of sugar. Two spoonfuls. She normally took her tea unsweetened, with just a slice of lemon, but hot sweet tea was effective in cases of shock, was it not?

With the cup set on the table by the chair, she spent a few minutes moving panels of wood in her escritoire, until the secret compartment at the back opened. She had not taken out the box inside since the afternoon of the day Grace and Georgie had told her — oh, some 15 years ago — that James still lived.

James.

Haverford could shout as much as he liked about Winshire’s heir being an imposter, about all the world knowing that the youngest son of the family had died in Persia three decades ago and more. But Eleanor had known almost as soon as Winshire’s daughter and daughter-in-law knew that James still lived. Of course he would come home now, when Winshire’s other heirs had died. She should have expected it. Why had she not expected it?

Words from Haverford’s rant came back to her as she sipped her tea and looked through the few treasures she had kept all these years, sacred to the memory of their doomed courtship. The ribbon she wore in her hair the first time they danced. Winshire says the man is his son. A dried rose from a bouquet he had sent her. The man has a pack of half-breeds that he claims are his children. Several notes and two precious letters, including the one in which he asked her to elope. Barbarians as Dukes of Winshire? Over my dead body! A handkerchief he’d given her to dry her eyes when she cried while telling him that they must wait; that her father would come around. Better to see the title in the hands of that idiot Wesley Winderfield that handed over to some clothhead.

If she had said ‘yes’, what would have happened? He had a curricle in the mews. They could have left that night, straight from the garden where they’d slipped out for a private conversation. Haverford would not have assaulted her on her way back inside. James would not have challenged him to a duel, wounded him, and been exiled a step ahead of the constable. Eleanor would not have been left with her reputation in tatters, refusing to marry Haverford and unable to marry James.

Or if she had stayed true to her memories of him, and had not finally given way to her sister’s pleadings, for Lydia had been set firmly on the shelf because of Eleanor’s scandal. But they told her James was dead, and what did it matter what became of her after that?

They lied. And now James was back in England, and she would need to meet him and pretend that they hadn’t broken one another’s hearts so many years ago.

A few tears fell onto the letters, and then the Duchess of Haverford packed everything away, dried her eyes and returned the box to its compartment.

She had children who loved her, friends, important work in her charities, and a full and busy life. Weeping over the past and fretting over the future never helped.

Her reflection in the mirror showed her complexion returned to normal, and if her eyes were sad? Well. That was normal, too.

James Winderfield senior and his family are introduced in Paradise Regained. His return to England as a widower and heir to the Duke of Winshire, and the subsequent love story of his son and namesake, James Winderfield junior, is in To Wed a Proper Lady, coming in March or April. The stories of his other children and his nieces are in the following books in the series The Children of the Mountain King.