ryony was awake for a full five minutes before she realized that Leo was in the tent with her. She bolted upright. Judging by the light coming in from the gap between the tent flaps, she’d slept well past sunrise.

“There is something you are not telling me,” he said quietly.

He sat cross-legged in the far corner of her tent. Even in the relative dimness inside, she could tell that his eyes were bloodshot. In his hand he held a mug of tea, tea without any steam curling above it.

“How long have you been here?”

“I’m not sure. An hour, maybe.” He took a swallow of the tea. “I came in to tell you it was time to get up, but I decided to let you sleep some more. I don’t imagine you slept very well last night.”

“I’ll be fine. If you will step out, I’ll get ready and we can start.”

“I’m not stepping out,” he said calmly. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what it is you are hiding from me.”

“What makes you think there’s something I’m hiding from you?”

“Because I wasn’t that callow a youth, I wasn’t that full of myself, and I wasn’t that frivolous. And self-centered or not, I most certainly was not a popinjay.”

“You certainly think well of yourself.”

“Other than your virulent dislike of me, I have no reason to think that I grate on people particularly. And you were the one who proposed. How did I go from a man you wanted to spend a lifetime with to a man you couldn’t stand?”

“Sometimes much can be discovered in the space of a few weeks.”

“A few weeks? You refer to the length of our engagement?”

She rubbed her temple. She’d said too much already.

“You were still working,” he said. “We saw each other alone only on Sundays, with one dinner with your family during the week, and perhaps one visit with Will to check on the wedding preparations. And I was gone the whole week before the wedding. Even if my character were truly rotten, there was no time for you to discover it.”

He frowned. “Was someone feeding you rumors?” “Do I look like the sort of person people come to with rumors?”

He looked at her steadily. “Then what was it?” She got off the bed. “Leave me alone.” “I already told you I won’t. We can stay here til the end of time, if you like.” “I need to use the facilities.” “Tell me and you may use the facilities as much as you like.” He was adamant. “Even our criminals are formally accused and informed of their crimes. You tried, convicted, and sentenced me without ever giving me a chance to defend myself. I deserve better than that from you. I deserve at least the truth. Or am I truly to think of you as heartless and capricious?”

She was angry again, angry enough that her shame faded into the background. Indeed, why should she be the one who was ashamed? She’d done nothing wrong. He was the one who had destroyed any chance they had at happiness.

She clenched her fists. “No. You may not think of me as heartless and capricious.”

Suddenly he was afraid, as if he were faced with Pandora’s box, the calamities within which, once let loose, could never be put back again.

But it was too late. Now she wanted him to know. Now her eyes burned with anger. Now her voice took on the weight and the inexorability of that of an avenger.

“That letter you were so sure showed every flaw in my character—the woman who wrote it, Bettie Young, she worked for a certain Mrs. Hedley. When I delivered Bettie Young’s baby, it was at Mrs. Hedley’s house, on a day the servants were supposed to have the afternoon off.”

There was a roar in Leo’s head.

“You do recollect, I hope? But then again, perhaps you did this sort of thing all over town, and Mrs. Hedley’s was but one address among many.”

He shook his head mutely. No, he had not done this sort of thing all over town. And he had a fine recollection of what happened that day.

He’d met Mrs. Hedley in Cairo, at the end of a North African journey that took him from Casablanca to the Nile. A young widow, she’d kept house for her brother, who worked at the British Embassy. During Leo’s two weeks in Egypt, they’d had an excellent time together.

Several years later, on the day he was to depart for Paris, they’d run into each other quite by accident in London. He hadn’t known that she’d returned from Cairo—her brother had at last married and she was happy to get away from the heat of tropics—but she had known about his upcoming marriage.

Three months after that, they’d met one last time, on the elegant suspension bridge in St. James’s Park, this time at his instigation.

“I need to know something,” he asked Mrs. Hedley, his voice low even though there was no one nearby. “Are you sure you never told anyone about what happened in April?”

“Of course not.” Mrs. Hedley scowled at his question, insulted. “I wouldn’t get you in trouble that way. Besides, Mr. Abraham and I had already met by then. He started courting me two weeks after that. I certainly will not have him think that I’d done anything with my widowhood except wait for him to come along.”

“But your servants—they were there that day.”

“They didn’t even know who you were. It wasn’t as if you left a calling card on your way out. Besides, they were completely preoccupied: My maid had a baby that afternoon in the servants’ hall.”

He apologized for questioning her discretion, she accepted his apology, he wished her the best of luck with Mr. Abraham, and they parted amicably, she for an excursion to Bond Street, he to his empty house in Belgravia. Months later, when he read the letter from Bettie Young, thanking Bryony for saving herself and her child, he’d made no connection between the letter writer and Genevieve Hedley’s maid.

He should have. He should have known all along that this was the dark heart of their story.

He was still and silent, his eyes lowered beneath his dark, straight brows, his chiseled features in shadow.

She was shaking again. She felt raw, torn open, and deeply, deeply ashamed—almost as ashamed as she’d been in the hours and days immediately following what she’d witnessed in that house on Upper Berkley Street.

“What did you see?” he finally asked.

“Your face in the mirror.”

“In flagrante delicto?”

“Not yet.” He’d approached Mrs. Hedley’s bed; he’d been not in it but beside it. And he’d still had his shirt on, his braces strapped firmly over his shoulders.

“Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Stop you?” In all the intervening years, the thought had never occurred to her that she could have made her presence known. One did not stop a flaming wreck. One ran as fast as one could. “I’m afraid that as my illusions shattered left and right, I did not have that kind of presence of mind.”

He passed his hand over his face. When he looked at her again, his eyes were blank. “Why didn’t you call off the wedding?”

She blinked. She’d asked that question of herself many times and it was always the point at which the pureness of her righteous indignation began to be adulterated with the complicity of her own frailty in this matter.

She had not called off the wedding because he was the one great prize of her life other women of her social station would forever covet. Because she feared the aftermath of a broken engagement so close to the wedding. Because she’d convinced herself that she was magnanimous enough to forgive him; that she forgiven him already.

Vanity, cowardliness, and delusion—faults in her character that she hadn’t even known, precipitated by the crisis.

“I thought I could forgive you,” she said. The human mind was capable of infinite self-deception.

Except she’d never forgiven anyone in her entire life. Her heart was made of glass: It could break, but it could not expand.

“And when did you realize you could not forgive me?” he asked, his voice soft and bleak.

She turned her face aside. Within the first hours of their marriage she’d realized it—that she hadn’t forgiven him at all, that her whole body revolted whenever he touched her. But by then they were already married, and it was too late.

Shame. Self-loathing. Frustration. They churned in him, each enough to drown him outright.

She sat back down on her camp bed again, her face pale as bleached bones. “Was she your mistress?”

He shook his head. “No. We were lovers in Cairo for two weeks when I was nineteen. The day I was to go to France, after I left your hospital, I stopped at a stationer’s. That was where I ran into her.”

“And she proved irresistible. I see.”

Mrs. Hedley had congratulated him warmly. And then, once they were outside the stationer’s, she’d winked at him in her bubbly way, and asked if he’d like one last tumble before he became a respectably married man.

He’d turned her down. As he’d turned down other women who’d wanted to be his last lay.

“She was far from irresistible.”

“You went with her.”

The incontrovertible truth. He had gone with Mrs. Hedley in the end.

“I had a case of cold feet.”

“About me?”

“About you.”

“And that is your excuse?”

“That’s not my excuse. That was just what happened.”

“Very convenient, don’t you think, to have a case of cold feet just when you run into an old lover.”

“It was not like that.”

“Then what was it like?”

What had it been like?

“I suppose—suppose—I—” He took a deep breath. He’d never stammered in his life. “I suppose there were always doubts in the back of my head. That I’d made too hasty a decision. That you and I hardly knew each other. That we might not be as well suited as we both wanted it to be.”

She stared at the hem of her nightgown. “And then what?”

“Then I went to say good-bye to you at the hospital. I thought it would be interesting, to see the hospital. But I’d never been in a hospital before and it unsettled me. You in that hospital unsettled me.”

He’d arrived at a bad time, possibly. There had been some kind of food poisoning going around, patients were vomiting in the lobby of the hospital, faster than the unfortunate cleaners could mop the messes away.

He should have been reassured by her coolness—she’d walked through the lobby as if it were a flower garden in spring—but it had only further heightened his sense that he truly knew nothing of her. The triumphal, proprietary air she took on as she introduced him to her colleagues also bothered him. He would have expected some such from a society miss, but not from her, whom he’d believed to be above such boastfulness.

“What about me that unsettled you?”

“Your aloofness, which I’d always liked before. Your vanity, which I’d never known existed.”

She laced her fingers together. “I see.”

He wanted to evaporate, to simply cease to exist. His reasons were in every instance pale and stupid—even more mortifying spoken out loud. But he had no choice now. He owed her this much.

“On my walk to the stationer’s, I was—I was suddenly swamped with doubt. I questioned whether my decision to marry you wasn’t as lunatic as everyone said it was, whether I was really resigned to a life without children of my own, whether we wouldn’t end up in a few years with nothing to say to each other.”

He stared at his hands. “And the wedding was in a week.”

Outside Imran called to a coolie to take more care with the bathtub. The river babbled cheerfully. The ayah softly hummed a tune that seemed to be a temple song.

“I could have drunk myself into a stupor. I could have unburdened myself to Will. But Mrs. Hedley was there, and she wanted a tumble, so she was the distraction I chose.”

Ironic, that in what he’d done out of fear that they might be unhappy together lay the cause of the greater part of their unhappiness.

“If it’s any consolation to you, I regretted my choice even before I entered her house. Afterward I thought myself a hundred kinds of stupid. I came back from Paris determined to make something beautiful of our life together, because you were the only one I wanted.” Suddenly he had to speak past a lump in his throat. “I suppose it was too late.”

She said nothing.

“And if it’s any further consolation, I haven’t been with anyone else since I married you.”

She spread her hands open over her knees. “I would like to dress now, if you don’t mind.”

He rose from the corner. “Certainly. I beg your pardon.”

At the tent flap he turned back. “You are right: I was a callow youth. But I never meant to hurt you. I’m sorry that I did—in such a despicable way, no less. Forgive me.”

But he already knew that she would not forgive him.