“Oldest of eight, you say,” Lord Newbury murmured, eyeing her thoughtfully.

Thoughtfully? That could not be the correct adjective. He appeared about ready to lick his lips.

Annabel looked over at her cousin, Lady Louisa McCann, with a queasy expression. Louisa had come by for an afternoon visit, and they had been quite enjoying themselves before Lord Newbury had made his unexpected entrance. Louisa’s face was perfectly placid, as it always was in social settings, but Annabel saw her eyes widen with sympathy.

If Louisa, whose manner and bearing were consistently correct no matter the occasion, could not keep her horror off her face, then Annabel was in very big trouble indeed.

“And,” Lord Vickers said with pride, “every one of them was born healthy and strong.” He lifted his glass in a silent toast to his eldest daughter, the fecund Frances Vickers Winslow, who, Annabel could not help but recall, he usually referred to as That Fool who married That Damned Fool.

Lord Vickers had not been pleased when his daughter had married a country gentleman of limited means. As far as Annabel knew, he had never revised that opinion.

Louisa’s mother, on the other hand, had wed the younger son of the Duke of Fenniwick a mere three months before the elder son of the Duke of Fenniwick had taken a stupid jump on an ill-trained stallion and broken his noble neck. It had been, in the words of Lord Vickers, “Damned good timing.”

For Louisa’s mother, that was; not for the dead heir. Or the horse.

It was not surprising that Annabel and Louisa had crossed paths only rarely before this spring. The Winslows, with their copious progeny squeezed into a too-small house, had little in common with the McCanns, who, when they weren’t in residence at their palatial London mansion, made their home in an ancient castle just over the Scottish border.