What was it in the telegram, she wondered, that snagged at the back of her mind like a hangnail on silk?

"Though it would be a shame," she went on thoughtfully, "if he didn't spend at least a little time in Paris, long enough anyway to buy himself a clean shirt and a box of bonbons. He'd only his overnight things with him, you know, for his cousin's funeral."

Handing off.

Why did she think she'd heard the name Ignace Karolyi before? And how on earth was he going to explain the Earl of Ernchester to the Foreign Office men in Paris?

"I wonder if you could get me some of the toast I didn't eat at breakfast?" Lydia asked after a moment.

"Right away, ma'am." She heard the beaming smile in the housemaid's voice, saw it in the way her shoulders relaxed as she turned from the door. Ellen and Mrs. Grimes both considered her too thin, though she had confounded their earlier threats- when she was in school, a gawky and bespectacled fledgling bluestocking-that no girl who went around with her nose in a book and not eating enough to keep a canary alive was ever going to catch a husband. In spite of daily reminders of her undesirableness, Lydia had always been aware that as the sole heiress to the Willoughby fortune, she would be inundated with proposals of marriage the moment she put up her hair.

Jamie told her she was beautiful, the only man she had ever truly believed. Had Jamie ever mentioned Ignace Karolyi to her?

She didn't think so. She cast her mind back to the tall, self-effacing don who sat on the sidelines of her father's garden parties with her, talking of cabbages and kings-telling her about medicine in China and how best to go about studying for responsions without letting her father know.