I barely heard her. Hurrying toward me, through the milling housewives and maids, footmen, carters, and cook's assistants making their morning rounds, came a ghost from my past.

The last time I'd seen her, she'd been thin and frail, a golden-and-white girl looking at me with timid eyes, her dainty mouth shifting between smiles and puckered worry. Her face was still pale and flowerlike, though lines now feathered about her eyes and mouth, and her skin had coarsened a bit. The curls that wreathed her forehead, under her bonnet's brim, were still golden, perhaps a little darker than they'd been fifteen years ago. Time had thickened her figure, but she retained an air of graceful helplessness, one that urged a gentleman to rush to her side and demand to know how he could assist her.

That air had ensnared me as a young man. I had proposed to her within a week of meeting her.

The woman stopped a few feet behind the girl, her lips parting in shock. Though I must have changed a great deal from the unruly and impetuous young man I'd been, she knew me, and I knew her.

Her name was Carlotta Lacey, and she was my wife.

Carlotta's eyes were blue. When I'd proposed in a country meadow near Cambridge, those eyes had glowed with excitement and delight. She'd let me kiss her, and then, full of confidence in our future, we'd consummated our betrothal there on the somewhat damp ground. I remembered the sweet scent of crushed grass, the tiny star flowers that tickled my nose, the warm taste of her skin.

Whether she remembered any of it as we stood closer than we'd stood to each other in fifteen years, I could not tell. I only knew that she looked at me with unblinking eyes, and that she'd deserted me for a French officer a decade and a half ago.

Carlotta recovered first. She closed gloved fingers around the girl's basket, and said in French, "Come away, Gabriella."