He looked down his nose. "It is a private matter."

"Then do not air it in public. If Louisa were to part from you, she would find some way to do so discreetly. She would not simply vanish."

A faint hope flickered in his eyes. "That is true."

"Doubtless she is somewhere sensible, with Lady Aline, perhaps."

"She is not. I have called on Lady Aline, and Louisa is not there."

Alarm touched me. "How long has she been gone?"

"A week Monday."

"A week?" Alarm bit me. "Did not it occur to you that she might have met with an accident? Or been taken ill?"

He shook his head again. "She sent a note."

I relaxed. A little. "Which said?"

"None of your damned business what it said."

I clenched my fists. "I am ready to tell you to go to the devil. I did not ask you to read it out to me, I asked for the gist of it. If I am to help you find her- "

Brandon reddened. "She said she wanted to go off and think. And I did not ask for your help."

"So you immediately thought she'd come to me."

His mouth tightened. "The last time my wife decided to go off and think, she ran straight to you, did she not?"

His voice was dangerously calm, with just a hint of tremor. We-Louisa, myself, and her husband-had given our words never to speak of the matter again.

"That was in another life," I said.

He looked at me as though he thought of the incident every night before he went to bed and first thing each morning. "It was not so very long ago."

I had wondered when he would reopen the wound. Louisa had made us promise not to. We had kept to our word so far, though that had not prevented Brandon from attempting, in a roundabout way, to kill me.

Where the discussion would have taken us, to words we could not withdraw or to a meeting with pistols on the green of Hyde Park the next morning, I do not know, because Marianne Simmons chose that moment to open my door and walk in unannounced.