But now he understood why someone would write things like ‘she walked in beauty like the night’ and so forth. Because poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time.

We think we’re so clever. And yet we’re always surprised to find ourselves entrapped or made fools of.

Such a fragile way to sustain a whole life: on a web one weaves for oneself.

A girl could forget her precise location in the universe when a man looked at her with eyes like those.

Good evening, Miss Eversea. You’ve stars in your hair.

Good God. She was Wellington with eyelashes.

When Phoebe glanced back at the marquess he swiftly lifted that rogue lock of hair, pointed at his forehead and mouthed: Good aim. She clapped a hand over her mouth. Dear God, he was sporting a bruise! So that’s where she’d clocked him with his hat! And this explained the forelock.

He was all too aware of the failings of his species and he knew how to use them to his advantage. A fascinating skill. A useful one. But hardly a loving one.

She felt the pain of his loss inside her like a savage hook. She wanted to reach into him and take it out, as though it were shrapnel. But the pain was old to him, and somehow it had become a part of him. He could bear it and speak of it. It had shaped him; he had accommodated it. He had loved and he had lost and it had made him who he was.

The stars are particularly spectacular tonight, don’t you think? Dazzling. As if they’ve all had a good rinsing from the storm.