Page 117 of Duke of Sapphire

Charlotte did not look at her. She looked at Henry.

What does that mean? She turned the words over. To finding your way home. Is he saying I have found mine? Is this home? Or is he saying—that he found his way back? To himself. To Nathan. To the life the accident interrupted.

Or is he telling me that I should find my own way home to something that is not this?

The silence stretched. Two seconds. Three.

She lifted her glass.

“To family,” she said.

Too quickly. Too bright. She heard herself say it and knew, even as the words left her mouth, that her tone was wrong. She sounded like she did at Ashford when she was managing her father’s drawing room. Smooth and hollow and slightly too fast.

Henry sat down.

Everyone drank. The moment broke into ordinary sounds again, the clink of glass, Nathan reaching to refill Eleanor’s water, James handing a bread roll up through the legs of his chair.

“That,” Tristan said, into a general murmur, “was rather amusing.”

“It was a toast,” Henry said.

“Hmm.” Tristan’s eyes moved between them. “Was it?”

“Have some wine, Tristan,” Charlotte said.

“I have wine. I am thoroughly supplied.” He was still smiling into his glass. “Nathan, how are the roads north this time of year?”

Nathan, bless him, took the subject and ran with it. Eleanor joined in. The conversation reformed around them all, warm and purposeful, and Charlotte sat inside it, smiled at the right moments, and turned the toast over and over in her mind like a stone she could not put down.

Even when you did not know you were lost.

Did she look lost to him? Had she always looked lost to him? Was that what this was—not feeling, not longing, but Henry Kingswell doing what the Duke of Sappherton did, which was to identify a problem and construct a solution? She had been the solution. Perhaps he had simply made a toast about it.

She was aware she was being an idiot.

She was not sure she could stop.

“Charlotte,” Eleanor said, low, meant only for her. “The soup was extraordinary.”

Charlotte turned, grateful. “Cook will be so pleased. She’s been terrifying the kitchen staff since Tuesday.”

“Tell me she makes pudding.”

“She does. Three kinds, because Ian made a formal petition.”

Eleanor laughed. Under the table, the bread roll fort made a structural noise and James mumbled something incomprehensible.

The meal continued. Charlotte continued inside it. She filled her glass again when Nathan reached for the decanter and she deflected Lavinia’s one careful look with a smile that she suspected did not convince either of them.

At the other end of the table, Henry answered Tristan’s question about the northern route and did not look at her again.

She told herself that it was better.

The candles burned down slowly. Ian and James were retrieved from under the table when the pudding arrived, both red-cheeked and full of extremely vital information about bread architecture. Ian climbed into his chair and looked down the table at Henry.

“Was that a good toast?” Ian asked.

The table stilled.