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The words I promise were still in his mouth. One syllable of it spoken. The rest standing in ranks on his tongue. It would have cost him nothing to finish it now. To say I promise to the still face on the pillow. He could not. Said now, it would be said for his own comfort.

And it did not matter. He understood that, sitting in the dim room with his brother’s hand cooling in his bare one. It did not matter one particle that the words had never been finished aloud. In many years of soldiering, no one had once required Damian Archer to say yes to an order. Orders were not a bargain. Orders were read to a man, and the saying of yes was in the doing of what had been asked. Edward had given his last order to the only officer he had, and had died like a commander sure of his man, and the order stood.

He would marry a gold-haired stranger who examined ruined things like him without flinching. He would be a father to his brother’s child. He would take up the title and the hope of home he had wanted to reach more than heaven, and he would carry all of it the way he carried the sutures. In silence to the grave, however far off his own grave was. Whether he was owed one at all.

With his bare hand, gently, he closed his brother’s eyes. He folded Edward’s hands on his breast the way he had folded soldiers’ hands. Found that it was not the same, and did it anyway, and stood.

Below him, faint through the floors, he could hear his mother’s voice. Still running on. Still bright. The house still believed that tonight heaven had given it back a son. It did not yet know that upstairs, all the while, heaven had been taking the other away. He would have to be the one to carry the news down to them. The miracle and the death in the same pair of hands.

Somewhere down there, too, was a girl with gold hair who had been promised to one dead man, and did not yet know she had just been given to another.

Damian picked up his glove and drew it on.

Then he went to tell them.

CHAPTER 3

Ophelia had learned from her father that the surest way to advertise a bad hand was to fidget. So she sat on the sofa with a cup of cooling tea balanced on her knee and let Lady Archer do the fidgeting for all three of them.

The saucer had begun to cling to her stocking through the muslin. She left it there. Any shift of her knee would only slosh the tea and give her away.

Lady Archer was more than equal to the work. She had crossed from the window to the fire and back to the window eleven times. Ophelia had counted, having nothing else to do with her mind. Every crossing brought another rush of talk. Lady Archer’s delicate hands flew up, dropped, flew again.

“What can they be saying to one another all this while?” Lady Archer stopped at the glass. There was nothing to see. The park was dark. “An hour. More than an hour. Do you suppose we might just …” She shut her mouth. “No. No, they must have their time. Of course they must have their time. Only Edward tires so, and Damian will not know it. He will not know how quickly Edward tires now. And when we are called back up I shall have to say something, and Damian does not like it when I say something.”

“They have a great deal of time to make up, Delilah,” said Mama from her chair by the fire, without lifting her eyes from her needlework. “I daresay an hour will not begin to cover it.”

“Yes.” Lady Archer’s hands came down and clasped each other. “Yes, that is what I tell myself. That is exactly it, Genevieve. You always state things so well.”

She was off again toward the fire.

The gilt clock on the mantel ticked. Ophelia watched the minute hand. She kept her face pleasant and, behind it, ran the thoughts she could not put anywhere else.

Ten weeks.

If she counted honestly, and she always counted honestly, it was the one place she never cheated, it was ten weeks now. Near enough that the difference did not signify. Her mother sat three feet away, needle going in and out of a bit of linen, and did not know. Lady Archer, who spoke of grandchildren twice a day the way other women spoke of tea, did not dream she stood nearer to one than she knew. The only living soul who shared the knowledge lay upstairs with the fever eating him away. Every day his hand on the coverlet was lighter. Every day the license did not come.

Eight days since the rider had gone for it. The archbishop’s office. The paper that would let the rector marry them in a bedchamber instead of a church. Edward could no more stand up before an altar than fly to the moon. Their initial hope of eight days there and back had been for fast riding in good weather. Ophelia stared at the rain streaming down the window and did the arithmetic again. It came out the same as it had the last forty times.

Not fast enough.

Perhaps not fast enough.

And there she sat, balancing a teacup, worrying about her reputation and her child being born a bastard when her betrothed lay dying above her head.

What a creature she was.

What a cold, counting creature, to sit at a good man’s deathbed and think of herself.

But it was not only her name on the table. That was the thing she came back to, the thing that made her lose her breath. If it were only her name, she could lose it and stand the loss. She had watched her father lose whole years of income between supper and dawn and walk out whistling. This was a stake that could not walk out whistling. This was a whole tiny life, put down before it could so much as look at its own cards, on the single wager of whether a license could outrun a fever. She had bet everything on a reasonable man. A reasonable match. Reasonable odds.

Reasonable was losing.

“Ophelia.” Her mother’s voice, gentle. “You have eaten nothing since breakfast.”

“I am not hungry, Mama.”

“Take a little of the cake at least.”