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“Then we shall find which one is mine.”

Luc stared at the four names.

Four men somewhere across the Channel. Four families. Four houses. Four doors upon which they might eventually knock.

It was considerably more than hoped for.

It was also considerably less than all of England.

He rose to find out what a Channel crossing cost. His stomach began to argue.

He had never been fond of the water.

CHAPTER 5

They buried Edward on the finest morning of the summer.

The weather struck Damian as a kind of insolence. Not one cloud sat over the churchyard. The limes beyond the wall hummed with bees. Somewhere out in the meadow a lark kept on as if the county had ordered music. Black wool drank the sun. Sweat crawled down his spine beneath coat and waistcoat and shirt, along the seams in his flesh that pulled when heat got into them. The navy wool coat was buttoned to the chin even so. His gloved hands locked behind his back. He stood at the head of his brother’s grave and let his wounds burn.

Rev. Halford was reading.

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live.”

Damian kept his eyes on the coffin. Good English oak. The brass plate with Edward’s initials threw light back at him. He did not look at the grave beneath it. He knew more about that grave than any man present. He knew the chill of it. He knew the dark, and the weight the dark piled onto a man. He knew, he alone of every soul in this yard, that the ground could not always be trusted to keep what it was given.

That was not a comfort. He had no idea what it was. Just the facts.

Half the county’s gentlemen had come. Edward’s tenants stood bareheaded along the wall in a long brown row. Few of them were looking at the coffin. Damian felt their eyes the way one feels sun through glass. On his height. On his shoulders. On the scarring that climbed the left side of his face out of his collar. On the new Lord Archer, reported struck down in June, who had walked up the drive in August.

He gave the crowd his right side and gave the sun his left. That eye lagged a half-beat when he turned it. The light came apart a little at its edges, as it did, so that the churchyard swam faintly gold whenever he blinked. He let it.

Let them stare.

Staring cost them nothing and told them nothing. The worst of it was buttoned away where no one living would ever see it.

The murmur began at the churchyard gate and came up the path faster than she did.

Damian turned his head. Miss Ophelia Clarke was walking between the leaning stones in the black of mourning, alone, chin level, step unhurried, as if a churchyard full of men were not turning to stare at a woman arriving where no woman had any business to be. At the graveside she adjusted her bonnet. Then she came and stood at his left. His ruined side. His too-bright side. Near enough that her sleeve almost brushed his arm. She folded her gloved hands and gazed at the coffin.

Rev. Halford faltered for half a line and recovered. Nobody said a word because the new baron had not objected.

Damian had not objected. He turned that fact over during the psalm and could not get it to lie down.

She should not have come.

It would be talked of in every drawing room within twenty miles. The dead baron’s betrothed, standing up at his burial like a widow, the day before she married his brother. He ought to have minded on her behalf, since she appeared unwilling to mind on her own.

Instead he felt better for having her there. The discovery sat in him like an error found in his own accounts. He disliked it.

It took him the length of the reading to work out why, and the answer did not improve his temper. Every other creature in this yard had come to stare at Damian Archer. She had only come to bury Edward. Edward was well-liked, and the men in attendance were here to bury him, but they were also here to stare at him.

His shoulders came down perhaps half an inch. He resented every fraction.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The ropes creaked. The coffin went down out of the sunlight. Damian took a handful from the sexton’s box and let it fall. The clods made a wooden final sound on the lid, and for one white instant it was guns. The battery. Smoke standing in rows. A boy’s shoulder under his hands as he shoved.

Then it was an English churchyard again. Bees in the limes. Sun on brass. His brother going into the ground.

Miss Clarke stepped forward. The stir behind them stirred harder. From somewhere about her person she produced three sprigs of rosemary tied with black thread. She had prepared them. She had stood in some garden and cut them and tied them. She dropped them onto the coffin, where they lay green against the oak. Then she stepped back to her place at his side as though returning from an errand.