Page 28

He was not coming.

The fire had fallen to embers. The room had gone cool without her noticing, and now she noticed all of it at once. The chill on her arms. The ridiculous ribbon. The hundred-brush-stroked fall of hair. The pinched cheeks that no one would see. Heat crawled up her throat and into her face. The useless kind. The kind that colored for an audience of none. On the table before her lay her cards, face-up, every one of them, spread out for an empty room.

She gathered them in. She squared the pack with three sharp taps that were much louder than she intended, and wrapped it, and put it away.

Relief.

That was the word. She took it out deliberately and laid it down where she could look at it, face-up, the way she claimed a trick.

Relief, no fumbling explanations in the dark about her lack of maidenhead.

Relief, no risk of a soldier’s hands discovering what a high waist and a well-cut stay were presently employed in denying.

Relief, no lying down beside and wondering what his brother had told him.

Every point of it true.

Every point of relief was sensible.

She snuffed the candle, got into the vast cold bed on the side nearest the fire, and lay like an effigy, listing her reliefs in order like winnings, while the rain went on at the glass, and the clock had the decency, at least, to stop smirking where she could hear it.

It was a long time before she slept, and no part of what kept her awake was relief, and she declined, firmly, to acknowledge it.

Morning came gray and dripping. The rain had gone to a fine drizzle that hung on the meadows like breath on glass. Ophelia had slept perhaps a handful of hours. The glass over the dressing table delivered to her the rest of the news … she looked like a woman who had slept perhaps three hours.

Exhaling in disgust, she had Sally lace her loosely, then put on the dove gray morning gown that mourning for Edward required and her complexion did not appreciate. She pressed two fingers briefly to her left temple, where a headache had set up residence overnight and was already rearranging the furniture to its liking like a rather inconsiderate guest.

Then she went down.

“His lordship rode out at first light, my lady,” the footman in the hall offered, unasked, bland as a man delivering a kindness or a cruelty and leaving her to choose which. “With Mr. Fletcher. The tenant cottages, my lady.”

At first light. In the rain. The morning after his wedding, the sixth Baron Archer had risen before the sun to go and look at roofs.

“Thank you, Thomas,” said Ophelia, with the full charm of an English rose, and went in to breakfast.

The breakfast room faced the park in all its mist-bound glory. The sideboard was laid. Ham. Eggs. A raised pie sweating gently under its crust. The smell of it reached her three steps past the door and turned over inside her like a capsized dinghy. She breathed shallowly through her mouth, took toast she had no intention of eating, and sat.

Her mother was alone at the table, behind the tea urn, and glanced up, and everything in her face went soft.

“There you are.” Mama poured her tea without asking and slid the cup across, and then, with a smile she was clearly trying and failing to keep respectably small: “Well, Lady Archer?”

“Do not, Mama.”

“I shall say it once a day until it stops astonishing me. It may take years.” Her mother’s hand came across the cloth and covered hers. Warm. Dry. Familiar. The same hand that had untangled her hair and her sums and, once, at Mrs. Everly’s card party, been laid in warning on her wrist two seconds before Ophelia relieved a bishop’s widow of her quarterly pin money. “You look pale, my love.”

“I slept ill. A strange bed.”

“Mm.” Mama’s eyes moved over her face, reading her, gently. Only two people alive had ever been able to do that, and the other one was somewhere on the far side of an ocean. “Eat your toast.”

“I cannot.”

“Ophelia. You ate nothing at dinner, either, and you have gone the color of the tablecloth. If you are sickening for something I shall have⁠—”

“I am not ill, Mama.”

“Then eat your⁠—”

“I believe I may be increasing.”