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The promise had been made about her, across her, in a sickroom she was not in. She was a term of the contract. She was not the reason for it.

So … she would take the safety. She would accept their fiction, and his name, and his arm that caught her before she fell. But she would form no expectations of affection from her enigmatic husband. So far as she could tell, Damian had no sentiments at all. Only an iron-clad sense of duty.

The garden door had swollen shut again behind them. He put the flat of one gloved hand to it and pushed. The wood gave and he held it while she passed.

“Mind the step,” he remarked solicitously. “The rain has made it slick.”

Ophelia stepped through and demanded her heart quit its mawkish racing.

CHAPTER 10

At Hartleigh, Ophelia had learned, a marriage was not counted in days. It was counted in rubbers of whist.

A fortnight of them now. Two weeks of the tea tray at eight, the card table at nine, and the two mothers running their campaign between deals like generals who had packed for a long siege and meant to sit it out.

It had started small enough. Lady Archer sighing at the empty nursery wing every time they walked past it. Then the nursery aired. Then a cradle down from the attics, purely, Lady Archer said, to be inspected. By the second week Ophelia knew she had not married into a family so much as into an expectation, and the expectation kept better hours than anyone else in the house.

Tonight the campaign had reached its zenith.

“Mrs. Simmons at the mill,” Lady Archer read aloud, holding the letter at arm’s length and patting the table for her lorgnette. Ophelia slid it into the path of her hand without a word. “Six children, all living, which speaks very well for her, and the rector’s wife says she is sober as a Sunday. Thank you, my dear. Now, Genevieve. I have written to her, and to the woman at Marbury that Lady Fenwick swears by, and I mean to write to the one in Shropshire besides, because the best wet nurses are engaged months in advance, everyone knows it, and I will not have my grandson put to some slattern’s breast for want of foresight.”

“Granddaughter,” said Mama, focused on her needlework.

“Grandson,” replied Lady Archer.

The letters lay spread across the tea table like a hand nobody had dealt. Three finished. Two begun. One list in the rector’s wife’s writing, names crossed out and put back and crossed out again. Ophelia poured the tea and said nothing. There was nothing to say that either of them would have heard.

“I have dreamed of him three nights together,” Lady Archer went on. Her hands had started conducting the argument on their own as she warmed to the subject. “A boy, on the nursery stairs, with the Archer chin. One does not dream a chin like that by accident, Genevieve. And Archer women carry sons. It has been so since the Conquest. I had two myself and never a moment’s doubt of either.”

“Clarke women know,” Mama said, laying it down like a trump and leaving it there. “I knew Ophelia before I had any right to know anything at all. I woke one morning and said to Sir Henry, it is a girl, and she will be fair, and here she sits. It will be a girl.”

“It will be a boy, and a boy who is to be a baron wants a robust woman. Good country milk. The Simmons woman churns her own butter.”

“A girl wants a sweet-tempered nurse. The milk carries the temper. Everyone knows that. And I will not have her drink up some milkwoman’s strong opinions.”

“Him.”

“Her.”

“More tea, Lady Archer?” Ophelia asked, and filled the cup before anyone could make a production of consenting.

She passed the plum cake into the narrowing gap between them like a white flag and sat with the heat of the pot still in her fingers. A remarkable thing, to sit at a table where her child’s wet nurse, sex, temper, and probable chin were all under negotiation, and not once in a fortnight be asked a single question on any of it. They consulted her about the tea. They consulted her about the fire, and whether the draft from the window troubled anyone, and whether the letters ought to go by the morning post or wait for franking. On the child itself she might as well have been the tea urn.

And neither of them knew. That was the part that sat in her chest like a held breath. They quarreled over a grandchild who existed for them only in dreams and family lore and the rector’s wife’s list, and Ophelia’s intuition, while the one woman at the table who had any fact at all sat pouring tea and holding her tongue. Her hands wanted to go where they did not belong. She kept them folded in her lap instead, and it took more effort than it ought.

She could not even resent them. Lady Archer’s grief had poured itself forward, all of it, into what came next. The son she had buried was not to be spoken of, so she spoke of the grandchild instead, the one direction she could stare without weeping. And Mama wanted an anchor. A child born at Hartleigh was a thing no tide out of England could shift, not even the tide that had carried Sir Henry to the Americas. Ophelia understood them both. She only wished, now and again, that understanding people excused one from having to listen to them.

“We shall settle it at cards,” Lady Archer announced, sweeping the letters into a pile as if the idea had just arrived and she meant the whole room to witness it. “Whist. All four of us.”

By the fire, the newspaper came down two inches.

“No, Damian, you may not have accounts to balance. You balanced them yesterday. And the estate work will keep until morning whatever you may believe. All four of us. It is not a family until it can make up a table.”

Her husband looked at his mother over the top of the paper and uttered not one word. Ophelia watched him try the excuses and set them down again. Estate business. The hour. A letter from the steward. He could often end a conversation by naming a duty and walking away as if the matter were already closed. He knew none of that would live five seconds against his mother in this humor in the evening after dinner.

“As you wish, Mother,” he said. He folded the newspaper as if he were laying down a sword, and rose to his full, overpowering height.

He moved the card table before anyone could ring for the footman. Set it down by the fire without a sound. From a man of six foot four, that silence was its own astonishment. In the candlelight as he bent to it, Ophelia caught what she had been catching since meeting him.