Page 5

He counted.

He counted again, because he did not believe it the first time.

There was one less body than he had placed there. He went along the pile with his free hand, shoving a dead man’s arm, a dead man’s knee, making sure a corpse had not simply rolled. Nothing had rolled that would make a whole man gone. The table still held the one the master had not finished. The missing one was from the pile.

Then he glanced at the dish of coin. The coin was gone. Not spilled. Taken. He could have doubted a miscount. An animal could drag a corpse, if an animal could get a cellar door open and had a taste for the field dead. A corpse did not take money for the road.

A traveler.

A thing that took money for the road was a traveler.

One of the bodies had risen.

He flinched from his own blasphemy. One of the dead had risen. He did not know which. He had not looked at their faces when he hauled them. He had looked at the stairs, and at his hands, and at the master’s back. He could not say which of the Waterloo dead had stood up in the night and dressed and taken coin and left.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs with the lantern shaking in his fist. The best and worst news of his life was his to take up. He dreaded the climb. He dreaded what the master would do with it.

CHAPTER 1

Edward’s breathing had a count. In. A small silence. Out. The same pause her father used when he was looking at a discard and had not yet decided whether to keep it.

Ophelia sat with her spine straight and her hands folded in her lap. She counted. Counting was what her mind did when she was frightened. Folding her hands kept the counting off her face.

Lord Edward Archer’s breathing was slowing as his life slipped away.

The sickroom was too warm. They had kept a fire up all day against the fever chills. August rain ran down the windows. The glass wept streaming tears on the outside, as if it were mourning the events unfolding inside.

Within the bedchamber, the heat had nowhere to go. She could smell lavender water. Candle smoke. The beef tea cooling untouched on the night table. Under all of it, from the dressings on his leg, that sweetish note everyone in the room had agreed not to mention. The beef tea turned her stomach. Most things turned her stomach lately. She was careful to lay the blame on the sickroom, where it could do no harm.

“And I said to Mrs. Hobbes, we shall want the London physician again, the one Lady Merrow swears by, because what does a country surgeon know of fevers, truly, and Edward was always delicate as a boy, do you remember, Genevieve, that winter he had the putrid throat?” Lady Archer’s hands conducted the sentences from the chair nearest the bed. Delicate, pale, never still. They had not come to rest once since noon. She had wept through one handkerchief entirely and had started on a borrowed second. “And now, and now …”

The hands dropped. The tears came back. Lady Delilah Archer wept over her son the way she talked, in floods, with her whole body. Ophelia’s mother leaned over and gathered the older woman’s fluttering fingers into her own and said, “There, now,” in the voice she used for overturned tea trays and ruined bonnets and, it appeared, dying sons.

Mama was drier-eyed, but only just. Lady Genevieve Clarke had cried her allotment quietly, at the window, at intervals. She budgeted tears the way she budgeted everything else she could not afford to overspend.

Edward lay propped on his pillows and let them grieve at him. He had no other option left that she could see.

He was thin now. That was the word she permitted herself. Thin. Wasted belonged to the surgeon, and she would not borrow his vocabulary. Three weeks ago Edward Archer had been a neat, fine-made gentleman of three-and-thirty who sat a horse well, right up until the moment he did not. Right up until the moment he had been thrown.

Now the fever had eaten him down to the bones of his face. His brown hair was dark with sweat at the temples. His blue eyes were the family eyes. His mother had them too. They were the only life left in him.

Those eyes found hers over the weeping. One eyebrow lifted a fraction of an inch.

How long, do you think, before they drown us both?

Ophelia did not smile. This room was not a table where a smile could be allowed. Her face had been trained from the cradle. It could be trusted. She let him see she had the message with a softening of the eyes. The tightness left his mouth.

“Mother.” His voice was light and papery. He had to spend a breath to lift it over the weeping. “Mother, what is the hour?”

Lady Archer surfaced, blinking. “The hour? Why, it must be nearly six.”

“Then dinner is laid, or nearly.” Edward turned his head on the pillow, exhausted. “Go down, both of you. You have not eaten since breakfast, and you have wept at me since three. I have been mourned as thoroughly as any man could wish, and I am not even dead yet.”

“Edward.” His mother’s hands flew up, appalled.

“Cook has made the white soup,” he went on, gentle and without mercy. “I could smell it on Stroud when he brought the candles. Go and eat it and let her feel useful. Ophelia will sit with me.”

“But you ought not tire yourself, my darling, and if you should want anything, anything at all⁠—”