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“You will hear me first,” she said. Her voice came out low. It held, which was a miracle she intended to take full credit for. “You have been leaving dinner early for a week. You are not leaving this one until I understand what I have done.”

“You have done nothing.” Immediate. Final.

“Then it is worse than that,” she said, “because if I have done nothing, then it is what I am.” She had not planned to say any of this. The words were coming up out of the locked drawer where her emotions lived, as though she had been rehearsing them for weeks. Perhaps she had. “So let us attempt bluntness at last, since I find I cannot afford another week of the politeness.”

“Ophelia …”

Her name. He so rarely used it that hearing it now nearly broke her resolve. She understood in the same instant that it was meant to. A brief mercy, played as a trick. She set her jaw and held her nerve.

“You know everything about me,” she said. “Everything, my lord. There is not another man alive who knows all my secrets, and you have known them from the first hour. You accepted another man’s child as your own. Your brother’s child. And you never so much as blinked or hesitated. You signed for it the way you would sign for a delivery of coal. A man does not do that for a woman he cannot endure.” Her breath was going. She spent it anyway. “So tell me why … Why did you marry me, if you cannot bear the sight of me?”

The corridor went quiet. Down at its far end, faintly, came the domestic clink of the dining room being ministered to. It might as well be in another country.

Damian stood without moving, gazing down at her. She watched the answer come up in him and reach the wall behind his eyes and stop there. He had bricked that door himself. She could see as much from here.

“I cannot,” he said.

Three syllables. Delivered the way he had said no surgeon. Level. Final. Closed.

“Cannot,” she repeated. Somewhere below her breastbone the child fluttered, as if it too were leaning in to listen. “Cannot what?” She took the half-step that used up all the air between them. She had to tip her head back to hold his eyes. She did it. “Cannot look at me? You manage it at dinner, with witnesses. Cannot touch me? You have barely tried, so how would either of us know? Cannot say? Finish the sentence, my lord. I am owed a verb. I will stand here until I get one.”

For one instant the wall relented.

She could not have said what moved. Nothing moved. But behind the mismatched blue, behind the wall she had been dining opposite for a week, something looked out at her. Not anger. Not coldness. Not duty. None of the stones she knew that wall to be built of. It was lonely. Anguished. A light left burning in a house that stood empty. Something that had stood a long time in the dark on the far side of that wall, listening to the living go by. It peered out at her with something so like longing that her anger went out of her hands like dropped cards.

Then it was gone. Between one heartbeat and the next, gone. The wall came back so cleanly she might have dreamed the breach, except that her whole body was still ringing with it.

That frightened her. Truly frightened her, in a way none of his silences had managed. A woman can fight coldness. Coldness is a position. Positions can be played against. She had just seen that the coldness was not the truth of him. The truth of him was in there, alone, and he was choosing to build the wall. Building it again in front of her eyes, calmly, on purpose, the way he had bound his own wound up. Against a man’s deliberate choice to be obstinate she had no cards at all.

“I see,” she said.

She stepped aside. She gave him room. She gathered herself, and when she spoke it was quietly, without heat, the way her father had taught her to state her stake at a table. Once. Simply. So that no man present could later claim he had misheard.

“Then I shall not ask again, my lord.”

She said it like a vow, because it was one. Very well. No more cards carried in case you will play. No more jokes saved for breakfast. No more listening for your step outside the drawing room and pretending I am not. You may call me Lady Archer until we are both gray, and I shall answer you just as pleasantly. I will not stand outside another closed door waiting for you to open it.

A flicker at the edge of his jaw. His lips parted. She saw them part. She waited one last beat, one last turn of the last card, to see whether he would stop her.

He did not stop her. He stood aside, which was its own answer. She walked away from him down the corridor, back straight, chin level, through light and shadow and light. Behind her, softly, of course softly, she heard the study door open and close.

Ophelia did not go back to the dining room.

She could not have sat through apple tart and pineapples with her face in its present condition. She crossed the hall instead, meaning to take the stairs and send her excuses down with her maid. A headache was an excellent excuse. A headache was always received, being the one card a woman was permitted to play at any hour. The hall was cold and dim. The lamps hissed. Her footsteps rang on the flags with an evenness she was rather proud of, considering the condition of her heart.

“My lady.”

Stroud came out of the shadow by the service door so cleanly he might have been assembled there, the way good butlers were. He was carrying nothing. That in itself was unusual. Stroud generally approached the family behind a salver, the way infantry approached behind guns.

“Begging your pardon, my lady. I would not trouble you at this hour, only—” A hesitation. Stroud did not hesitate. She stopped where she was, one hand on the cold banister, and gave him her attention. “There is news come up from the village with the carrier tonight, and I had meant to lay it before his lordship, but as he is occupied … delicately done, that. The whole house would know by morning that his lordship had left his own table before the sweet. “… perhaps my lady will judge whether it will keep.”

“Tell me.”

“There were two men at the Bell yesterday, my lady. Strangers. A gentleman and his servant, by their manner of going on … Foreign.” He gave the word a brief distasteful space of its own. “The gentleman dark, and thin, and not turned out quite as a gentleman should be, by all accounts, though he spent free enough. The servant a big, solid sort of fellow. French speech between them, Tull thought, or something near it.”

“And?” She kept her voice at an emotionless pitch. She had given too much away tonight.

“They were asking questions, my lady. After his lordship.” Stroud’s gaze fixed itself on the middle distance, the correct posture for repeating impertinence. “After his lordship’s health, first. Whether he was a well man. Whether he had been ill since coming home from the wars. Then his habits. Whether he keeps much company. Whether he rides out alone, and where, and at what hours.” A pause. She watched him decide there was no way round the last of it. “And then, my lady, begging your pardon, they asked after his lordship’s scars.”