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Ophelia did not move. A lamp fluttered and found its flame again. Somewhere far off the dining-room door opened and shut on a bright ribbon of Lady Archer’s voice, and closed it away again.

“His scars,” Ophelia repeated dumbly.

“Where they were, my lady. And—” the faintest trouble crossed Stroud’s face, the trouble of delivering words he could not make respectable “… how they were healing.”

She frowned.

“Did they give a name? A direction?”

“None, my lady. Tull says they paid in coin and asked their questions civilly and sat over their wine, and he does not know are they at the Bell still or gone on. He thought his lordship should hear of it, and I think so too, my lady, if I may say.”

“You may. You did quite right.” Her mind was moving now, dealing the facts out face-up. Foreign. A gentleman and his servant. His health. His habits. His scars. How they were healing. Not creditors’ questions. Not an old brother-officer’s questions. Creditors asked after a man’s rents. Soldiers asked after his company. Who under heaven asked after the progress of another man’s scars, unless they already knew the scars were relevant?

She had sworn, minutes ago, in that corridor, that she would not pester her husband again. Very well. She had said nothing whatever about what she might speak to him about. And this was her news to deliver. She was mistress of this house, and men had sat in the village drinking wine and probing her husband’s health.

“Thank you, Stroud. I shall take it to his lordship now.”

The study door, when she reached it, was still closed, as it was always closed. She stood before it one moment with her knuckles raised and her vow eight minutes old. The irony arranged itself around her like a cardroom’s gales of mocking laughter. Back so soon, madam? Then she knocked.

“Come.”

He was standing at the desk, not sitting, both hands flat on an open ledger. The single dying candle cut him out of the dark. He turned to her. She watched him note that she had come back, and brace for the siege to resume. She took a queer cold satisfaction in disappointing him.

“A message, my lord. From the village.” She was proud of her voice, a wife delivering the post. “Stroud has it from the Bell. Two strangers were there yesterday, a foreign gentleman and his servant, asking questions about you.” She watched his face the way she had once watched her father’s opponents, missing nothing. “And your scars, my lord. Where you got them.” She paused, watching intently before she delivered the last. “And how they were healing.”

The wall blinked. Damian had reacted.

She had thought she had seen him go still. Dinner had been still. The corridor had been still. This was another thing. It began in his hands, flat on the ledger, and climbed. Shoulders. Jaw. The left eye. He was not looking at her anymore. He was not looking at anything in the room. His gaze had gone to the dark middle distance and fixed there. His head turned, a fraction, a degree, as if he had heard a sound from another room. A voice he almost knew. She could see him reaching for it. She could see the reach fail. Something in his jaw set hard against the failure.

“When?” he asked. His voice had gone stony.

“Yesterday, at the Bell. They may be there still. Tull could not say.”

“A name?”

“None given, my lord.”

“The gentleman …” The words came slowly, as if each were being carried up from a distance. “Did they say how he spoke? His voice?”

“Only that the speech between them was French, or near it.” She watched him take that in, and reach again into whatever dark room he had descended into, and come back again with his hands empty. She stood in the wreck of her evening and noted that her husband had just asked her more questions in one minute than since their first meeting.

“Thank you,” he said at last. “That will be all, madam.”

That will be all.

She kept looking at him. The stone face. The fixed eyes. Both hands pressed flat on the ledger, as if it might slide away if he let go. She gave him a curtsy. He did not see it. Then she went out and closed the door softly.

Softly. She could learn too. Her fingers stayed on the latch for one heartbeat, though she could not have said why. The cold metal bit into her palm and she wished … she wished she could speak with him openly. It had begun to be so promising, when she had confessed to him that morning. Then the kiss. Then nothing.

The hall echoed her footsteps back. The lamps hissed. Behind her, the study held its silence like a breath no one dared release. Ophelia climbed the stairs with one hand on the cold rail. Her mind laid out the night’s cards, one after another, in a line she could no longer sweep away.

He was worried.

She had seen it. Somewhere behind those mismatched eyes, a door had rattled on its hinges.

She reached the dark landing and stopped. One hand pressed below the restless weight of her babe. The question had been rising all evening, cold and patient, pushing the other cards aside. Now it lay face-up. She could not sweep it away.

What did a stranger from abroad know about her husband that his own wife did not?