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The axle ground against the stones with a horrific screech, and the whole coach shuddered and began to tilt, slowly at first and then with sudden speed, toward the side where Temperance sat.

Sutton grabbed her and hauled her onto his lap, twisting so his own back took the blow, shielding her as the coach crashed onto its side, crushing him between his wife's weight and the carriage wall.

Chapter Seventeen

Vienna

12th June 1818

Dearest Sutton,

Vienna dances the waltz as if it were not at all scandalous, which I suppose here it is not. Still, the matrons all agree it is best learned with one's husband. Mine, however, is far away in London. What else am I to do? A Hungarian hussar has undertaken to teach me. He is patient, very tall, and has a moustache that requires its own servant.

I tore my hem during the second lesson and mended it myself at the side of the ballroom, which caused a small scandal among the ladies watching. I have learned a great many things on this journey that a countess is not supposed to know.

P.S. The Viennese take their coffee with a cloud of whipped cream on top. They call it Schlagobers, which sounds like a threat and tastes like heaven.

Your wife,

Temperance

[Enclosed on a separate sheet: a full sketch of the Danube from the Kahlenberg. In the margin of the letter, a small coffee cup heaped with cream.]

Temperance turned onto her left side, then her right, then onto her back, where she lay staring at the bed's canopy.

She could not sleep.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the tilting carriage, Sutton's wide, terrified eyes as he gathered her against his chest, heard the crack of iron and the shriek of wood, and the duchess's furious, quite unladylike oath. Then came the silence, and in the silence, the coachman's cry.

They had all walked away from the crash.

Luckily, the wound Sutton had taken from the footpads had healed enough that it did not reopen. He had hurt his shoulder shielding Temperance from the worst of the crash, but that was all. Everyone else inside the carriage was unharmed.

That was the miracle of it.

But Roger, Sutton's driver, had been thrown from his box. He now lay in his room with a bandaged head and a broken arm, with a maid assigned to check on him periodically.

He had cursed and argued with the doctor, who said he should be confined to bed for weeks. The doctor noted this as a good sign, since a severely injured man could not curse so loudly.

Afterward, Temperance had taken her bath and gone up to bed. Sutton had seen the doctor out, then disappeared, and had not come upstairs since.

The bath had been taken away. The maid had banked the fire and gone to bed. The candle on the nightstand had burned a finger's width lower, and the other half of the bed lay cold and perfectly smooth. Rain had begun to patter against the window.

Temperance lay there another quarter of an hour, listening to the house settle and trying not to think of the empty pillow beside her.

Then she threw back the covers, pulled her new silk dressing gown over her transparent nightgown, and stalked out of the room in search of her husband.

A thread of light showed beneath the study door.

Temperance padded up to it, stopping with her hand an inch from the wood.

Through the crack, she heard the dry whisper of turning pages, then the scratch of a pen, then a long silence, and a muttered word she was fairly certain was a harsh curse.

She imagined Sutton at his desk, shirtsleeves rolled, hair in disorder, a frown between his brows.

She let her hand fall.

He was shaken and overwrought after the accident; he would not come to bed simply because she asked him to. Marching in and demanding it would only make him dig in his heels.