Page 14

It was easier than arguing. Ophelia took a slice of the seed cake from the tray and bit into it. The sweetness climbed the back of her throat and turned over there, slow and warm and wrong. Her stomach gave a low, warning roll. She set the plate down on the table and kept her hands still until the turn of it passed.

“I find I am too anxious for cake,” she said, which had the advantage of being true twice over.

Her mother looked at her a moment longer than the remark deserved. Ophelia met the look with the pleasant face and held it until her mother’s eyes went back to the needlework.

Through the netting of her reticule, where it hung at her wrist, she could feel the soft-cornered edge of the old pack of cards. Her father’s pack, worn silky with use. She pressed her thumb against it once, the way another woman might have touched a crucifix.

A hand is never lost until your expression says so.

Papa’s voice, over the green baize. Years of it. Papa, who was somewhere on the Atlantic or already in Boston, unreachable as the stars, and just when she could have used a man who knew how to sit at a table where the stakes had gone wrong.

“He was so brown,” Lady Archer said, to no one, at the fire. “Did you remark it? Brown as harvest. And so large. Was he always so large? He went away … well, he was always a great tall boy, but he went away a boy. And this morning, when he came in to find us, I did not know him. My own son. For a full moment I looked at him as if he had come to see about the roof.” Her hands rose, pressed together, came apart. “And then I knew him, and I thought my heart would stop in my body. They wrote that he had fallen, you know. At that dreadful place. They were very sure. I have been wearing black for him. I had the letter in the drawer of my writing table. And then he walks into supper.”

“It is a miracle,” Mama replied. “There is nothing else to call it.”

“It is. It is exactly a miracle.” Lady Archer’s chin trembled. She bit it still, and her voice came out bright and fast and pitched a little too high. “And that is why I cannot help thinking, you will say I am foolish, but God would not give me back one son in the morning only to …”

She could not finish it. Her hands finished it for her, one brief helpless lift toward the ceiling, and then flew to her mouth.

“Of course not,” said Mama, smooth as cream, in the voice Ophelia knew of old. The voice that meant her mother believed nothing of the kind and would go to the rack before admitting it. “Edward has been holding on for something. Anyone who has sat with him this week has seen it. Now he has good news, and he may rest and mend.”

“Yes. Yes, that is it exactly.” Lady Archer seized it with both hands. “He was waiting. And now, did you see his face, Ophelia, when Damian came in? Did you see it?”

“I saw it, my lady,” Ophelia said.

She had seen it. She would be seeing it for the rest of her life, she rather thought.

She had been in her usual chair at the bedside with Edward’s hand in both of hers. The door had opened, and the room had filled. That was how it had felt. Not that a man had entered. That the air had gone. Six feet and more of dark, road-dirty stranger, and suddenly there was no space left to breathe.

Edward had made a sound she had never heard from him.

Damian.

Half a word. All breath. A drowning reach.

The stranger had checked on the threshold as if he had been struck. And in the half second before he crossed to the bed, his eyes had come to her. To her, sitting there with his dying brother’s hand in hers.

She could read anyone. It was her one true inheritance. She could read a bishop.

She had not been able to read that look at all.

That had been an hour ago. More than an hour.

“And the scar,” Lady Archer said, dropping her voice as though the scar might hear. “Along his poor face. He would not let me look at it properly. He turned his cheek when I reached up. He was always turning some part of himself away even as a child, but I saw. And he keeps his coat buttoned to his very chin, in August.” Her hands were talking again, faster than her mouth. “Well. Soldiers. I daresay they are all so. When he is settled, when everything is settled, when Edward is up again, and you two are married, my dear, and we have had the wedding …” She wheeled toward Ophelia, face lit with the relief of a happier subject. “We shall have it here, you know, in this very room. I have quite decided. Before the windows, with the park behind you. Monday. The license will surely come by Monday even with these roads, and Mr. Halford can be fetched in half an hour, and Edward can be carried down in the wing chair. He weighs nothing now. It would be no trouble at all to …”

She heard it leave her mouth. Her hands stopped in the air.

“—to carry him,” she finished, defeated, and sat down hard on the nearest chair.

“The rain will slow the London road, I fear,” Mama said into the pause, giving them all somewhere else to look. “But not stop it. These August storms blow through.”

“Yes,” Ophelia said. Her voice came out level and light. A drawing-room voice. A voice with nothing whatever behind it. “And the license does not spoil for keeping.”

Lady Archer laughed, too gratefully, too long. Ophelia smiled with her. When she lifted her cup at last, her sleeve gave off the faint ghost of the sickroom. Camphor. Barley water. And underneath them the low sweetish smell that nobody in the house had yet put a name to out loud. She drank the cold tea to the bottom of the cup so as to have a reason for the face she made.

Hold, she told the child, or herself, or the cards in her reticule. She was no longer sure which of them she addressed in these silent hourly dispatches.

Hold.