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The paper is coming.

He has only to last until the paper comes.

That was when they heard the boots.

Not a footman’s quick soft-shoe. Army boots. Heavy, coming down the great stair one count at a time, like the pendulum of a very large clock.

Ophelia’s fingers tightened on the empty cup. All three women stopped at once, the way a card room stops when a man everyone owes money to appears in the doorway.

“There,” breathed Lady Archer, rising, patting at her cap, her face doing six things. “There, we are to go up, I knew …”

The door opened.

Anyone coming in was seen at once. The door gave straight onto the hall, and the old carpet ran the whole length from the threshold to the fire. So all three of them saw him in the same instant.

Nobody said anything at all.

He had not changed his clothes. Mud still dried gray on his boots. He was still buttoned into his dark coat as if the fact of being inside was something that happened to other men.

Standing, he was worse than he had been in the sickroom doorway. The sickroom had had shadows to lend him. This room had none. Only the light of too many candles, and that light lay plainly along the left side of his face, where pale seams of scarring climbed out of his collar, up the jaw, toward the temple.

Edward’s brown hair, cropped close once and grown out rough.

Edward’s blue eyes. And not.

The left one caught the light strangely. Being looked at by him felt like being looked at twice.

And he was looking at her.

Grim as a magistrate. Stern as sentencing. He came into the room, and he did not go to his mother.

Lady Archer started forward with his name and half a question rising. “Damian, is he … are we …”

He walked past her lifted hands as if they were furniture. The whole length of the carpet. Until he stood directly in front of the sofa, in front of Ophelia, near enough that she had to tilt her head back to keep his face. The fire’s warmth cut off. There was only the sheer breadth of him.

“You are my brother’s betrothed.”

His voice was low and worn at the edges, like something dragged a long way over bad roads.

No one had ever presented them. The thought landed late. She had sat holding his brother’s hand while he stood in the door. They had breathed the air of the same sickroom. The world had been too far out of its order today for anyone to remember names.

Very well.

Her chin came up of its own accord.

“I am,” she replied. “Miss Ophelia Clarke.”

Nobody moved. Lady Archer’s hands hung forgotten in the air where his passing had stranded them. The fire ticked. Behind Ophelia, her mother had gone still as her own needle. Ophelia could feel that silence against her back like a draft.

Whatever this was, it was not how a gentleman came downstairs to say the ladies might go up.

“Edward’s last wish,” he said, “is that we marry.” A muscle moved once in the ruined side of his jaw. “I will honor it.”

The word went into Ophelia like a splinter going in clean. At first she felt only the entry and not the wound.

Last?

Some cold analytical corner of her, the corner that could not stop keeping score even now, even here, marked the phrasing.