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Gone, and the knowledge gone out of the world with him. The one other living soul who knew about her situation. She stood in the tilting room and felt the secret seal itself under her bodice with a weight like swallowed lead. Hers alone now. Hers entirely. Ten weeks of it, and every week to come.

Somewhere out in that gray streaming country a rider was carrying a special license through the rain, spending a dead man’s money, riding hard for a bridegroom who was dead upstairs.

Unwed.

Increasing.

Her father an ocean away.

Every reasonable card she had been dealt, burned in a single afternoon.

Behind her, her mother gasped. One high, cracked note. And began to weep. That, very nearly, was what finished her. Mama did not weep. Mama had not wept when Papa sailed. Mama had packed his shirts dry-eyed and thanked the porters. The sound of her weeping now, raw and unpracticed, undid something in the room that even Lady Archer’s flight had not touched. The edges of Ophelia’s sight went white and crawling.

At the window, the terse gentleman who was now Baron Archer had not moved. The rain-light lay along the scarred side of his face. He stood with his back to the wreckage he had announced, staring out at the park his brother would never see again.

And he was, Ophelia understood with the last clear corner of her mind, the only wager left on the table to save her and her child.

She locked her knees. She gripped the sofa with both hands. She stood on the floor that was no longer there, because not falling was the one play she had left.

And she made it.

CHAPTER 4

Overhead, Lady Archer’s footsteps kept on. Along the landing and fading toward Edward’s room. A door opened somewhere above them and did not close. After that there was only the rain, and the clock, and Mama weeping.

The tick of the clock was obscene. Nobody had stopped it. Nobody had drawn the curtains or covered the glass or done any of the rituals the moment demanded. The moment was minutes old. The house did not know yet what had happened in it. The tea things sat exactly where they had been set down. The slice of seed cake with one bite gone. Her own cup drained to its cold dregs. Everything still arranged for an afternoon that was already finished.

Ophelia’s hand was closed on the scrolled arm of the sofa. She made herself let go of it, one finger at a time. She stood. Her knees complained. Her legs held her, more or less, so long as she asked nothing sudden of them.

He had not moved from the window. His shoulders stood black against the night. He went on looking out at it and did not turn. Behind him the room he had just wrecked settled around the tea tray, and the offer still hung in the air. The floorboards gave an ugly creak, as if the house itself had flinched.

Mama stopped weeping the way she did everything. On purpose. Ophelia heard the breath drawn and held. The desperate wet fight to get it back under command. Then Mama was on her feet, handkerchief crushed in one fist. Her voice came out ruined and level at once.

“Captain Archer—” A beat. “My lord, forgive me. I hardly know what to …” The title cost her. Ophelia heard it catch in her mother’s mouth before she forced it through. “My lord. No one can speak of marriage in this room tonight. This house is in mourning. The curtains are not even drawn. The baron …” Her voice cracked. She drove it on anyway. “Your brother is lying above our heads, and my daughter was his promised wife, and she will mourn him as his promised wife. There can be no talk of weddings for a twelvemonth, sir. There can be no talk of weddings tonight at all.”

He turned from the window at last. In the failing light the scarred side of his face was only shadow. The eyes were only a gleam. He stared at Mama for a long moment.

“I did not choose the hour,” he said.

That was all. He did not defend it. He did not soften it. He did not take it back. He left the sentence in the middle of the room and turned his gaze to the window again.

A twelvemonth.

Ophelia folded her hands at her waist and kept her face where a grieving betrothed’s face was meant to be. Behind it she did the arithmetic she was not permitted to say aloud. She did not have a twelvemonth. She did not have six months. She did not have three. She made herself do the figure honestly. Honest figures were the only kind worth doing. Perhaps eight weeks before eyes sharper than Mama’s began to count. Ten, if her luck ran generous. Her luck had shown no recent sign of running generous. Six before her own glass told her plainly. Every argument in this room was being made by people who thought time was a thing they had.

She could not say so. The words sat on her tongue like ashes. She kept her mouth shut.

Somewhere deep in the house a bell rang. Rang again. Feet went quickly along a distant passage. A girl’s voice rose below stairs, one thin note of it, and was hushed. The news was moving through the walls. Through the kitchens. Through every seam. Joint by joint, the house was beginning to know.

Then they heard Lady Archer coming back.

They heard her long before they saw her. The steps on the stair were slow and uneven. Nothing like the flying climb of a woman her age had made going up. When she appeared in the doorway she had one hand on the frame. Her cap was crooked. Her face …

Ophelia had seen loss before. She had watched her father read a letter once, at breakfast, and put it down, and understood from the way he put it down that the letter had cost them the London house. This was not that. There was nothing left arranged in Lady Archer’s face. And her hands. Those hands that talked. That flew. That had not been idle in all the weeks Ophelia had known her. They hung at her sides and did not move at all. That was the worst thing Ophelia had seen all day, in a day that had not held anything back.

Lord Archer crossed the room. It was the first thing he had done since the window, and he did it without a word. He took the wing chair. That chair. The very chair his brother was to have been carried down in, before the windows, on Monday. He set it behind his mother and put her into it with one hand under her arm. Careful. Wooden. As if he were afraid of breaking her and did not quite know where she would bear a touch. Then he stepped back from her, out of reach.

“I saw him.” Lady Archer’s voice was very weak. “I saw my …” She stopped. “He seems …” Her hands woke then and pressed themselves flat against her skirts, as though holding something down. “He seems as if he is only …” She could not have the word asleep. It broke in her throat. She sat with it broken for a moment. Ophelia felt the next sentence coming before it arrived. There was only one plank left for the woman to stand on.