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“… Walked,” said Mr. Fletcher, repeating it as if the word belonged to another language.

“To the coast. A fishing boat did the rest.” And then, in the voice she was coming to know, the one that shut a subject the way a lid shut a box: “The status of my being alive is the primary concern.”

Papers. Chair legs. The gathering noises of an interview ending. Ophelia removed herself to the barometer in three hurried steps and was studying its needle with every appearance of meteorological passion when Mr. Fletcher emerged. He bowed. “Lady Archer.” He looked harried and oddly pleased, as if he had survived an ordeal. Then he was shown back out into the mizzle.

She stayed at the barometer. Changeable, said the needle, uselessly.

She knew. All England knew. What became of officers wounded at Waterloo was no secret. Brussels had been one great open ward of them. English ladies scraping lint and carrying broth and writing letters home over the heads of insensible heroes. Names in the papers. Mothers informed by every hand that could hold a quill. Wounded officers were written about. They were written to. They were fetched home in carriages.

They did not vanish for weeks and then walk out of Belgium like a common vagabond.

Who had nursed him, on this farm of his, and why did he not name them? Why had no one sent the single line, your son lives, that would have spared Lady Archer a month of mourning two sons at once? Who had declared him dead when he was merely wounded? What sort of wound swallowed a man whole for weeks and then let him cross a country on foot? And why, this very morning, had a man, declared a public miracle over the marmalade, flinched as though the word had scalded him?

The story covered him like a coat cut for another man. It covered him, but nothing sat where it should.

Questions stacked themselves in her mind like unplayed cards. Ophelia had never in her life left a hand unfinished. She looked at the library door, squared her shoulders, and went in.

He was still at the desk. Edward’s desk. Edward’s library, if she was honest, with its ledgers and its smell of leather and old candle smoke. A room that still expected a slighter man. Lord Archer sat in it like a garrison posted to a fort that was not his.

He rose. Of course he rose. “Miss Clar—Lady Archer.”

“My lord. I understand Mr. Pole is back?”

“It is.” He remained standing, the whole considerable length of him, as if he hoped the interview might be conducted briefly and preferably at attention.

“That is fortunate.”

“It is.”

She waited. Nothing followed. That was the maddening part. He was not being cold. He was being finished. Every sentence a dispatch. State the matter. Sign. Seal. Done.

She went along the shelves, trailing one finger across the spines as though she had come for a book after all. The leather was cool under her skin. “Shall you miss it?” she asked lightly. “The army.”

“No.”

The word came down like a lid.

Ophelia stood with her back to him, staring hard at a shelf of sermons no one had ever read, and took brief, furious inventory. In the entire span of their acquaintance she had assembled perhaps forty of the man’s words. Out of these she was expected to construct a marriage. It was like being asked to trim a bonnet with three inches of ribbon. Her palm itched with the frankly lunatic urge to seize the nearest folio and beat some conversation out of a man the size of a wardrobe.

She did neither.

She had one gambit left, and it lived in her reticule.

The pack came out, shuffled by her father’s hands across a thousand green evenings. It was the only thing of his she carried, and she carried it everywhere. If there was a sudden lump in her throat at the sight of it, that was a matter between her and the cards.

“Do you play whist, my lord?”

That got his eyes up. Both of them. Sea-blue and shadow-blue, fixed on her with a level, measuring look. The look, she imagined, that he had once bent on a stretch of ground before a charge. It was the longest he had looked at her all day.

“… I play.”

“Two-handed whist. Penny points.” She set the pack down on the desk between them, squarely, a challenge laid on green baize that happened to be brown leather. “You need not produce a single word beyond the score, my lord. I find I cannot abide a silent room. A silent opponent, however, I can abide very well.” She let that sit for one beat. “Unless, of course, you would rather not risk losing to a woman.”

His face changed. Barely. In a worse light she would have missed it. He looked at the rain. At the ledgers. At the worn old pack. At her.

“The drawing room has a table,” said Lord Archer.

She had him. She was almost certain she had him because cards were a conversation he could conduct without speaking. An honorable escape she had built with her own two hands and held open while he walked into it like a gentleman. She did not care in the least.