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The left eye. The lid sat a little low tonight, the way it did in the evenings, though he would never in this life have owned to being tired. And below the lid, the different shade.
A lady did not stare. A lady only became, by degrees, a scholar of a subject.
The scarring came up that side of his face. Could a wound do that? Bleach an eye? She had heard of eyes clouding after a blow. The old head groom at home had one gone pale as skimmed milk from the kick of a bay. But Damian’s had not clouded. It saw. It only did not quite agree with its brother, as if the two of them had been through different wars.
She wanted, quite suddenly and quite improperly, to ask. They did not speak of his wounds. It was one of the unwritten articles of their treaty, and she had never once been tempted to breach it until she started wanting to know things for no reason she could name other than he was … interesting.
“Partners,” said Lady Archer, cutting the cards with tremendous ceremony and then ignoring the cut altogether. “Husband and wife together, of course. You must learn one another’s play. It is the very foundation of a household.”
“Of course,” murmured Mama, taking the seat opposite Lady Archer as if she had made her peace with the rest of the evening.
They played two hands.
Her husband played the way he seemed to do everything. He counted. He remembered. He committed nothing without support. Solid, unglamorous, faintly military whist, the kind that reduced a hand the way a siege reduced a fortress, and it was, she noted with some private indignation, very good. He had taken off his gloves to deal, which he did not always do, and once, passing her the pack, his fingers brushed hers. Cool. Always cool, as if he had just come in from the night air.
Across the table, the opposition prosecuted the war on two fronts and the whist on none. Lady Archer talked through every trick, a hanging offense at any serious table in England, lost count of trumps twice, and at the climax of the second hand played the ten of spades onto her own partner’s ace with a flourish.
She beamed all the while not at her cards but at the young couple opposite, as if they were the hand she was playing. Mama received the ruin of her ace like a saint in a window and said only, “Delilah.”
“Was that wrong? I am sure it made no difference.”
It had made a difference to the game. Ophelia gathered the trick, marked the score, and had opened her mouth to propose the next deal when Lady Archer’s hand flew to her temple as if a pistol had gone off.
“Oh,” said Lady Archer. “Oh, my head.”
“Mine also,” said Mama, half a beat late, like an echo in a stone church.
“It came on all at once. It is the weather, I expect.”
“The candles,” said Mama, at the same moment.
Neither lady appeared to notice they had named different culprits. Symptoms were compared and found to be identical and completely different. Ophelia proposed hartshorn. Both patients refused it with vehemence. The ringing of any bell, the summoning of any maid, the disturbance of any person whatsoever was forbidden on pain of the sufferers’ lasting distress. They were merely old women. This from Lady Archer, in excellent health, gathering her shawl and her letters and her workbasket as if she were breaking camp. The young people were on no account to stir. The young people were to stay exactly where they were, by the good fire, and play on.
“It would be a sin to waste such a cozy evening,” said Lady Archer, and pressed Damian’s shoulder in passing. Over the heads of the young people in question she exchanged with Mama a look of such blazing significance that it could have been read without quizzing glass from the far side of a valley.
The door closed behind the flurry of them. Shawls, workbaskets, meaning. The drawing room went quiet except for the fire and the rain at the black windows.
Ophelia kept her lips pressed together and her eyes on the scoring pencil while the whole of it assembled itself in her head. Simultaneous headaches. The forbidden bell. The cozy fire. They were hedging their bets, the darling ridiculous pair of them.
The wet nurse secured on paper, and now the husband and wife penned up alone together to secure the rest, because if a grandchild could not yet be confirmed, one could at least be commissioned.
It was the least subtle maneuver in the history of matchmaking, executed by two women who had not even agreed on a cause for their headaches beforehand. The laugh was rising in her like water in a lock. And the crowning joke, the joke she could share with not one living soul, was that she could have saved them the trouble of the entire campaign with the truth.
She glanced up to make sure her face was doing its duty.
Her face abandoned its duty on the spot. Because her husband was looking at the closed door, and the corner of his mouth, that stern, disciplined, buttoned-to-the-throat mouth, had developed a distinct and unsoldierly tremor.
Their eyes met, and there it was again. The awareness from the walk. The two of them briefly on one side of the world and everyone else on the other. Conspirators.
“My mother,” Damian said gravely, “has not had the headache in twenty years.”
The lock gates gave way.
“Mine has never had one in her life,” Ophelia managed, laughing in a manner her governess would have wept over. “And they did not even settle on a story between them. Weather and candles, in the same breath. It’s shameful play. If either of them sat down at a real table she would be ruined inside the hour.”
A short breath escaped him through the nose, quickly mastered. In another man she would have called it a laugh. His eyes had gone bright with it, and he did not look away from her as she wiped hers.
“The rubber stands abandoned,” he observed, nodding at the deserted seats, where the two forsaken hands lay face-up in the wreckage of the last deal. “Though I note their cards remain at the table. Which is more than can be said for their owners.”
