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It would not now.

It was fainter. Silvered at the edges. Settling toward the skin. Not gone. Nothing like the arm, not that pace. But better. Day by day, mending what ought to have been visible on him for the rest of his life.

Her father had a saying for when the cards ran past all reason. The game is straight, or the game is rigged. And it is never the game that tells one which.

She had married into a game whose rules had been withheld from her. Very well. She came off the wall and walked toward the drawing room, unhurried, an English rose with nothing at all on her mind. Behind the delicate expression she did what she had always done best.

She considered how to play her next card.

* * *

Hartleigh ran on the well-bred fiction that all was well. Ophelia had spent her life at tables full of people pretending not to watch one another, and she knew the signs. The mamas had noticed. And having noticed, they came at her separately, each armed to the teeth.

Her mother chose the sitting room, over embroidery, with the rain coming soft against the windows.

“The blue is coming up nicely,” her mother said, of the delphiniums on her canvas. Then she spoke as if she were putting a foot off a bank into water she could not see the bottom of. “Dearest. Is everything quite … as it should be? With his lordship?”

Ophelia’s needle went in and out.

“Why should it not be?”

“Only you seem … That is, one notices …”

Her mother’s silks were tangling. She picked at the knot rather than glance up.

“Men are strange creatures after a war, you know. They say Colonel Smythe’s boy came home from Spain and did not speak ten words together for a twelvemonth, and now he is the most amiable man in the county. It wants patience, dearest, that is all. Gentlemen must be allowed their moods. Why, your own papa had his moods, heaven knows, and I found if one simply went on cheerfully, without remarking upon it⁠—”

Papa’s moods.

Ophelia laid another stitch. Neat. Papa’s latest mood had boarded ship at and was presently having his moods in Boston, beyond the reach of any letter she could write. The needle did not so much as pause. Flinching was a tell.

“… for a fretting wife makes a brooding husband, my mother always said, and … Oh, drat this knot!”

The thread snapped. Her mother stared at the broken end. The corners of her face gave way, just where she believed they would not show.

“You would tell me,” she said, lower. “If anything were wrong? Because everything is … The settlements are all. We are quite … Ophelia, if this should not work out, I do not know what we⁠—”

There it was. Under the counsel, the fear. A ruined husband on one side of an ocean. A marriage on the other. Nothing else in the world to stand upon.

Her mother had come to give comfort. Very well. Someone in this room was going to receive some.

“Nothing is wrong, Mama.”

She said it with her eyes on her work, easily, the way one played a false card. Smooth. Mostly true, because the best lies were mostly true. Papa had taught her that as well.

“The barony is new to him. He was trained to a regiment, not to rent-rolls. He works a great deal too hard, and I am not such a goose as to plague a tired man for conversation. He is very good to me.” She glanced up and gave Mama a contented smile. “We get on famously.”

It landed. Her mother’s shoulders came down. Relief arrived, plain as a trick won.

“Of course. Of course. You were always sensible.”

Mama rethreaded her needle. Her fingers did not shake now. She went back, comforted, to her delphiniums.

Ophelia returned to hers.

She had come into this room half hoping to be the one comforted. To lay the whole strange hand face-up on her mother’s knee and be told what it meant. She had just learned the price of this table. Her mother could not afford to see those cards. She had been through enough this past year. Therefore she could never be shown them.

So that door was shut. She had closed it herself, from her own side, softly and out of kindness. Mama would be pleased enough when Ophelia began to show.