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Lady Archer’s turn came the following afternoon, in the long gallery, where the ladies took their exercise when the weather kept them in. Ophelia was three ancestors deep. A periwigged judge. A bishop. Somebody’s wife with somebody’s spaniel. The dowager materialized at her elbow, already talking.

“For I said to myself, there she is, walking all alone, and I thought, I shall just say a little word, because I see how it is, my dear, I am not blind, whatever else I may be.” Her delicate hands flew and settled, flew and settled, birds trying a hedge. “You must not take it to heart. Damian was always the quiet one. Always. Edward came out of his cradle talking. He had all the words, the whole family’s share of them, and Damian just watched him.”

A little laugh that did not quite carry. They were passing Edward’s portrait. Lady Archer did not look at it and Ophelia felt the tug of loss. He was gone too soon, the eldest son.

“He was silent with me his entire life, and I am his mother. So it is not you, my dear. It was never going to be you. It is only Damian.”

They had stopped. Ophelia felt it in her feet first. They were beneath the other portrait. The one at the gallery’s end.

Captain Damian Archer, in regimentals, done the year he got his company. Scarlet and gold lace. The crimson sash. One hand on his sword hilt as though the painter had asked him to stand still and he had obliged under protest. Younger. Untried. The left cheek smooth. A face she had never once met. The mouth held straight in a way that somehow suggested a joke deliberately not being made.

And the eyes. Both looking directly out of the canvas. Both the same clear Archer blue. Edward’s blue. Lady Archer’s blue. Matched. Ophelia wondered what kind of injury could make an eye no longer match.

“It is a fair likeness,” Lady Archer said, tilting her head like a wren considering a crumb. “Though.” She squinted up at it. “His eyes … Were they not … It is the oddest thing. They are no longer quite that shade, are they? Or one of them is not. I look at him across the dinner table and I think, now, that is not—” She stopped. Fluttered. “Oh, listen to me. Fanciful. No painter living has ever got a true eye. The man made poor Edward look forty years of age, and he was six-and-twenty and beautiful. Now.” The hands rose again, redirected, all business. “The wet-nurse. I have been making inquiries, my dear, because these things cannot be left, whatever anybody says. Mrs. Cole’s eldest girl weaned her boy at Michaelmas, a great healthy creature with arms like a dairymaid, though the mother-in-law is chapel rather than Church, not that it signifies in the milk, and if you mean to nurse him yourself. Him! Listen to me. It may very well be a girl and I shall love her to distraction. Then of course, only your mama and I both think⁠—”

She was moving. She was gone, away down the gallery, trailing arrangements, the talk going with her like a tempest passing through. Ophelia was left standing alone beneath those painted eyes.

Which matched.

She stared at it for a long time. The painted blue did not blink and her neck began to ache from the angle.

The left one, she thought. It is the left one that changed.

She thought of an old casement with a cracked pane replaced. How the new glass never came quite the color of its neighbors. How the light rippled wrong through it. How everyone in the house agreed not to comment on it.

That night Sally undressed her by the fire, drawing out the pins with the gentleness maids used when they were deciding whether to say a thing. Each pin ticked into the dish. The fire pulled at Ophelia’s bare shoulders.

“Say it,” Ophelia told the mirror.

Sally’s hands paused.

“It is only talk, my lady. Belowstairs.” A pin. Another pin. “Mr. Stiles. That was the late lord’s valet, that has been with the family twenty years. He went up to his lordship after the trouble in the yard, with hot water and lint, to offer his services, seeing as his lordship keeps no man of his own. And his lordship turned him away at the dressing-room door. Next day word came down he was not wanted at all. Not for the shaving, not the boots, nothing. No cause given. No fault found neither. His lordship does everything for himself.” The brush began, long and slow. “Mr. Grafton will not speak of it. Will not say a word against him, nor a word for him. Only whenever the master’s name comes up in the hall, he goes all careful and quiet, and finds a bit of silver wanting polish.”

Ophelia ought to have checked her. A mistress did not sit still for backstairs talk. Her mother would have had the girl blushing inside a sentence. The brush pulled through her hair. She let it.

“Did he seem frightened? Mr. Grafton?”

Sally met her eyes in the glass, then looked down.

“Careful, my lady. He seems careful.”

“Thank you, Sally. That will do.”

Alone, with her hair down her back and the fire burning low, she sat at the dressing table and did what her father had taught her to do with a table she could not read.

Lay out what you know, my girl. Not what you fear, not what you hope. What is shown, then what is missing. Then count.

She laid the first card. He eats almost nothing. She could not once remember him finishing a plate. He carved for everyone. Served everyone. Moved his food about with the sleight of a sharper palming a knave. The dishes went back down scarcely lighter than they had come up.

The second. He barely sleeps, and he never tires. She woke often now. Her babe had made a stranger of her sleep. The light was always under his bedchamber door. At one o’clock. At three. By dawn he was mounted and gone. She had never seen him yawn.

The third. The weather did not touch him. He stood bareheaded in the yard through the cool of morning and the heat of afternoon with equal indifference. She had never seen him seek the shade. Never seen him take the chair nearest the fire when an evening turned cool. Never seen him warm his hands.

The fourth. Flesh that mends too fast. A ruined cheek quietly repairing itself on a scale of months. A cut healing in hours.

And the fifth, today’s card, laid down last and face-up. Two eyes that do not match each other. And do not match the portrait.

She looked at what she held.