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An hour ago there had been two hands at the table: hers, and the fever’s, with a piece of parchment racing north to decide if she won this hand or was ruined beyond redemption. Now a third player had sat down out of the rain, holding cards no one had seen. The brother. The soldier. The heir now, if Edward … When Edward … And she did not know yet whether the great gray ruin of a man in that room played with her or against her. She knew only that the deck had been swept up and everything was being dealt again, and that she had felt safer the moment he walked in, which was itself something to be examined with great suspicion, later, when she could afford it.

Her thumb rode the worn edge of her father’s old pack, once, as if touching a talisman.

She had never yet thrown in a hand while there was a card left to play, and she did not mean to begin tonight. Ophelia put the cards away in her reticule, pasted the English rose back on her face, and went down the stairs toward the noise.

CHAPTER 2

The kitchen door had never once been locked in Damian’s lifetime. It was not locked now.

He came in out of the rain the way he had come in a thousand times as a boy. Through the scullery. Past the game larder. Into the warmth of the kitchen.

It smelled of bread, and tallow, and beeswax, and scoured copper, and home.

He stood dripping on the flags. Water ran out of his hair and down the back of his collar and found the seams at his left shoulder, thin, cold lines he had no business feeling because he had died and been resurrected by unholy experiments.

Mud had come in with him, to the knee. His boots were soaked through. His fingers had gone stiff on the road and would not uncurl all the way, but his heart … his heart thundered with sheer relief.

He had dreamed this house from the far side of a battlefield. He had dreamed it from a place worse than any battlefield. The dream had never once smelled of white soup, but it was certainly welcomed now.

A scullery maid he did not know came around the corner with a stack of plates and saw him.

The plates did not fall. She set them down on the dresser as if they might break if she breathed, and backed away with her apron pressed to her mouth. Her eyes went to the uniform. Then to the left side of his face. Then up his height. He understood she was looking at all of it. The size of him filling the doorway. The scarring. The rain running off a dead man’s coat.

“Where is my brother?”

His voice came out rusted. He had not used it much on the road.

She did not answer. In the passage behind her, someone whispered his name, Master Damian, in the tone reserved for church. Then the whisper was running away from him through the house like fire through stubble, and there was nothing to do but follow it.

He went up the service stair. Wet boot-soles on the old wood. Through the baize door into the hall. And there it all was.

The black-and-white marble he had slid across in stockinged feet. The long-case clock, still four minutes slow. From the open door of the dining room, his mother’s voice, running on the way it always ran, threading itself through the silence of some other diner’s patience.

He stopped in the doorway, rain ticking off the hem of his coat onto the marble.

Two ladies sat at a table laid for four. The covers were scarcely touched. One he did not know. A handsome woman of middle years, gold hair going soft at the temples. The other was smaller than he remembered, and grayer, and her hands were moving as she talked, drawing her worry in the air above the cloth. Mother. She looked up.

The spoon slipped from her fingers and rang against the china.

For one full breath, Lady Delilah Archer looked at her second son as though the churchyard had opened. Her face went white to the lips. Her hand rose, shaking, and pressed flat against her breastbone.

“Damian.” Barely a sound. Then louder, breaking. “Damian! He is alive! Sweet merciful God! He is alive!”

Her chair went over backward. She was across the room and on him. Her hands fisted in his wet sleeves. Her face tipped back to find his, saying it over and over.

“Alive. Alive. You are alive!”

Behind her, the strange lady rose with her hand at her throat. The doorway filled with servants. The word went round them all like a bell being rung.

“Alive! His lordship’s brother. Alive!”

Damian stood under it and let the word strike him as many times as they cared to ring it.

Alive.

If they only knew. If any one of them knew what the word was being asked to cover. What had climbed out of a cellar in Belgium and buttoned a dead man’s uniform over the evidence and walked home to them. There was a lightning-scoured cellar where this homecoming ought to have ended. There was a monstrous thing standing in Hartleigh’s hall wearing their joy like a stolen coat, and it bent its head, because its mother was reaching for its face.

Her palms found his jaw. Found the scarred side, and did not flinch. Only cradled it. The left eye took her in a half-beat late. He felt the lag and could not correct it. He waited for her fingers to find the work under the collar and snatch themselves back. They did not. They only shook.