Page 16 of Baron Bolt

“Captain Archer.” Mama’s voice, faint, from somewhere behind her. “Sir. This is … surely this is not …”

“Last wish?” Lady Archer’s hands found their voice before she did. They were flying. “Damian. What a … why should you say … Edward is mending, the fever was down this morning, he knew you at once, you must have seen how he knew you …” Her words came apart even as she stacked them. “Why would you say it in that dreadful way, as though …”

Underneath the mother’s rising voice, underneath her own mother’s refrain, Ophelia sat with her cold splinter and her hot face and understood what was being done to her.

She was being handed on.

Settled. The way a dying man settles a debt of honor he cannot bear to leave outstanding. Passed across the table from one brother to the next, along with the hall and the meadows and the hunters in the stable. And the new holder of the note had come downstairs to inform her of the arrangement with all the tender feeling of a man executing a bill of sale.

Under the anger, quick and vile as a palmed card, came the other thought. The gamester’s thought. The one she would be ashamed of at three in the morning when she lay sleepless in her bed.

A fresh opportunity, when her wager was failing.

The shame of it got her onto her feet faster than the anger did.

“You are very kind, Captain.” Her voice came out thin as ice on a pail, and level. Her legs were another matter entirely, but he could not see her legs. “But I am betrothed to Edward. And so, if you will excuse me, I will go up and speak to Edward about it.”

She stepped past the tea table. She got as far as the end of the sofa.

He did not stop her.

He did not argue, which she had braced for.

He did not follow, which she had half braced for.

He did something far worse. He turned away from all three of them, to the window, and gave them the wet dark breadth of his shoulders, and stared out at the park as if the answer to something lay in the wet meadows.

One second.

Two.

She counted the way her father had taught her to count a man deciding whether to lie. The clock ticked. Rain ran on the glass in long threads. Beyond his reflection the night blurred and streamed.

“Damian,” said Lady Archer. “Damian, you are frightening …”

Three.

Four.

Five.

“You cannot speak to him.” He said it to the window, evenly. “Edward is gone. He … died.”

For one whole beat nobody in the room breathed.

Then Lady Archer made a sound Ophelia had never heard a human being make. A gasp, a tearing of the soul, and it made her realize that she herself would soon have a child of her own that she would fear to lose. And Lady Archer was running. Actually running, that delicate woman, her skirts seized up in both fists, through the door he had left open and across the hall. Her feet went up the great stair at a pace no one her age should attempt. Fading. Climbing. Toward the room at the top of the house where her son was.

Where her son no longer was.

The floor went.

That was the only account of it Ophelia would ever have been able to give. The carpet, the rich colors of it, which she had been looking at on and off for an hour, simply ceased to hold her up. The room tipped like a card table going over. All its familiar objects slid toward some edge. The rain got very loud and then impossibly far away, a sound heard down a well. Her stays were a hoop of iron. Her knees were wet paper. Her hand shot out by itself and closed on the scrolled arm of the sofa and gripped until the carving printed itself into her palm.

Edward.

Gone. While she had sat here being agreeable about the roads. Gone with his brother’s hand in his, perhaps, and hers nowhere to be found. Gone between the seed cake and the second pot of tea. And the last thing she had ever said in his hearing was barely anything at all, because she had thought there would be another morning.

Everyone had thought there would be another morning.