Page 20 of Baron Bolt

That was the whole of it. And some cold corner of her reached up and took the sentence and turned it over. There it was at last. The card he had not played in front of the mothers. Played now, for her alone. A promise. And it told her nothing. It was a card laid face up that somehow showed her only its back.

A promise of what? Sworn over what?

She examined him. Examined with everything she had, the way she could look at a bishop and know his discard. The good eye gave her granite. The strange eye gave her firelight. The ruined face gave her nothing at all. And the question, the only question that mattered, the one pacing behind her teeth like a thing in a cage, climbed as far as her tongue and died there.

Did he tell you?

Do you know?

How much did Edward say?

To ask it was to answer it. If Edward had kept her secret, the asking would reveal it. She could not buy his knowledge except at the price of her own.

She would have to marry him blind. Sit down to the longest game of her life across from a man whose hand she could not read, without ever knowing how much of her hand he had already been privy to.

He seemed to understand that the conversation was concluded, though she had concluded nothing. He came over. She held her ground. He inclined his head to her, a simple courtesy.

“Miss Clarke,” he said.

And he walked out. He did not wait for her answer. The door stood open behind him on the dim hall.

He had not asked a question.

Ophelia stood alone in the wreckage of the evening, in the sunken red light, among the teacups of an afternoon that no longer existed, and understood. She was going to marry him. It was settled. It had been settled in a sickroom upstairs before she had ever been consulted. No refusal she could frame would so much as reach him. In the whole of their acquaintance he had asked her exactly one question. “Are you my brother’s betrothed?” And she had said “I am.” And as far as Lord Archer was concerned, it seemed, everything after that had merely been the declaration of terms.

She had never said yes. She noticed it the way a player notices, too late, the card she failed to count. She had argued. Cleared the room. Argued again. Run dry. He had made his two sentences and his bow and gone. And at no point in any of it had the word yes left her mouth.

Yes did not appear to be required.

The rain pressed on the black glass. Above her head, faintly, feet moved with slow care in the room where Edward lay. Ophelia let out a long breath. She picked up her mother’s fallen handkerchief from the carpet because her hands wanted something to do, and stood holding it in the gloom. Damp linen. Mama’s scent still in it. Nothing else to hold.

The hand was dealt. There was nothing now but to play it. And she would play it well. She promised the empty room that. She would play it beautifully. Name intact, and her child safe, and a face that gave nothing away.

Her father had taught her that much, before he sailed.

The game does not care what one feels.

She exhaled, stunned in belated relief.

Edward had found a way to take care of her in his final moments.

* * *

The English officer’s coat was gone, but Luc remembered it.

He remembered the gilt buttons. The number upon them. The officer’s distinctions. He remembered the man himself because it had taken two of them to carry him down.

An officer, then.

An English regiment.

And a battle that had left so many officers dead and wounded that their names had been printed for anyone who cared to read them.

Luc cared now.

It took him two days to find the first list and another to find one that was of any use. He worked through the names at the kitchen table while the doctor paced below.

Killed. Wounded. Missing.