Page 25 of Baron Bolt

The ring stuck at her knuckle. She seated it herself with one small push, before he could so much as beg her pardon, and glanced up at him. For half a second something showed at the back of her eyes. He could not name it. It was gone before it landed. Rev. Halford was already praying over their joined hands.

“Those whom God hath joined together.”

They were pronounced man and wife into the cold air. There followed a brief pause that wanted a kiss in it. Damian bowed over his wife’s cold hand instead, correctly, finally, like a door being closed. His mother’s sob from the front pew covered the moment for everybody.

In the vestry she signed the register with an even hand. The last time in her life she would write it. If the pen hesitated, it hesitated for less time than the rain took to cross the window. The mothers signed as witnesses, and it was done. Ten minutes past the hour, on the morning after they had buried Edward, and Miss Ophelia Clarke was Lady Archer, and Damian had a wife.

The concept did not fit anywhere in him. He carried it out of the vestry like a parcel addressed to another man.

They drove back alone together, bride and groom in the first carriage. His mother had engineered it with a delicacy that could have been heard in the next county.

The rain drummed on the roof. The wet park slid past the glass. For half the length of the drive neither of them spoke.

Damian had sentences prepared. He had been preparing sentences for her since waking that morning, and not one of them had ever survived contact.

I am sensible of the sacrifice you … No. You need be under no apprehension that I shall ever … Worse.

Everything true he might have said to her stood on ground he could not let her walk. At last he said, to the window, “You were not obliged to come yesterday. To the graveside.”

“No,” she agreed.

“I am glad you did.” It came out stiff as a rusted pistol trigger, which was how everything came out of him lately, when it came out at all.

She was silent a moment. The rain ran down the glass between them and the park.

“Edward was kind to me,” she said. “It seemed a small thing to return.”

And what the deuce am I to say to that?

He examined her profile, pale beneath the bonnet brim, and had not the least idea whether he had just been shown grief, or gratitude, mourning of a loved one, or a door being gently shut. Miss Clar—Nay, Lady Archer was hard to read. He possessed no means on earth of asking. The carriage came up the sweep to the house. The moment, whatever it had been, ended.

The wedding breakfast was a trial. In the course of a single hour his mother wept for Edward, proposed a toast, recollected that one could not have toasts, and drank it anyway.

“Quietly, only ourselves, he would not grudge it.”

Then she discovered aloud that she was now the Dowager Lady Archer. That there had been two Lady Archers at this table since morning. That it was the strangest thing. That it was a great blessing. That it was a terrible day. That it was a great blessing. She clapped her hand over her mouth at the sound of her own delight, and dissolved into tears.

It was his bride who retrieved her from the brink.

“Lady Archer,” she said, and Mother looked up, wet-eyed, at the sound of her own name given back to her in that clear voice. “You must tell me about the ring. I should like to know whose hand it was on before mine.”

And his mother was away. Her own mother, married at seventeen, a love match, a scandal at the time, the whole history streaming out of her happily while the ham was served. Her good spirits restored, and filling the room.

Damian sat at the head of a table in what was Edward’s chair, which would not stop being Edward’s, for the horrible truth was he had died before his brother had. But that was his secret to keep because his brother had wished he sit here, so he watched his wife of two hours manage his mother. Kindly, without any show of effort, and thought, the new Lady Archer is the only person under this roof still in possession of her wits.

Himself not excepted. Himself least of all.

He sent Edward’s valet away at eleven, as he had sent him away every night since coming home.

“I was a soldier. I can manage my own buttons.”

It had hardened by now from an eccentricity into a rule that nobody questioned. He stood alone in the baron’s bedchamber, listening to Hartleigh go to sleep. One flaw of his new … state … was that he did not need sleep as he once had, which gave him far too much time to think. And when sleep eventually found him, it was unnaturally deep, and no dreams attended it, which might be the only mercy available to him under the circumstances.

The house settled and the stair ticked. A shutter knocking somewhere until a servant went and quieted it. The last doors. The rain thinned to a whisper on the glass. Somebody below stairs, some optimist, had turned down his bed.

Beyond the dressing room, a thin line of candlelight lay along the bottom of the far door. Her rooms now. He could hear a maid moving about, faintly, and then the maid’s step in the corridor going away, and then nothing.

Damian stood in the dressing room with his thumb on his top button and did not move.