Page 27 of Baron Bolt

She caught her own eyes in the glass and found her fingers at her cheek. Pinching. She was pinching color into her cheeks, like a nervous maiden hoping to impress a potential beau.

Ophelia glared at her hand as if she had caught it in someone else’s pocket. There was already a little rose in her cheek. There always was.

Then she caught her reflection in the looking glass and realized she had loosened the ribbon at her throat as well. Half an inch. No more. The lawn whispered when she breathed. She could not have said when she had done it.

For whom?

For a towering, grim, scarred soldier who had married her the way a man pays a debt of honor. Promptly. Correctly. Without visible pleasure. Who gloomed in rooms like a Gothic landmark. Who had put the ring on her finger this morning with his glove off. His bare hand had been so large that hers had simply vanished into it. She had spent an unforgivable number of hours since then thinking about that hand. The care of it. The way he had held her fingers, as if they might break.

Her heart was doing something brisk and unauthorized against her ribs.

Dash it.

She despised it.

She got up from the dressing table because sitting still had become impossible. The night-rail clung at her knees when she moved. She fetched her reticule from the chair and took out the cards.

She cleared the little writing table by the fire, sat, and dealt herself a game of patience by candlelight. Her hands calmed the way they always did with cards in them.

You are being absurd, she informed herself, and laid the seven of clubs on the eight of hearts. She had liked Edward. She made herself think his name squarely. No flinching. She had never once pinched her cheeks for him. Liking was safe. Liking was a stake she could recover. What her pulse was doing now was a different game entirely, and she knew the trouble it brought to be too invested. She had watched her father sit down at it every night of her childhood, radiant, certain.

This hand, poppet. Luck loves the bold.

And she had watched the sea swallow him up all the same, along with the dowry, the town house, and every promise he had ever made her mother.

The heart was the one stake one never got back. That was the true lesson of Sir Henry Clarke, whatever he had believed he was teaching her.

And she had not much margin left. Every farthing of her was already on the table. Her name. Her youth. The child she carried and could not yet feel and could not stop thinking of as a card lying face-down in front of her, waiting to be turned.

She would not add wanting to the pot. She would absolutely not add wanting him. A man who had married her as a courtesy to a corpse. A man who, for all she knew, had been told everything at that deathbed and looked at her across the breakfast table every morning knowing she was a fallen woman.

Or not.

She moved the queen of spades and realized she had blocked her own game three plays ago.

Next door, a boot heel struck the floor.

Ophelia froze with the knave of diamonds hanging in the air.

Movement. The scrape of a chair. Water poured. It did not sound like a valet was in there with him. She had put it down to soldiers’ habits, though it made him surely the only baron in England who saw to his own boots. His tread crossed the room. Paused.

She looked at the connecting door. Beneath it lay a thin gold line of candlelight. She watched it the way a gambler watches the dealer’s fingers.

The tread moved away.

She let out her breath and laid the knave down. Her heart was going like a horse at the top of a hill. And she was, the word arrived before she could stop it, hoping. Sitting in fine lawn with a ribbon loosened at her throat and her cheeks pinched and her hair brushed to gold. Hoping. She, Ophelia Clarke, who had once bluffed a colonel of dragoons out of forty pounds with a pair of fours and never blinked.

The clock smirked its way to eleven.

She played out the hand. Lost it. Dealt another.

Half past eleven. In his room, silence now, but the light held under the door, and so, therefore, did she. He was a deliberate man. He was reading, perhaps. Fortifying himself. She dealt a third hand and told herself she did not care in the least whether he required fortifying, and lost that hand too, because she was playing like a swooning flibbertigibbet.

Midnight. The candle on her table had burned to a thumb’s width and begun to gutter. Her shadow jumped up the bed-curtains in long, uneasy sweeps.

At a quarter past twelve, the line of light beneath the connecting door went out.

For a moment she did not understand it. Written in plain English, sitting on the page, and meaning nothing. Then she understood it entirely.