Page 30 of Baron Bolt

The whole hand teetered. She had already begun sorting her outs. A feeling merely. I spoke too soon. Women are foolish after their weddings. Then the two mothers, between them, without the slightest assistance from her, saved it for her.

“She knows,” said Mama, with immense simplicity.

“She knows,” breathed Lady Archer, and the crease vanished from her brow like frost off a window. “Of course. Of course she knows.” She sank into the chair on Ophelia’s other side, gripping Ophelia’s hand as if it might escape. “A mother knows. Doctors may say what they please. What do doctors know? A woman knows the very moment. The moment, Genevieve.”

Ophelia wished she could give herself a good hard kick for opening her mouth. As if she could not have predicted that the two mothers would descend into such wishful thinking. And she still did not know if Lord Archer knew.

What did Edward say before he died?

“The moment,” her mother agreed fervently, sitting down again with her handkerchief pressed under her eyes, tears and rapture streaming together. “I knew with Ophelia before Sir Henry had pulled on his boots. Fish, Delilah. I dreamt of fish. Carp, three nights running, great gold carp, and my grandmother always said fish, and my grandmother was never once wrong about anything except her second husband⁠—”

“Storms,” cried Lady Archer, both hands flying up. “With Damian it was storms. I dreamt of thunder every night for a se’ennight. Thunder fit to crack the roof beams. Lightning walking across the whole sky. And I woke and told his late lordship, mark me, this one arrives with noise. And was I wrong?”

“You were not wrong,” said Mama, and Ophelia wanted to weep. Just lay her face in her hands and weep until the very oceans were emptied. One never allowed emotions to enter the game and now …

“I was not wrong! Six weeks early and bellowing, and the midwife said in thirty years …” Lady Archer’s hands described the midwife’s astonishment at some length. “And with Edward, I⁠—”

There she stopped.

The hands came down. Her expression wavered. For one terrible moment the loss was in the room with them. The fever. The black crepe on the mirrors. The son who was not at this table. Ophelia’s throat closed hard around a grief she had no proper title to. A reasonable man she had liked. A man who ought by rights to have been sitting where his brother’s empty chair now stood.

Lady Archer pressed her handkerchief once to her mouth, choking back her grief. Then she lifted her chin. Her eyes were wet and blazing.

“With Edward I cried at the christening of the curate’s child,” she finished, even as a drum, “and I never cry at christenings, and I knew that very afternoon. A woman knows.” She turned on Ophelia with the full force of her recovered joy.

As if Ophelia had personally arranged it as a kindness to her. Which was so nearly, horribly adjacent to the truth that Ophelia had to look down at her tea. The cup had gone cold in her hands.

“And now there will be a child in this house again. Is that how you knew? Did you feel tears springing in your eyes?”

Ophelia’s head swam at the riot of emotions in the room, in her head, and the complexity of truth and lies to yet unravel.

“It is in the eyes,” her mother interrupted, fortunately saving Ophelia from a response. “The moment she spoke I saw it. It changes the eyes.”

“The eyes! Yes!” Lady Archer leaned in. Both mothers were now studying Ophelia’s face from a distance of eight inches, one on either side, like fanciers at a horse fair.

“What is in my eyes,” said Ophelia, “is too little sleep.”

“Radiant,” said her mother.

“Luminous,” said Lady Archer.

And they were off again. Carrying. Cravings. “Toasted cheese, morning and night. Sir Henry said I would turn into a Welshman.” Lady Archer’s eleven hours with Damian while the storm broke. The cradle. “The family cradle, it is in the attics, Edward’s own cradle, oh, I must have it brought down and looked at. And the nursery aired. I shall speak to Mrs. Hobbes this very⁠—”

And her mother, in the same breath as “of course we shall not breathe a word, not one word, it is far too early,” resolving aloud to write to her sister in Bath, “family being family and hardly counting.” The two of them agreeing, disagreeing, interrupting, handing the conversation back and forth across her like women winding wool. Faster. Happier. Louder. The fire hissed. The drizzle ran down the windows. The pain behind Ophelia’s left eye kept the beat that a ballroom of dancers could have used to keep rhythm.

Her only boon was extracting a promise not to inform her husband, and that he should hear such a thing from her because it was only proper.

Then she sat between them with her cold tea and her whole skull pounding, and she said nothing, because this was the true poison of it, the thing that made every rapturous word land on her like a dropped plate.

Her nonsense was working. Every mystical flourish, every dream of carp, every solemn assurance that a mother simply knows, was another card played squarely on her behalf. By luncheon, the child had a provenance. It dated from her wedding night. A night that had consisted, in its entirety, of too many hands of patience and a line of light going out under a door.

And it dated from it on the sworn testimony of two mothers who believed every syllable and would repeat it, glowing, to Mrs. Hobbes, to the sister in Bath, to the rector’s wife, to the county. She could not have dealt herself a better hand with a fortnight’s preparation. She had not told a single additional lie. She had merely sat there, in dove gray, and let two good women build a fiction for her out of dreams and carp and thunder and what they wished to hear. She was fairly certain the memory of this chaos would be with her for the rest of her life.

“… and she must have the blue chamber for a nursery, the light is better⁠—”

“… the yellow, Delilah, an east light in a nursery⁠—”

Ophelia pressed two fingers to her temple and closed her eyes.