Page 32 of Baron Bolt

And back to one. She revised Sunday to Michaelmas.

Lady Archer, mercifully or otherwise, required no partner to keep a conversation aloft. “The farms, yes. So like his dear father, out in all weathers.” Her hands swooped. “Though you must not take a chill, my love, not now, not after everything. When I think of this summer. When I think of that dreadful letter …” The hands stilled and clasped. Her knuckles went white. The busy voice thinned. “Struck down, they wrote. Struck down at Waterloo, and I wore that letter next to my heart for a month believing I had lost you both, and then there you were, standing in the door. I say it every night on my knees, every single night. God in His benevolence gave me back my son. His own hand, Damian. There is no other accounting for it. A miracle, the rector called it, and I …”

The cup in Lord Archer’s hand stopped an inch from his mouth.

It was nothing. Smaller than a shilling. The lift of the cup checked. The corner of his jaw tightened where the scarring feathered out. His gaze went past the table, past her, as if something stood in the gray light and he could not face it. Then the cup finished the journey. He drank. He set it down without a sound, and the care of it was louder than a clink would have been.

No one else saw.

Her mother was on her second piece of toast. Lady Archer had already gone on toward the rector’s sermon. But Ophelia had spent her girlhood across a card table from gentlemen who would rather have died than shown their hands. She knew a forced smile laid over a bad discard. She knew what she had just watched.

A man dealt a card he hated.

A miracle. He had been handed a miracle, publicly, lovingly, over the marmalade.

And it had pained him.

She filed it away. Another card in the hand she was collecting. The eyes that did not match, the cravat tied high enough to serve as a fortification, and now this.

“… which is why,” Lady Archer was saying, both hands rising again, “quiet or no, I will have flowers. Edward would …” She faltered for the smallest moment, turning to Ophelia, all damp hope and attention. “Oh, my dear. I do not scruple to say it, not among ourselves and not at my age. How soon may I hope for a grandchild?”

The chocolate caught in Ophelia’s throat. She restrained herself from glaring at Lady Archer, who was clearly playing mischief.

She pressed the napkin to her lips and coughed once, quietly. A crumb. That was what anyone would think. Under her ribs, her body had already started counting the thing she had refused to count for a fortnight.

There was no difficult sum to it. She had to get her husband into bed, and soon. Or she had to sit across from that hard, unmoving jaw and tell him she was already carrying his brother’s child.

Her stomach had objected to ham from across the table all week. Now it made its objection known again.

“A crumb,” she managed. “Do forgive me.”

Edward. For one aching instant he was there again. A pleasant, reasonable man with a fine-boned face, apologizing to her with his eyes at the end because he had not managed to keep living. She had liked him. It was a poor, washed-out word for all that remained of him, especially with his child growing inside her.

“A grandchild!” cried her own mother, arriving like cavalry that had waited all morning for the signal. Ophelia grimaced in her head. What were they about? It was yesterday all over again but with her husband in attendance. “Delilah, you have taken the words from my mouth. But it is not too soon?”

“Of course, of course, but one may hope, Genevieve. Hope is not haste …”

Ophelia glared at her chocolate, wishing she could shush them.

“… the south rooms. They get the morning sun. Edward had the south nursery and never an ague in his life. Well. One ague …”

“… and a name is not settled in a hurry. Family names especially …”

“Edward,” said Lady Archer softly, “if it is a boy.”

The word landed in the middle of the table.

Ophelia kept her eyes on her chocolate. She could not look toward the head of the table. She looked anyway.

His lordship was studying his plate, jaw locked. Then his eyes lifted. One sea-blue, one darkened by shadow. They met hers across the length of the cloth, and for that brief instant they understood one another without understanding anything else. It was not tenderness. It was not sympathy. It was the look two soldiers might exchange when they found themselves pinned in the same ditch.

He glanced away first. The mothers kept going. Christening gowns now, and lace. Her mother’s down-to-earth voice ran through Lady Archer’s flights of fancy and pulled them back to earth. The two of them were so happily occupied that neither noticed they had lost their audience.

Ophelia buttered her toast. Conversation had become a battlefield where she had no ammunition so she conceded the morning.

Lord Archer rose. “Ladies.” One word for all three of them. “You will excuse me?”

Then he was gone. Six foot four of navy wool moving down the hall, boots striking the floor one after another.