Page 35 of Baron Bolt

A won trick was a won trick.

The drawing room stood empty of everything but firelight and rain. It was the friendliest room at Hartleigh. Windows full of the park, all that green running soft and wet away to the trees. The fire built up against the damp. The pianoforte shut and patient against the wall. She had meant to ring for a footman to shift the little work table. Damian simply picked it up, table, workbasket, and all, like a tea tray, and set it by the window, and placed two chairs, and sat.

They cut for the deal. She won it. Trumps turned up spades.

The first hand passed in a silence that ought to have been dreadful and was not. That was her first discovery. The silence had grammar in it. His lead was a statement. Her ruff was a contradiction. The long pause before he covered her ten was an entire paragraph of reconsideration. When he quietly abandoned his diamonds, it was as good as a confession. Somewhere in the middle of the second hand it occurred to Ophelia that this was, by an absurd margin, the longest conversation they had ever held, and that neither of them had spoken a word aloud.

She took that second hand on a finesse she was frankly proud of. He studied the trick as she swept it in.

“You held that queen a long time.”

Unprompted. Observational. An entire sentence, arriving unforced, like the first swallow in April.

“She was waiting for your king,” said Ophelia. “He was bound to come out eventually. Men of rank always overestimate their safety.”

Not quite a smile. It touched the corner of his mouth and was gone. But he dealt the next hand a half-beat faster, and sat forward over his cards by perhaps an inch, and Ophelia, sorting her own hand into order, felt the quiet hum of a game becoming interesting.

So she settled in to read him.

She had been reading opponents since her hair was in plaits. First over the rim of the nursery banister. Then, once Papa decided she was of more use as a player than an ornament, across the table itself. She knew tells the way a groom knows horses. Men breathed differently over a strong suit. Their fingers tapped, or stopped tapping. Their eyes paid little visits to the colors they loved. They sipped their wine too carelessly before a bluff. They turned talkative when weak and silent when strong, or the reverse. But always, always, there was something.

Damian Archer had nothing.

He dealt like drill. He discarded like arithmetic. He gathered his tricks without triumph and surrendered hers without regret. His face throughout was the face of a monument in an ancient church. Not cold, exactly. Closed. A door without a handle. She led false and watched for relief. Nothing. She dithered over a discard and watched for hunger. Nothing. She could not calculate his hand. She could not so much as determine whether he liked his hand.

She had never once sat across from an opponent she could not read.

It infuriated her. It fascinated her. It did both in such perfectly equal measure that she mistook the whole feeling for concentration, lost her count of trumps, and threw away a trick that a child of six would have kept. Because she had been studying the light reflected in his mismatched eyes instead of her own cards.

“Your lead, Lady Archer,” he said, with a mildness that somehow made it worse.

She straightened her cards with a snap. “You say ‘Lady Archer’ as though we had been introduced at a subscription ball and might never meet again. We are married, my lord.”

He played on through the trick, and she thought the sortie lost like all the others. Then, eyes still on his cards:

“Damian.”

Her heart did a small, unauthorized thing. “I beg your pardon?”

“My name. You may as well use it.”

A pause. A log settled in the grate. The rain ran on against the glass. When he went on it was quieter, and he was looking at the trick and not at her. “‘My lord’ was my brother.”

The lump arrived in her throat without asking leave. She played her card first. One did not fold a winning position merely because one’s chest hurt. She said, lightly, “Then you must have Ophelia.”

He inclined his head. Gravely. Over a two of clubs.

And that was how, after a full day’s siege, after the weather, and the farms, and the horse she had never even got to deploy, Ophelia and the man she was married to arrived at last upon Christian names. She celebrated with a soul-deep, entirely invisible hurrah, and dealt. At the present rate of advance, they might attempt a whole conversation by Christmastide.

They split the first two games of the rubber, and the play sharpened, and so did she. Somewhere between the third hand and the failing light she stopped keeping account of the day’s grievances. The license. The walls. The cold arithmetic under her ribs. There was simply no room left for them. There was the fall of the cards, and the fire on her face, and the man across the table giving her, for the first time since Papa had sailed, a real game. She had forgotten what it did to her blood.

The door opened from the hall and she jumped like a housebreaker. Absurd. They were sitting in plain view playing whist, the most respectable vice in England. It was only a footman with the candles. Beyond the windows the park had gone from green to slate without her noticing.

The last game came down to the last tricks with the score leaning her way and hearts for trumps. She had it. She had counted everything countable, and she was nearly sure she had it.

Right up until Damian took the final three tricks in succession with cards she had confidently buried a quarter of an hour earlier, laid the king of hearts on the last of them with the finality of a signature, and won the rubber.

Ophelia sat back, two points down, beaten, and obscurely, ruinously pleased about it, which was not a sensation she had ever before associated with losing.