Page 40 of Baron Bolt

“So it has.”

He offered his arm as he might have offered a chair, and settled her on his right. Wool under her glove, warmth through the cloth, and the clean scent of gentleman. They went down the walk between the clipped box hedges, and she felt him check that long stride to the length of her half-boots. She marked it as she did most things he did with his body.

He said the lower meadow would want draining before winter.

She said she supposed it would.

He said the limes were turning early.

She agreed that they were.

Lud, she hated this sort of talk. Remarks that asked for nothing and gave nothing, passed between two people who had agreed, without saying so, to leave the real cards shielded in the hand. And she was dealing it as fluently as he was, because she had not come out for the air.

Her mind was still in the breakfast room.

Lady Archer had been at it again, hinting. Only chocolate, and toast, and those delicate hands fluttering over the pot like a pair of finches that could not decide where to land.

“You are not to overtire yourself, my dear. A turn about the gardens and nothing further. And we must think of the spring, must we not? The red room catches all the morning sun. Oh, and I shall write to the aunts the very moment there is … well.”

Well.

The well had said the whole of it.

Across the table Mama had set her cup down with a click and a suppressed smile of knowing.

The fuse was burned nearly to the powder. Lady Archer would hold happy news the way a sieve held water. Within days, maybe a week, if some miracle of restraint occurred, Damian would hear from his own mother that his wife was increasing.

And Damian, unlike the mothers, would know what that meant.

A wedding night that had never happened because he had been on the other side of the door.

She had turned it over half the night and come out where she always came out. If the hand must be lost, she would lose it playing. She had never yet sat still while another player turned her cards face-up for her. She did not propose to begin with her flighty mother-in-law.

But she could not announce it cold. She could not say it between the drainage and the limes and watch his face for a reaction which would likely never appear. The man was a rock.

So she walked. She endured the weather. She waited for an opening.

It was Damian, of all people, who opened one.

“You knew my mother held the last trump,” he said. No preamble. Other men cleared their throats. He simply began. “Last night. You led the ten to draw it out of her.”

“She holds her cards to the left when she has anything worth guarding.” A wagtail ran along the wall, dipped, vanished in a flash of gray, black and white. “And there are only thirteen hearts in a pack, my lord. I had seen twelve of them.”

He was silent for another three paces.

“Where does a baronet’s daughter learn to strip a table like a⁠—”

He stopped, hunting the civil word. The hunt itself was more flattering than any word he might have found.

“Like a sharp,” she said. “You may say it. My father would have bowed.”

“Your father taught you?”

Not a question. She could hear the pieces clicking into place behind it.

“Before I could read. Truly before. I knew the pips before I knew my letters. He would stand me on a footstool to sort his hand, and if I sorted it wrong, we began again.”

They passed through the gate into the park. The path ran green and wet toward the pale lime walk. Rooks were quarreling over something in the treetops, a raw, ugly noise that suited her better than the weather had.