Page 55 of Baron Bolt

Ophelia had grown expert, these past days, at dining with a statue. She had learned the trick of it. She addressed remarks to the table at large. She kept her mother supplied with conversation and her mother-in-law supplied with pauses, since Lady Archer required nothing else. She did not glance too often at the head of the table. Glanced was asking, and she had nearly cured herself of asking.

The child chose the fish course to make itself known. Or she thought it did. A faint flutter low in her belly, gone almost before she had decided she felt it. She set down her fork. Breathed through it, and thought, Well, at least one of us is at ease in this house.

“And I said to Mrs. Priddy, there is no sense waiting until the autumn to look over the nursery floor,” Lady Archer was saying. “The east nursery, I mean, the one with the morning sun, for the north one never aired properly even when my boys were small, and a baby cannot be expected to thrive in a room that smells of chimney. You will want new grates, of course.”

“New grates certainly,” Ophelia’s mother agreed, in the placid tone of a woman paying out rope. Genevieve Clarke had spent thirty years making conversation while attending closely to everything else in the room. Her eyes went, briefly, to the head of the table, and came back, and told Ophelia nothing.

“And the cradle!” Lady Archer’s hands left her lap and began to conduct. The more her heart filled, the more they flew. “The cradle has been brought down. The good one, the oak. Edward slept in it first, and then Damian, and I remember the nursery maid saying she had never known two babies less alike, for Edward would cry to be taken up and Damian would cry to be put down. Do you remember, my love? No, of course you do not, how could you? But it is all up there under holland covers, and it wants only beeswax and new bedding, and there is something so right, is there not, in a family cradle, the same oak going on and on.”

Ophelia was watching her husband by then. She could not have named what warned her. He had been carving the partridge on his plate with the same care he brought to everything. Then the knife was not moving.

“And I have been thinking of names, which I know is dreadful of me, I know one must not, but if it should be a boy. And Priddy’s girl swears by the way you are carrying that it will be, my dear, though I put no faith in that, none at all, I carried both of mine identically. If it should be a boy, an heir, only think!”

Change the subject, Ophelia thought. “Milady, you promised to tell my mother about the succession-houses. The pineapples.”

“The pineapples, yes, in a moment, my dear. An heir, and the line safe, and this house full again, which is all I have prayed for through every dreadful thing this year, every single dreadful thing, and it has been granted.” Lady Archer’s voice wavered, righted itself, sailed on. Her hands described wide happy circles above her untouched plate. “And oh, I must say it, I have been wanting to say it all evening. How happy Edward would be. To see it. To see his brother so settled, and so soon, and an heir coming to Hartleigh. It is everything he could have wished, everything. It is exactly what he would have wanted.”

Every word of it innocent. Every word of it true. That was the horror Ophelia sat and watched arriving, unable to stop it, the way one watches a card fall that cannot be taken back. Lady Archer did not know how true.

Exactly what Edward would have wanted.

Edward, pale against his pillows, wringing a promise out of the brother he had thought dead. Edward, who had known what and who he was leaving behind and in whom. The dead baron’s whole design, laid out cheerfully over the partridges by his mother, who thought she was only being fond.

Ophelia stared down the mahogany at her husband and watched him turn to stone.

It was not violent. That was the terrible part. Nothing in him moved quickly enough to alarm a soul. Lady Archer rattled on. The footman changed a plate. The candles went about their business. Only Damian went rigid by degrees. Hands. Shoulders. Jaw. Until the man at the head of the table was only the appearance of one. The candlelight found the scarred side of his face and slid off it.

He laid down his knife and fork. Side by side. A small click that no one heard but her.

“Ladies.” He rose. The chair made no sound. He bowed to his mother, to hers, a beautiful correct bow with nobody behind it. “You will excuse me.”

“Oh, but the apple tart,” said Lady Archer, her hands stopping mid-air, bewildered birds frightened from their perches.

“You will excuse me,” he said again, gently, and was gone. The dining-room door closed behind him with a click softer than his cutlery.

For a moment nobody spoke. Lady Archer looked from the door to her plate to Ophelia, stricken, turning the last five minutes over and finding nothing in them but love. “Did I? I only meant⁠—”

“He has been much occupied with the quarter accounts,” Ophelia heard herself say, in a soothing voice. “Pray go on. Mama, you wanted to hear about the pineapples.”

Ophelia set her napkin by her plate and rose. Her mother’s eyes met hers and said, as clearly as print, Be careful. She ignored them.

“I shall only be a moment.”

She was not going to be only a moment. She had known it before she reached the door.

The corridor was colder than the dining room, and dim. The sconces stood at intervals. Light, then shadow, then light. He had not gone far. He had not hurried. Of course he had not hurried. He never gave anything away, not even haste. She came round the turn and saw him halfway down the passage by the study, tall in his wool coat, his hand already reaching for the door. It opened softly.

Something in her, the part that had sat at the unused whist table until the candles drowned, said it clearly.

No.

“Damian.”

He stopped. She saw his shoulders hunch. Then he turned, courteous to the last inch, already assembling the sentence that would put her back in her chair. “Milady. It has been a long day, and your mother will⁠—”

She did not run. Running was showing her cards. She walked, quite fast, straight down the passage and past him, and put herself between her husband and the study door. Her back came nearly against the panels. Her heart went off like church bells at noon.

He was enormous this close. She came to the middle of his cravat. The sconce above them laid its light down the left side of his face, over the scars she now knew to be fading, and lit the two blue eyes that did not quite agree. The right one on her. The left always a fraction elsewhere, as if part of him kept watch on something over her shoulder that no one else could see.