“No.” Aurelia caught her hands at once. “No, Clara, do not look so. Please. It is not as that letter says.”
“But you hesitated.”
“Because the letter is cruel, and because cruel things are often written in a way that makes any answer seem guilty.” Aurelia drew her gently toward the bed and made her sit. “Listen to me.”
Clara sat, but her hands were cold in Aurelia’s.
“Lord Westbridge and I have spoken often of the past,” Aurelia said carefully. “That much is true. He has knowledge connected to matters that affected my family, and I have wished to understand them. I should not have kept so much from you, perhaps, but I did so because I did not want to trouble you.”
“And Lord Westbridge?”
Aurelia drew a breath. Here was the narrow bridge. One careless step, and everything below would give way.
“Lord Westbridge has been kinder to me than I expected any man in London to be,” she confessed. “He has stood by me when others would have found it easier to step away. He has treated my mother’s suffering as something that matters, not as an old inconvenience best forgotten. And, yes…”
She stopped. Clara looked at her, wide-eyed. Aurelia felt heat rise to her cheeks, but she did not look away.
“Yes, I care for him. And I believe he cares for me.”
It was the first time she had spoken it aloud.
Clara’s expression changed, not wholly reassured but steadied by the sincerity of the confession. “Then it is not false?”
“No,” Aurelia assured her, though the word cost her more than Clara could know. “Whatever it may have been at first, it is not false now.”
Clara wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand, young enough still to forget elegance in distress.
“But the letter says I shall be ruined if I remain close to you.”
Aurelia’s chest tightened.
“You are not unsafe because you love me. And you are not ruined because some coward with ink and malice wishes you to be afraid.”
“What if Captain Harrow receives one?”
Clara’s fear was so immediate in its turn toward another person, that Aurelia’s heart ached.
“Then Captain Harrow will be angry on your behalf.”
“You cannot know that.”
“I think I can.”
Clara gave a watery, uncertain laugh. “He was very brave at the garden party.”
“Indeed,” Aurelia agreed.
For a little while longer, Aurelia sat beside her, speaking gently, answering what she could and avoiding what she had to. She told Clara that gossip was not truth, that anonymous letters deserved contempt, that anyone who wished to advise a young lady for her own good might have had the courage to sign their name. Clara listened, and some of the panic left her, though not all.
It was not gone. It had merely been soothed.
When Clara at last rose to return to her own room, she paused at the door.
“You will not leave me out of everything, will you?”
Aurelia’s throat tightened.
“No,” she promised.
