“Your support is, as always, deeply reassuring.”
“My support is unconditional. My approval is pending.” Adrian released his shoulder and stepped back. “Three days, you said?”
“Three days.”
“Then you have three days to prepare a household for a woman who would sooner set it on fire than call it home, and a child who will almost certainly terrorise your staff within the hour.” A faint, genuine warmth entered Adrian’s voice—the warmth of a man who understood that what was happening in this room was not merely a legal arrangement, however fiercely Tristan insisted otherwise. “Shall I attend the wedding, or will my presence only remind the bride that the groom has allies she has not yet learned to resent?”
“You will attend. Eleanor Whitby will stand with Rosamund. You will stand with me.” Tristan paused. “And you will say nothing to Miss Everleigh about James, or Edwin, or any of what I have told you tonight. Not a word. Not a glance. If she asks you why I did this, you will tell her you do not know.”
“You are asking me to lie to your future wife.”
“I am asking you to protect her from a truth she is not yet ready to survive.”
Adrian held his gaze. The fire shifted. A log collapsed inward, sending a brief flare of light across the room that caught thehard lines of Tristan’s face and, for one unguarded moment, the exhaustion beneath them—the particular weariness of a man who had not slept, would not sleep, and had just committed the rest of his life to a woman whose hatred he considered both warranted and irrelevant.
“Very well,” Adrian said at last. “I will lie for you. I will stand beside you in a church and watch you marry a woman who cannot look at you without bleeding. And when this inevitably becomes far more complicated than your formidable mind has calculated —” He collected his coat from the chair where he had tossed it upon arrival. “— I will be here. As I have always been. Telling you things you do not wish to hear.”
He paused at the door.
“For what it is worth,” he added, his voice quieter now, stripped of its habitual sharpness, “I think she frightens you. And I think that is the first honest thing that has happened to you in years.”
The door closed behind him. His footsteps receded down the corridor—easy, unhurried, the stride of a man who had delivered a grenade and was content to let the blast radius sort itself out.
Tristan stood alone in the library. The fire was dying. The brandy on the desk had gone warm. Beyond the window, London was sliding toward evening, the grey light thickening into the early dusk that came too soon in this season, pressing against the glass like something that wanted in.
He reached for the drink he had poured an hour ago and had not touched. Lifted it. Held it without drinking, because the gesture was enough—the weight of the glass, the warmth of the liquid, the small ceremony of a man pretending to do something ordinary while the ground beneath him shifted toward a future he could neither predict nor control.
She frightens you.
He set the glass down, untouched.
Then he crossed to his desk, sat down, and began writing instructions for the preparation of rooms that had not been occupied in years—a bedchamber with good light, a nursery close enough that a child’s laughter might carry through the walls, and a study with a writing desk positioned near the window, because he had noticed, in a carriage forty-eight hours ago, that Rosamund Everleigh turned toward windows the way other people turned toward warmth.
He would not sleep tonight. But the work would carry him through, as it always had, and in the morning, the machinery would resume its turning, and the chapel would be secured, and the household would be readied, and in three days a woman who hated him would stand before God and give him her name, and he would take it, and keep it, and guard it with everything he had—including the truth she must never know.
The pen scratched across the page. The fire died to embers. And somewhere across London, in a narrow house with a hole in thecurtain, Rosamund Everleigh held her sister in the dark and did not sleep either.
CHAPTER 6
“You are not wearing that.”
Eleanor Whitby stood in the doorway of the bedchamber with a parcel tucked beneath one arm and the expression that Rosamund had learned, over a decade of friendship, to recognise as the prelude to an argument she would not win.
“It is a perfectly adequate dress.”
“It is a perfectly adequate dress for attending a lecture on drainage reform.” Eleanor stepped inside without waiting for invitation—she had dispensed with that formality somewhere around the third year of Rosamund’s disgrace, when invitations had dried up along with everything else, and the only person who still crossed this threshold was the one who never needed permission. “You are being married this morning, Rosamund. Not sentenced.”
“The distinction feels rather academic.”
“The distinction is ivory muslin.” Eleanor set the parcel on the bed and untied the string with fingers that were steady despite the hour. She had arrived at half past six, before the street was fully awake, with her hair already pinned and her coat buttoned to the throat against the cold, carrying something wrapped in brown paper that she handled with more care than the battered stairs deserved. “My mother’s. She wore it the morning she married my father. She would have wanted you to have it—she told me so herself, before she died, though I believe she imagined the occasion would involve rather more champagne and considerably less duress.”
The paper fell open. Inside lay fabric the colour of cream just before it turns—not white, not yellow, but the soft warm nothing that existed between them. Fine muslin, well-kept, trimmed at the collar and cuffs with a narrow border of lace that had been mended once, carefully, by someone who understood that love lived in the seams of things.
Rosamund’s throat closed.
“Eleanor. I cannot take your mother’s wedding dress.”
“You can, and you shall.” Eleanor smoothed a crease from the bodice with the back of her hand. “Because the alternative is watching you walk into a chapel wearing grey cotton and giving the Duke of Rathbourne the impression that he has married a woman who has surrendered entirely.” She looked up, and beneath the brisk practicality was something fiercer. Somethingthat had kept this woman at Rosamund’s side through funerals and evictions and the slow, grinding indignity of a world that had simply looked away. “You have not surrendered. You have never surrendered. And you will not begin today, of all days, because you could not find a frock.”
