Rosamund pressed her knuckles against her mouth and held them there until the danger passed. The dress lay on the bed between them—a small, luminous thing in a room that had not contained anything luminous in years. The wallpaper peeled at the seams. The curtain had its hole. The morning light came through thin and provisional, as though it too were uncertain how long it could afford to stay.
“Sit down,” Eleanor said. “I’ll do your hair.”
“You don’t have to —”
“Rosamund. Sit.”
She sat. Eleanor moved behind her, and the familiar touch of her friend’s hands in her hair—gathering, sectioning, pinning with the unhurried competence that Eleanor brought to everything—loosened something in Rosamund’s chest that she had been holding clenched since the carriage. Since the study. Since the moment a man in dark wool had held out a licence with hands that did not shake and asked for nothing except her name.
“Have you eaten?” Eleanor asked.
“I cannot.”
“You will. I brought rolls from the bakery on Conduit Street. The woman with the gap in her teeth—she always puts extra butter in yours because she thinks you’re too thin.”
“Eleanor —”
“You are not walking into a chapel on an empty stomach to marry a duke. It is undignified and you will faint and I will be forced to revive you in front of the clergyman, which will be humiliating for us both.” A pin slid into place. “Eat the roll.”
Rosamund ate the roll. It tasted of butter and flour and as she ate, she could not help but feel remarkably grateful for the stubbornness of a friend who had decided, four years ago, that she would not let Rosamund starve. Neither on food, nor belonging.
Every other connection Rosamund possessed had snapped the moment her father’s name appeared in the broadsheets—drawing room doors closing, invitations withdrawn, faces that had smiled last season turning away with the practised cruelty of people who feared contamination more than they valued loyalty.
Eleanor had not turned. She had arrived the morning after the first headline with a basket of food and a face that dared anyone to comment, and she had kept arriving—weekly, without fail, without flourish—through four years of silence from everyone else. She did not discuss it. She did not want praise. She simplycame, the way weather came, because it was what she did and she saw no reason to explain the obvious.
“Tell me honestly,” Eleanor said now, her fingers working a plait into shape with gentle efficiency. “Are you all right?”
“I am marrying the Duke of Rathbourne in two hours. ‘All right’ seems an ambitious aspiration.”
“That is not what I asked.”
Rosamund closed her eyes. The plait tugged gently at her scalp—a grounding sensation, small and steady and real. Outside, a cart rattled past on the street below. Clara was still sleeping in the next room; Rosamund had checked three times.
“He is not what I expected,” she said at last.
Eleanor’s hands stilled for a fraction of a beat. Then resumed. “In what way?”
“In every way that makes it worse.” Rosamund opened her eyes and stared at the peeling wallpaper. “I wanted him to be cold. Indifferent. Transactional. I wanted him to behave like a man purchasing a solution, so that I could behave like a woman being purchased, and we could both maintain the pretence that this arrangement is nothing more than convenience.” She paused. The next words cost more than the ones before. “He arranged rooms for Clara beside mine. He asked his housekeeper what kind of light the bedchambers received. He told me to bringwhatever matters to her—toys, books, whatever she needs. As though a six-year-old girl’s comfort were a matter of genuine importance to a man who commands half of London.”
“Perhaps it is.”
“That is the problem.” Her voice had gone quieter. “If he were cruel, I could endure this. If he were indifferent, I could bear it. But he iscareful, Eleanor. It seems as though he carefully considers every word, every decision… I do not know what to do with that, because the man who destroyed my family should not be capable of —” She stopped herself. Breathed. “It does not matter. He is what he is, and I am what circumstances have made me, and in two hours I will stand in a chapel and hand him the only thing I have left.”
Eleanor finished the plait. She pinned it carefully, stepped around to face Rosamund, and crouched until their eyes were level. Her hands closed around Rosamund’s—warm, dry, steady in the way that Eleanor’s hands had always been steady, through every crisis and every grief and every three-o’clock morning when the world had seemed too heavy to carry past dawn.
“Listen to me.” Eleanor’s voice was low and unhurried, carrying the weight she reserved for truths she would not allow to be argued with. “You are not handing him the only thing you have left. You are taking the only option available and making it yours. There is a difference, Rosamund. A large one. And the woman who raised her sister alone in a house with a hole in the curtain on three shillings a week is not a woman who hands things over.” She squeezed Rosamund’s fingers once, hard. “Sheis a woman who decides what she can endure, and then endures it, and then gets on with the business of living.”
Rosamund’s breath shuddered. She caught it. Held it. Let it go.
“I hear you.”
“Good.” Eleanor released her hands and rose. “Now. The dress.”
They managed it together—the ivory muslin lifted over Rosamund’s head, the lace settled at her collar, the small row of buttons that ran down the back fastened one by one with Eleanor’s careful fingers. The fabric was lighter than Rosamund had expected. Softer. It carried the faintest scent of lavender—not perfume, but the sachets that Eleanor’s mother had kept in her wardrobes, a ghost of domesticity so gentle it made Rosamund’s chest ache.
She turned toward the small mirror propped against the wash-stand. The glass was clouded and gave back everything slightly altered, as though the world it reflected were a kinder draft of the real one. The woman in it wore ivory instead of grey. Her hair was pinned. She looked like someone standing at the edge of something vast and refusing, quietly and absolutely, to step back.
“You look beautiful,” Eleanor said simply.
