The rocking horse carried Clara through imaginary countrysides until supper. Mrs Alcott served the meal in the nursery on a tray with more food than Clara had seen in a single sitting since before memory began. Roast chicken and buttered potatoes and a dish of stewed apples with cream that made her eyes go round. She ate with the focused determination of a child who had learnt, without anyone teaching her, that food was a thing to be grateful for rather than expected.
Rosamund sat beside her and managed half a bread roll.
Eleanor appeared at the nursery door as the plates were cleared. She had changed into a borrowed nightdress—Mrs Alcott’s doing, presumably, since Eleanor had arrived that morning with nothing but the clothes she stood in and the unshakable conviction that her presence was required.
“She looks happy,” Eleanor said quietly, watching Clara negotiate with Mrs Alcott about whether a second helping of stewed apples constituted a medical necessity.
“She looks fed.”
“Those are not the same thing, and you know it.” Eleanor leaned against the door frame and studied Rosamund with the quiet, unflinching attention that had sustained their friendship through every disaster of the past four years. “She looks like a child who has stopped bracing.”
Rosamund did not answer. The observation was too accurate to acknowledge and too painful to dismiss.
Clara fell asleep mid-sentence. One moment she was explaining to Mrs Alcott the genealogy of Bess the rag doll—whose mother, apparently, had been a duchess, and whose father had been a pirate, and whose uncle had been eaten by a whale—and the next her head dropped sideways against the arm of the nursery chair and her mouth went slack and the words simply stopped, replaced by the deep, boneless breathing of a child whose body had run out of fuel.
Rosamund lifted her. Clara weighed almost nothing—had always weighed almost nothing—but tonight the lightness felt different. Less like deprivation and more like something that could be remedied. There was a kitchen downstairs with a cook who had already asked Mrs Alcott what the young miss preferred for breakfast. There would be eggs tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.
She carried Clara through the connecting door and laid her in the bed—the enormous, clean, soft bed with its fresh sheets—and tucked Bess beneath her chin and drew the blanket up and stood there, one hand resting on her sister’s back, feeling the steady rise and fall beneath her palm.
The house settled around them. ’Safe.
She pulled her hand from Clara’s back and stepped into her own chamber. The wildflowers had opened further since that afternoon, the cornflowers spreading their petals as though they, too, had decided the house was worth trusting. The novel sat beside them, spine still uncracked. The bed waited.
She crossed to the window instead. The garden lay below in blue-grey shadow, the copper beech a dark shape against the sky, the gravel paths catching the last of the light. Beyond the wall, London glowed—distant, indifferent.
Her hand found the window latch. She held the cold metal and let the chill anchor her, —the plaster wall in the townhouse, the brick outside Mrs Hewitt’s shop, the brass handle of a study door while her fingers shook.
She had always reached for cold things. For hardness. For the jolt that reminded her body to keep standing when her mind had run out of reasons.
Tonight, the room behind her was warm.
Through the connecting door, Clara’s breathing carried—steady, unhurried, the rhythm of a child who had not woken once since being laid down. No nightmare. No whimper. No small voice calling Rosa in the dark because the walls were thin and the world outside the blanket was full of things that could not be trusted.
Rosamund stood in the doorway between the two rooms—hers and Clara’s, connected, unlocked, exactly as he had promised—and for the first time in four years, she did not check the latch. Did not press her ear to the front door. Did not lie rigid beneath the covers with one hand stretched toward her sister’s bed, ready to snatch her up at the first sound of trouble.
Her body simply refused to perform those rituals. The vigilance that had kept her upright through funerals and evictions and the slow grinding erosion of everything she had ever owned—it loosened.
She climbed into the bed. The sheets were cool and impossibly soft, and her body sank into the mattress with a surrender that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with the absence of dread.
Tomorrow she would face a breakfast table fourteen feet long and a husband who read his correspondence like ammunition briefings. Tomorrow she would navigate a household she had not asked for, carry a title that tasted of ash, and begin the impossible work of building a life inside the walls of a man she had sworn never to forgive.
But tonight, Clara was breathing in the next room. And the door between them was open. And somewhere down the corridor, beyond two closed doors and the length of an immense hallway, the man who had arranged all of it was awake too—she was certain of that, as certain as she was of anything—making arrangements she would never see for dangers she would never know about, because that was what he did, and apparently what he intended to go on doing, whether she thanked him for it or not.
She closed her eyes.
Sleep, when it came, arrived without her permission—sudden, deep, and so complete that she did not hear the footsteps that paused outside her door near midnight, lingered for the space of three breaths, and then continued down the corridor with the careful, deliberate tread of a man who had come to make sure the house was quiet and had found, at last, that it was.
CHAPTER 9
“Will Her Grace be taking breakfast in her chambers, or shall I lay a place in the dining room?”
Her Grace.Two words that belonged to someone else—a woman who existed in ballrooms and receiving lines and all the gilded machinery of a world that had spat Rosamund out before she was old enough to understand why. She was no moreHer Gracethan she was the Queen of Egypt. She was a seamstress in a borrowed nightdress who had woken at five o’clock because the mattress was too soft and the silence was too complete and her body, trained by four years of vigilance, refused to believe that safety did not require consciousness.
“The dining room.” She turned from the window. If she took a tray in her chambers, she would be hiding. Rosamund Everleigh—Rathbourne, she corrected, and the name sat in her mouth like a pebble—did not hide. “Has His Grace already come down?”
“His Grace breakfasts at seven, Your Grace. Without fail.”
Of course he did. Without fail. The man probably scheduled his heartbeat.
