“A Mrs Langley. Young. Direct. She meant no harm by it—or if she did, the harm was honest, which is more than I can say for the rest of the room.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“That a name is not a history. It is a direction.” She lifted her glass. “I believed it when I said it. I am working on believing it still.”
He regarded her across the table with an expression she had not seen before—not the careful neutrality of dinner conversation, not the guarded warmth of the nursery, but something rawer. Something that looked, if she was not careful about how she read it, like fury held very tightly on her behalf.
“You should not have had to defend yourself alone.”
“I was not alone. I had my composure and a very good cup of Wedgwood tea.” She set her glass down. “I managed.”
“I have no doubt.” His voice dropped. “That does not mean you should have had to.”
The words settled between them. She did not know what to do with them, so she ate her soup, and after a moment he returned to his correspondence, and the silence that followed was not the same silence that had preceded it.
“Clara drew a portrait of you today,” he said, after the second course. “It is displayed on the nursery wall. I am depicted, I believe, as a rather tall stick figure wearing a hat. She assures me the hat is a crown.”
Rosamund’s mouth moved. Not quite a smile—a ghost of one, summoned and released before it could settle.
“She has very fixed ideas about crowns.”
“She has very fixed ideas about everything. I admire the consistency.”
The third course came and went. They spoke of Clara’s drawing, of a letter from Eleanor that had arrived that morning, of Mrs Alcott’s campaign to reorganise the linen cupboards, which Tristan described as “the most ambitious military operation this household has witnessed since my grandmother dismissed three footmen in a single afternoon.”
Normal. He was keeping it normal. Holding the shape of an ordinary evening around her.
She retired before dessert. He rose when she rose. Said good night. Did not follow.
Rosamund climbed the staircase and walked the corridor to her chamber and opened the door and stopped.
She crossed the room. Touched one petal with the tip of her finger. The silk of it was cool and impossibly soft, and it bent beneath her touch without breaking.
She did not ask who had left them.
She sat at the desk, and the scent of the anemones reached her—green and clean, carrying the garden inside, just like her mother’s lavender used to carry the whole of Hertfordshire into whatever room she entered.
The woman who had walked into Lady Willoughby’s luncheon that morning was not the same woman sitting here now.
She was no longer certain she wanted it to stop.
CHAPTER 20
“Aparcel has arrived, Your Grace. For Miss Clara. From Mr Edwin Vale.”
Rosamund’s cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
She sat in the morning room with Clara on her lap and the remains of breakfast cooling on a tray beside them. Harding stood at the threshold with the studied neutrality of a man delivering news he wished belonged to someone else. Before Rosamund could speak, Tristan appeared in the corridor behind the footman.
“When did it arrive?”
“This morning, Your Grace. Seven o’clock. A liveried man. He did not give his name.”
“Bring it to me.”
The parcel arrived on a tray: a carved wooden horse, painted with meticulous detail. A set of tin soldiers in bright enamel. A cloth-bound book of illustrated fables, gilt-stamped, its pages thick as cream. And a note in Edwin’s handwriting.
Tristan read the note. His expression did not change. He set it on the desk.
