The room went still. Clara looked up from her book, her gaze moving between the two men with the grave attention of a child who could read the weather of a room even when the words were beyond her.
Edwin’s smile did not falter. That was the thing. A genuine man, rebuffed, would have shown something—hurt, embarrassment, the retreat of a person whose sincerity had been met with suspicion. Edwin’s expression held its shape the way a mask holds its shape: from the outside, perfect. From behind, hollow.
“Of course,” he said. “I understand completely. The offer stands, should you ever feel comfortable. There is no urgency.”
He rose. Collected his hat. Bid farewell to Clara, who waved from the carpet without looking up from a page depicting a dragon guarding a castle—a subject that, given her domestic circumstances, she presumably considered instructional.
Rosamund walked him to the entrance hall. At the door, Edwin turned and took her hand—briefly, warmly.
“You are so like your father,” he said. “That same grace. That same willingness to believe the best in people, even when the world has given every reason not to.” His grip tightened for a fraction of a second. “He would be proud of you, Rosamund.”
Then he released her hand, descended the steps, and climbed into his carriage.
Rosamund stood in the doorway. She raised her hand in farewell—a small gesture, instinctive, the kind a person made when parting from someone they had begun to trust.
And then she saw it.
Through the carriage window, in the instant before the glass caught the angle of the afternoon light and turned opaque, Edwin’s face was visible for perhaps two seconds. He was not looking back at her. He was looking forward, at the street ahead, and the expression he wore—now that the door was closed and the performance was over and no audience remained—was not grief. Not humility. Not the tender sorrow of a man rebuilding bridges with his dead brother’s children.
It was calculation. Cold, precise, and absolute. The face of a man reviewing a campaign and finding it on schedule.
The mask resettled before the carriage rounded the corner. By the time the wheels had disappeared from view, the face in the window might have been imagined—a trick of the light, a projection of Tristan’s warnings onto a man who was doing nothing more than sitting in a carriage and thinking.
But Rosamund stood on the steps of Rath House with the spring air carrying the scent of the copper beech and the distant noise of London pressing in from every direction, and the ground beneath her certainty shifted.
She closed the door. Pressed her back against it.
From the drawing room, Tristan’s voice reached her—low, speaking to Clara, asking about the dragon in the fable book with the grave attentiveness he brought to everything the child said. Clara’s answer rose above it, bright and careless and utterly unaware of what was unravelling around her.
“The dragon is not bad,” Clara was saying. “He is only lonely. He guards the castle because no one ever comes to visit. If someone would just knock on the door, he would let them in.”
Tristan was quiet for a moment. Then: “Perhaps the dragon keeps people away because he is afraid of what would happen if he let them close.”
“That is silly. If you let people close, they bring you biscuits. Everyone knows that.”
Rosamund pressed her hand flat against the door at her back and stared at the empty hall—the polished floor, the flowers Mrs Alcott had placed on the table that morning, the whole warm, careful machinery of a house that had become, against every expectation, a home—and felt the terrible weight of two truths she could no longer hold apart.
One: that a man who wept for her father and sat on the carpet and built castles with her sister might be exactly what he claimed.
Two: that the face in the carriage window had worn the expression of a man who had never wept for anyone in his life.
She could not hold both. She could not choose between them. And the man in the drawing room—the one who had kissed her in the dark and guarded her sister and refused, over and over, to explain what he knew—was the only person who might tell her which truth would break her.
She was beginning to be afraid that it would be both.
CHAPTER 25
The botanical illustrations had been Clara’s idea.
She had found the book on Rosamund’s writing desk — Edwin’s gift, pressed flowers and copperplate labels, the one thing Rosamund had kept from the parcel Tristan had returned — and carried it to the morning room with the proprietary confidence of a child who considered all books within reach to be common property.
Edwin arrived to find her already cross-legged on the carpet with it open in her lap, renaming everything.
“This one,” Clara announced, without looking up, “is not a bluebell. It is a sleeping fairy.”
Edwin lowered himself to the floor beside her. Not to a chair — to the floor, with the careful, slightly stiff movements of a man whose joints no longer cooperated with spontaneity but who haddecided the carpet was worth the cost. Rosamund watched him do it from across the room.
“A reasonable correction,” he said. “The botanist was clearly working without sufficient imagination.”
