He had three days to make the lie worth what it had cost her.
He did not permit himself to think beyond three days. He picked up his pen, and he pulled the first document toward him, and he began.
CHAPTER 27
The door opened.
Rosamund came in carrying Clara on her hip, her cheek pressed sideways against the child’s temple, laughing at something Clara had apparently declared in the corridor. Clara’s stockings had come down again. One hand gripped Rosamund’s collar. The other was extended, demonstrating something structural about castles.
Then Rosamund looked up.
She crossed the threshold smiling, and the smile died before she had taken two steps into the room.
Edwin sat in his chair with his teacup balanced and his posture at perfect ease. His face wore an expression of such practised warmth that a stranger would have found nothing amiss in it. But Rosamund had not been a stranger for some time now, and what she saw beneath the warmth—notinit, but underneath,where the scaffolding showed—was the same quality she had glimpsed through the carriage window. The cold below the performance. The nothing beneath the warmth.
Then she looked at Tristan.
He stood at the hearth with his hands at his sides. Not clasped behind his back. Not resting on the mantel. Simply hanging, as though the body that commanded every room it entered had briefly forgotten what it did with itself. His face was a thing she had never seen before—not the granite composure she had catalogued over weeks of breakfast tables and corridors and the near-dark of a carriage after a race. Not the restrained warmth that broke through in nurseries and gardens and drawing rooms where no one was watching. This was what lay beneath both: a blankness so total it felt like a door slammed and locked and the key thrown into something deep.
He did not look at her when she entered. He looked at the fire.
Clara felt it before either adult acknowledged it. Children read rooms the way animals read weather—not in any single detail but in the altered pressure of everything at once. Her lecturing hand came down. Her weight shifted against Rosamund’s shoulder.
“Why is it quiet?” she asked.
“It is not quiet, darling.” Rosamund set her down, kept one hand at her back. “It is only that we have had a great deal of conversation already this morning.”
“His Grace is doing the stiff thing.”
“Clara.”
“He is.” Clara studied Tristan with the candid attention of a child who did not yet understand that observations were sometimes better kept. “He does it when he is thinking hard about something and does not want anyone to know.”
Edwin smiled. It was the smile of a man who found the observation useful.
Rosamund turned Clara gently toward the door. “Go and find Mrs Alcott, please. Ask her whether the rocking horse has been exercised this morning. I believe it is overdue.”
Clara went, casting one backwards look at the room with the expression she wore when she suspected she was being managed. The expression was accurate. When the door closed, the drawing room contracted around the three of them—smaller, tighter, the air between them pressed thinner than the architecture warranted.
Edwin set down his teacup.
“I owe you an honest question,” he said, addressing Rosamund. His voice carried nothing dramatic. It was the voice of a man performing restraint. “Or perhaps several. I have been remiss in asking them, and I think you deserve better thanthe comfortable half-truths that have characterised our recent visits.”
She said nothing. She watched him the way she had learnt to watch rooms—for the change in pressure, the thing arriving before it announced itself.
“I have been wondering.” Edwin folded his hands in his lap with the care of a man who understood that stillness was its own kind of performance. “Whether you truly believe he loves you.”
Rosamund did not flinch. She kept her spine straight and her face composed with the practised steadiness of a woman who had been composing her face in difficult rooms since she was nineteen years old.
“I was not aware my marriage was your concern, Uncle.”
“It is my concern because you are my concern. You are my brother’s daughter, Rosamund, and I have watched this arrangement unfold with a disquiet I can no longer contain in the name of family peace.” Edwin’s eyes moved to Tristan briefly, then returned. “I have been asking myself: is this man capable of the thing he appears to be performing? Or has he constructed something more useful to him than love, and allowed you to mistake the construction for the real article?”
“Edwin.” Tristan’s voice came from the hearth. One word, carrying everything a word could carry and choosing to carry nothing. A warning emptied of urgency, because a warning withurgency would have told Edwin too much about where the nerve was.
Edwin did not look away from Rosamund. “Does he love you? That is what I am asking. Simply that.” He turned toward the hearth. “Perhaps you would prefer to answer yourself, Rathbourne. Do you love your wife?”
The drawing room went utterly still.
