She kept her voice entirely even. “The side terrace, then.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have that key either.”
A silence followed that they both inhabited in different ways. Rosamund inhabited it with the full, cold understanding of someone who had just confirmed what she had suspected since the carriage turned through the iron gates and the footman’s eyes went to Edwin before they came to her. The young man inhabited it with the rigid stillness of someone waiting to find out whether the thing he had been instructed to say had been sufficient.
“I see,” she said. She slowly made her way upstairs again, her heart beating wildly in her chest with the fear that she had made a grave mistake.
CHAPTER 29
She found them by accident.
That was the part she kept returning to, afterward—the casualness of it, the way the discovery arrived not through any heroic scheme but because she had gone to ask about the post schedule and the study door was ajar and the bureau drawer was half-open and her own handwriting was sitting on top of a stack of papers that had no business being there.
She had gone to the study at half past three. Edwin was riding his estate rounds—she had seen him leave from the upstairs window, his horse moving down the drive at an unhurried pace, a man taking his property’s measure. Clara was with the housemaid who had been assigned to her, a girl of sixteen who appeared entirely willing to spend an afternoon naming things in the garden. The house was quiet in the way that large country houses achieved in the hours between luncheon and tea, when the staff retreated to their own routines and the rooms held only dust and the ticking of clocks.
She had told herself she was going to ask about the post schedule.
She had told herself a great many things over the past three days.
The bureau stood against the east wall between the window and a writing desk heaped with ledgers. Solid mahogany, three drawers, the top one open an inch and a half—not forced, not riffled through in haste, but simply not fully closed, the way a drawer was left when someone had been through it recently and had not troubled to shut it entirely because the room was his and who would notice.
She noticed.
She crossed the room. She pulled the drawer open.
Her own handwriting looked back at her.
Three letters, still sealed—the seal on each broken with a clean, careful cut of a blade rather than the rough tear of impatience. Someone had opened them, read them, and refolded them along their original creases. They sat on top of a sheaf of estate papers with the unremarkable tidiness of things that had been filed rather than posted.
Eleanor’s name on the first.
Rath House, Londonon the second, in her plainest hand.
The third she had written after midnight, in a rush she had not been able to explain to herself at the time, only that the words had pressed against the inside of her chest until she could not keep them there any longer. She had written his name on the outside with the pen pressed too hard, the letters deeper than they needed to be.
His Grace the Duke of Rathbourne.
She stood at the bureau and held all three in her hands for a long moment. Outside, a wood pigeon called once from the oak trees along the drive. The clock on the mantel ticked. The house continued its afternoon quiet with the complete indifference of a building that had housed worse things than this and expected to house worse still.
She put the letters back.
She closed the drawer to its original inch and a half.
Then she went upstairs to wash her hands, and collect Clara from the garden, and wait for supper.
* * *
The dining room at Ashvale seated twelve. Edwin had set them at one end, himself at the head with Rosamund to his left, the arrangement of a host and a valued guest rather than a captor and a prisoner, because Edwin understood that the words you used for things determined how people could object to them.
Clara had been given her supper in the nursery. Edwin had suggested it gently, citing the formality of the dining room and the child’s need for early hours. Rosamund had agreed because disagreeing over supper arrangements would have told him too much about how precisely she was now measuring every concession she made.
The first course arrived. Edwin spoke of his tenants. He spoke of the harvest prospects and a drainage project in the lower fields that his steward had been proposing for three years. He spoke with the unhurried ease of a man entirely comfortable in his surroundings, which he was, because they were his surroundings and he had arranged them to be exactly what they were.
Rosamund ate her soup and waited.
She waited because everything she was about to say required a stillness she had not yet fully assembled, and she had learnt four years ago that words spoken before the stillness was ready did damage that calm words could not afterwards undo.
The soup was cleared. The fish arrived.
