Silence. The carriage swayed. Somewhere outside, a child laughed, and the world went on being ordinary in a way that felt like an insult.
“If I say no. What happens?”
“Edwin files his petition. The court grants a hearing. His solicitor presents evidence of your unsuitability. You argue your case without representation, because you cannot afford it. The magistrate weighs a duke’s intelligence against a seamstress’s devotion, and devotion loses. Clara is removed from your care and installed in a household where she will be leveraged and sold into whatever arrangement serves your uncle’s purposes.” He delivered each sentence without inflection, without mercy. “That is what happens.”
“And if I say yes?”
“Then none of it does.”
She gripped the edges of her cloak until the wool bit into her skin. The three shillings pressed against her thigh—the sum total of her power in the world. Against that: a name, a title, the full crushing weight of everything the Duke of Rathbourne represented. A wall so high that a man like Edwin could spend years throwing himself against it and never reach the other side.
All she had to do was marry the man who had built it on her family’s grave.
“I need time.”
“You have until tomorrow.”
“That is not time. That is a deadline.”
“Your uncle filed this morning. A deadline is all either of us has.”
The carriage slowed. The footman’s step on the pavement. The handle turning. Tristan spoke before the door opened.
“I am not asking you to forgive me.” His voice had shifted—stripped of the professional distance. What remained was rawer. “I am asking you to let me do the one thing I can do that matters. Whether you hate me while I do it changes nothing.”
The door swung open. Grey afternoon light spilled in, and she could see her street—her narrow, crumbling street—waiting outside like a verdict.
She stood. Her knees held, which felt like a victory.
On the step, she paused. He remained exactly where he had been—seated, still, the lamplight catching the hard line of his jaw.
“You said you are the only man in London who can save my sister.”
“I am.”
She held his gaze for a long, unbroken moment. Then she said the truest and most terrible thing she had ever spoken aloud:
“I know.”
The door closed. The carriage pulled away without haste, the way everything connected to Tristan Rathbourne operated. She stood on the pavement and watched it disappear into the grey afternoon traffic, and then she stood there a while longer, because her legs had decided—now that the performance was over—that they were no longer interested in supporting her weight.
She pressed her hand flat against the cold brick wall beside her and leaned into it until the stone bruised her palm. Three shillings in her pocket. A proposal in her chest. And upstairs,behind a door with a lock that barely held, a six-year-old girl who trusted her to keep the world from breaking.
She climbed the stairs. She opened the door. Clara looked up from the floor where she had been drawing with a nub of charcoal on the back of old broadsheets, and smiled, and said, “You were gone a long time,” and Rosamund knelt and gathered her close and held on with the fierce, shaking grip of a woman who had just been offered everything she needed by the last person on earth she would ever have chosen to take it from.
Tomorrow. He had said tomorrow.
She pressed her face into her sister’s hair and felt the word sink through her like a stone dropped into deep water—disturbing everything, and nowhere near finished falling.
CHAPTER 4
She did not sleep.
The ceiling of the bedchamber had a crack that ran from the window to the door in a jagged line, and Rosamund traced it through the dark hours the way a cartographer follows a river, mapping it without purpose, committing it to memory because memory was easier than thought.
Thought was a country she could not afford to enter.
Clara slept beside her on the narrow bed, one arm flung across Rosamund’s ribs with the unconscious possessiveness of a child who had learned far too soon that the people she loved could disappear. Her breathing was slow and steady—the only sound in the room apart from the settling of old timber and the occasional rattle of a cart on the street below. Rosamund kept her own breathing quiet, because Clara stirred at disturbance, and the last thing the girl needed was to wake at three in the morning and find her sister staring at the ceiling with dry eyes and a mind like a trapped animal pacing the walls of its cage.
