“I am here for the duration,” Bethany said. “I will not interfere. I will not say anything you do not want to hear. I will drink your aunt’s camomile tea, walk your uncle’s orchards and sit in your uncle’s drawing room, and if you want to talk I will listen, but if you do not want to talk I will be quiet. Either is acceptable, and neither requires discussion.”
She unpacked her trunk in the guest bedroom. She drank the camomile tea, all of it, every cup Aunt Margery produced,because drinking it was an act of solidarity with Aunt Margery’s need to be useful, and Bethany understood usefulness and honored it. She walked the orchards with Imogen in the afternoon, matching her pace, and her silence, not filling the quiet with words because she understood, better than anyone, that some silences needed to exist and that filling them was a form of trespass.
The third evening. The four of them were at the dining table; the candles low, the food plain, the conversation sparse. Cassie was telling a story about a hedgehog she had found in the garden, and Aunt Margery was pretending to listen. Bethany was cutting her bread into precise squares, which was something she did when she was thinking about saying something she did not want to say, and Imogen was watching her, because she had been watching Bethany cut bread into squares for thirteen years, and the squares always meant the same thing: a sentence being assembled behind the teeth, a truth being prepared for delivery.
Bethany set down her knife.
“I told you, Imogen.” Her voice was quiet, level, carrying the particular weight of a woman who had been holding a sentence behind her teeth for days and was now releasing it because holding it any longer would have been dishonest and dishonesty was a thing Bethany Mercer could not sustain. “I told you on the gravel sweep at Ravenhurst Park. I told you the day after Marchmont. I told you in your morning room after the conservatory. He has done exactly what I said he would do.”
The table went silent. Cassie stopped talking about the hedgehog and Aunt Margery’s cup paused halfway to her mouth.
Imogen set her fork down.
“I needed to be told by him, Bethany. Not by you.” Her voice was steady and low and carried no anger, because the anger had burned through in the first three days and what was left underneath was something colder and more precise. “You tellingme was never going to stop me. I have been told all my life by women who knew better. My aunt told me. Mrs. Glass told me. Every woman who has ever watched a younger woman walk toward a man she should not walk toward has told me, and I have heard each one of them, but I walked anyway. I needed to be told by him, not by anybody else.”
She paused. The candle nearest her plate flickered in a draft from the window, and the flickering made the shadows in the room shift, and that was the only movement, because no one at the table was moving.
“He was the only one who could have told me, and he chose not to. He chose to wait. He chose to keep the wager between us while he came to my house and whispered words to me that I believed, and I believed them because they sounded true. They may have been true, but the truth of them does not help, because the wager was also true, and he chose the wager’s silence over his own honesty, and that choice is the thing I cannot forgive.”
She picked up her fork, set it down again and looked at the tablecloth.
Bethany’s face changed. The steadiness cracked, and beneath it, Imogen saw something she had not seen on Bethany’s face in six seasons of friendship, something that looked, in the candlelight, remarkably like shame. Bethany had been right. She had been right about the duke, about the mark and right about the broken hearts, but being right had not prepared her for this, for the specific shape of the damage.
“I am sorry,” Bethany said. The apology arrived before her napkin reached the table, quick, raw and genuine. “I am sorry I said it. I am sorry I was right. I would rather have been wrong about him than right about this.”
There was silence for the rest of the meal. The cold supper went mostly uneaten, and Aunt Margery excused herself with a small sound that might have been a cough and might have beena sob. Cassie followed, pressing Imogen’s shoulder once as she passed, a brief firm touch that said everything Cassie had not said aloud for a week.
Bethany stayed. They shared the bed, the narrow guest bed in the room next to Imogen’s, lying side by side as they had when they were twelve, when the world was smaller, and the dangers in it were imaginary. The bed was too narrow for two grown women, but neither of them cared, because the narrowness meant their shoulders touched, and the touching was the point.
Imogen cried once, quietly, in the dark. Not the hot furious tears of the Carlisle parlor. Quieter tears, slower, the tears that arrived after the fury had burned out and the grief had settled in underneath it. It was the grief of a woman who had given herself to a man she loved and who had learned, less than thirty hours later, that the giving had been built on a foundation she had not been allowed to see.
She told her friend everything, and Bethany listened without commenting. She simply lay beside her in the dark and listened to her cry and was there, present, silent and steady, because steadiness was what Bethany offered and it was what Imogen needed.
Chapter Sixteen
“Get up.”
Henry Frost was standing in the doorway of the study at Grosvenor Square with his coat on, his hat still in his hand and rain on his shoulders, which meant he had come directly from somewhere else, or someone had sent for him. Collins was the only person in the building who had the authority to send for anyone and the only person in the building who was still speaking to Ash, because Ash had dismissed the rest of the staff four days ago on the grounds that being looked at by people who pitied him was worse than being alone.
“Get up, Ash.”
He was on the floor of his study. He had been on the floor for some time, though he could not have said how long, because the distinction between hours had become academic at some point around Tuesday and he had stopped tracking them. The study was dark, the curtains drawn, one candle guttering on the desk above him, the wax pooling on the wood because no one had trimmed the wick and no one was going to trim the wick because the staff had been dismissed.
A half-emptied decanter of brandy sat within arm’s reach, and beside it a stack of letters he had written and not sent, seven of them, each one addressed to Miss Imogen Goodall in his angular handwriting, each one sealed, none of them carrying the right words because the right words did not exist. He had tried seven times to find them. The first letter had been an apology, and the apology had been inadequate. The second had been an explanation, and the explanation had been insufficient. The third had been a confession, and the confession had been self-serving. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh had been progressively shorter, progressively more desperate,progressively less convinced that ink on paper could repair what he had broken, until the seventh letter contained only her name and a single sentence he could not bring himself to finish.
He had not slept since the Carlisle ball. Five days. He had eaten something on Monday, a piece of bread Collins had left on the desk, and then nothing since, because eating required the belief that sustaining oneself was worth the effort, and the belief had departed his body at approximately the same moment Imogen had walked past him in the Carlisle parlor with tears running down her face. He replayed it every hour, the image of her walking past him, her face set, her eyes bright, her body moving with the fierce controlled precision of a woman who was holding herself together by an act of will and who would break the moment she was out of his sight. The breaking was his fault, every piece of it, and the every-piece-of-it was what kept him on the floor.
Frost came into the room without asking what had happened because he had read the Tattler, and the Tattler had been sufficient. He picked up the decanter, carried it to the far side of the room, and set it on the mantelpiece, out of reach. Then he rang the bell. Collins appeared, expectant, vindicated, the face of a man who had sent for reinforcements and whose reinforcements had arrived.
“Tea,” Frost said. “Then soup. Then a barber. In that order.”
“I do not want tea.”
“I did not ask you what you wanted. I asked Collins for tea. The tea is not for your enjoyment, Ash. The tea is for the purpose of getting liquid into your body that is not brandy, because you have been drinking brandy for five days and it is not helping and you are beginning to smell like a man who has given up. But giving up is not what we are going to do today.”
Frost sat down in the chair beside the desk, regarded Ash on the floor with the calm, unsparing look of a man who hadwatched other men come apart before and who understood that the first step in reassembly was not sympathy but architecture. You did not put a broken man back together by telling him you were sorry. You put him back together by giving him something to build.
“The girl is not the only one who has lost something here,” Frost said. “You will lose yourself if you stay on this floor. I have known you for twelve years, Ash, and I have watched you waste eight of them. I am not going to watch you waste the ninth on the floor of your own study because a woman you love discovered that you are a coward and a fool. You are a coward and a fool. The question is whether you intend to remain one.”
