Her cheeks warmed at the sight of him—incorrigible, sunlit, hair still tousled from her own hand.
Oh saints. She was in such terrible trouble.
“She is a plague,” Tamsin muttered as she bent to gather crushed lavender and paper packets of dried valerian. “A torment. A devil.”
“Zenobia?” Ruby asked. “Or the princess?”
Tamsin made a sort of guttural moan. “She made no effort to conceal herself whatsoever, despite promising to do so. She wanted to wear a scarlet morning robe, and then when I told her no, she proposed a bathing costume instead. She nearly caused a riot in the churchyard because she attempted to run off with a marble headstone, and I believe there is still a small stampede ongoing because she somehow terrorized a bull.”
“Do you know,” Ruby said, “Ithoughtyou were talking about the princess, but I found myself less and less certain the more you spoke.”
Tamsin threw up her hands in a shower of fragrant herbs and stalked after Archer and Princess Serafina.
Inside the shop, Alice took Ruby’s arm. “Not to worry,” she said to the apothecary. “We can be relied upon to make recompense for... all of this.” Her black lashes fluttered as she looked down at Ruby. “Can’t we?”
“Yes,” Ruby said stoutly, and made for the door.
They had only just begun to follow in the wake of their straggling parade of companions when Alice tightened her grip on Ruby’s arm. “Oh! I almost forgot. The mail coach delivered a letter for you straight into our hands. Well, my hands—Tamsin was busy hauling the princess out of a tavern fight.” She removed a slightly battered envelope from her reticule and passed it to Ruby. “Here. I think it’s a reply from your father.”
Ruby froze in the middle of the street.
It was her father’s handwriting, to be sure. She recognized the careful precision of his downward strokes; he cut his quills precisely; his pens never broke or spattered.
She flipped the letter over and found his seal pressed into the smooth circle of crimson wax. Her fingers trembled as she broke it.
He had written back already. Had he discovered with whom Verdura had schemed? Did he have some superior notion in mind for the protection of the princess?
She thought of her father and Cassandra in Rome, hot coffee and rose-petal jam—of Liverpool and the drapes on fire. She thought of theRoyal Archaeological Journal, crisp black print on cream paper, laid next to her father’s plate at the breakfast table.
Her chest squeezed tight, and she pictured her father’s lean elegant hands set to pen and ink, and she hoped—shehoped—
And then, instead of hoping, she read his letter.
Chapter 21
Ruby did not come down to supper.
Archer had watched her enter Pomeroy House just behind him. He’d waited for her to look his way, but she hadn’t. Her head had been bent with Alice’s, and she had not acknowledged the pack of dogs that greeted her, only pressed her palm against her breastbone and hurried up the stairs.
He’d watched her ascend until even her trim little boots were out of sight and told himself to be patient, to wait for her, to stop being such an outrageous fool.
He wanted to hold fast to her ribbons and keep her beside him. He wanted to smile at her and have her smile back, a thousand times,everytime.
He did not pretend, even for a heartbeat, that he was not watching her place at the table, waiting for her to come.
But she didn’t. They’d all taken to eating in the kitchen, even the princess, who was as fond of Wall’s cooking as she was disdainful of the sailors’ table manners. Archer’s eyes lingered on the braided straw chair, left empty for Ruby, plain and silent.
He didn’t make it to Wall’s dessert course. He pushed back from the table with an abrupt scrape and strode for the door.
Something was wrong. He knew it was.
She wasn’t anywhere on the ground floor: not the blue parlor or the library or the chamber for the hounds. She wasn’t in the tower—despite the 197 steps he climbed to search for her, and then another 197 back down to keep looking. She wasn’t in her own chamber. Nor Archer’s.
He found her, finally, in a small, disused room at the back of the house—the conservatory, he supposed, though little was kept and tended inside its glass-and-iron walls. Before Ruby had come, it had been dusty and vacant, the windows thick with salt spray.
She sat on a settee with her knees drawn up, her chin in her hand and her eyes fixed upon the glass, looking out at the sea.
“Ruby.”
