For a long moment she lay perfectly still. The fire had gone to embers. The wind was still at the windows. The house slept around her, vast and indifferent.
She pressed both hands flat over her face.
"No," she whispered, into her palms. "No. No.No."
The protest was useless. Her body, flushed and throbbing and shamelessly warm, was not persuaded. Neither, if she were honest, was her mind. The dream had been vivid in a way dreams were not supposed to be—had felt less like invention than recognition, as though her sleeping self had seen something her waking self was too disciplined to name, and had shown it to her with the clinical thoroughness of a physician presenting a diagnosis.
She had known the man for a single morning.
She had exchanged perhaps fifty words with him, most of them professional.
And her body had already decided.
Lorraine sat up in the dark. She pulled the counterpane around her shoulders, drew her knees to her chest, and stared at the shuttered window with the dry-eyed horror of a woman who had spent three years building a fortress and now, distinctly, heard the first stone fall.
She did not sleep again that night. She sat in the narrow blue room until the grey light came in at the edges of the shutters, and she listened to the rain, and she composed a lecture for herself of such withering thoroughness that a less determined woman would have resigned by breakfast.
Lorraine did not resign. Lorraine had survived worse than her own body.
She would survive this too.
Probably.
Chapter Four
“The post has arrived, Your Grace.”
Dominic did not look up from the estate ledgers spread across his desk. The figures swam before his eyes—tenant rents, crop yields, repairs to the east cottages—but he kept his gaze fixed upon them as though they held meaning beyond the tedious machinery of an inheritance he had never asked for.
“Leave it on the sideboard, Graves.”
“There is a letter from India, Your Grace. From Mr Harding.”
That made him look up.
Graves stood in the doorway, his expression composed as ever, though something stirred beneath it—concern, perhaps. He advanced a step and offered a silver tray upon which lay a single envelope, its edges softened by its long passage across sea and continent.
Dominic took it. The hand was unfamiliar—neat, precise, the script of a man accustomed to formal correspondence. He broke the seal and read, his jaw tightening with each line.
Dear Duke of Ravenswood,
It is with great regret that I must inform you of a delay in our intended departure from Calcutta. My wife has been taken with a fever, and the physicians strongly advise against travel until she is fully recovered. We anticipate that our arrival in England will be postponed by no less than six weeks, and possibly longer.
I trust this will not occasion undue inconvenience. Pray be assured of our continued intention to collect our grandson at the earliest opportunity, and of our gratitude for your care of him in the interim.
Your obedient servant,
James Harding
Six weeks. Possibly longer.
Dominic set the letter aside and stared at the wall opposite his desk. He ought to feel something—frustration at the delay, concern for Mrs Harding’s health, perhaps even relief at the reprieve. More time before he must watch William’s son leave his house forever.
He felt nothing.
That, perhaps, was the true difficulty. Four years spent mastering the art of feeling nothing—and he had succeeded so completely that even those emotions which might have rendered him human seemed frozen beyond recall.
“Your Grace?” Graves had not yet withdrawn. “Is everything in order?”
