“Very little. I was able to pour most of it away when Sarah did not sit with me.” She put her hand on his arm because she could feel the tension in him through the dark. “I am well. I promise you.”
His hand covered hers on his arm and pressed it there. “Smart woman.” The words came out rough. “You must be the cleverest woman I know.” His voice was strained.
They stood for a moment. The moon had gone behind a cloud and the garden was nearly black. She could feel his breath on her cheek as she looked up at him.
“After I set the stillroom to rights, the taste disappeared. The belladonna went out of the tea.”
“They know,” he said. “They know you would find it.”
“Yes.”
He released her hand and walked a few paces ahead, then turned back. She could see the outline of him against the faint grey of the path—tall, rigid, his shoulders squared the way they went when he was holding something down.
“There is something else,” she said. “And it is worse.”
She heard his breath leave him. “Go on.”
“Elizabeth.” She said the name carefully, the way one sets down something fragile. “The belladonna, in small doses over weeks. It does not kill outright. It convinces. A woman taking it might fix upon a single certainty that is not true, and no physician alive could argue her out of it. She would believe it the way she believed her own name.”
The silence stretched. She could not see his face, but she heard the sound he made, a sound for which language had no word.
“She believed the child was dead,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Because of belladonna,” he said.
“Yes.”
“It was not dead.”
“No.”
He was quiet for so long that she began to wonder if he had heard her. Then the gravel shifted. He came back to her out ofthe dark, and when he was close enough to see, she saw that his face was wet.
She had never seen him weep. She had seen him angry, cold, drunk, tender, and afraid. She had not seen this. She did not look away.
“Henry.” She stepped closer, close enough to feel his breath on her forehead. “You do not have a curse. It is not your love that kills.”
He closed his eyes. She watched his countenance begin the slow work of undoing what almost two decades of grief had built.
She lifted her hand to his jaw, where the wet had run, and he did not turn away from it as she had half expected. He leaned into her palm instead, the smallest movement, a man too tired to keep holding himself up alone. So she closed the last of the distance and put her arms around him.
For a moment he stood inside her arms without answering them, then something gave. His arms came around her, one hand spread wide on her shoulder blade and the other on her waist. He pressed her against him until there was no space left between them. He bowed his head to her temple. She felt the breath go out of him against her neck, ragged, and then again, steadier.
She held on and let him be held and felt the great rigid weight of him slowly cease to brace itself.
“Thank you,” he said, against the skin of her cheek. “Thank you.”
She stayed with him in the garden until his breathing steadied. Then she left him with the dark because some grief is owed its privacy, and this was his to do alone.
The fear she had carried since the wedding had not gone. But it had halved. His doom was hers now, and hers was his, and there was, against all reason, comfort in it.
Chapter twenty-four
His Mother’s Rooms
Henry
