He tried to speak. The sound that came out was not quite a word but it was the most he could manage.
He slept again.
The next time he woke, it was dark and Violet was in bed beside him, her back to his chest, her breathing slow and deep. His arm was around her waist. He did not remember putting it there, but his body had apparently made the decision without consulting him, and he found he had no objection.
He lay in the dark and breathed her in. Lavender and something else.
He was alive. The knowledge of it arrived with gratitude and relief but also with shame. He was alive because his wife had been investigating murders he had dismissed as a curse. The madness they whispered about in Lady Thornwick, the eccentricity they pitied, those were the things that had kept him breathing. And the women with ridiculous bonnets he’d prohibited Violet from associating with, they had cared and had acted to save him.
He had married a woman with an army. He had not known it. He had been too busy protecting his solitude to notice that she had built a fortress around them both while he was looking the other way.
He tightened his arm around her. She stirred.
“You are awake,” she murmured.
“I am told I owe you my life.”
“You owe your life to egg whites and my mother’s iron water.”
“Violet.”
“Mm.”
“Thank you.”
She turned in his arms. In the dark, he could see the outline of her face, the loose hair across the pillow. She put her handagainst his chest, and the weight of it settled something that had been unsettled for years.
She began to talk. She told him about Cranbrook and Bainbridge, about the charcoal poultice, about Mrs Bickle arriving with the magnesia from Edinburgh and eating his biscuits. He listened, but he was listening to her voice more than the words, the way it moved through the dark, low and steady.
He watched her mouth move. He had kissed that mouth. He wanted to kiss it again, and the wanting was not desire but something less manageable. He noticed, for the first time, a faint line at the corner of her eye. He wondered if he had put that there. The weeks of fear, the investigation, the sleepless nights… He had put it there by bringing catastrophe to her feet, and yet she had stayed.
She was telling him about his mother-in-law counting her own heartbeat to time the doses, and he was thinking that he had never seen anything as beautiful as this woman talking about medicine in the dark with her hair undone. She was beautiful by being exactly who she was and nothing else.
“The Duchess of Cranbrook was kind enough to offer assistance with announcing the delay of our ball. You will need the better part of two months until you can stand, I should think.”
“That is unfortunate,” he said in a gravelly voice. “I was looking forward to that.”
She laughed, giving him a light slap on the arm.
“And Sarah?” he asked, because the name was the stone at the bottom of everything.
“In a cell at Bow Street.” Violet paused. “She was arrested in Surrey, at the cottage where she keeps your nephew.” Another pause. “Who is not your nephew.”
He felt the betrayal settle with the slow, cold weight of confirmation. He had known, since she told him about the boy’sage, that Sarah’s story was a lie. He had known and had spent the days since refusing to follow the knowledge to its end.
“Edmund?”
“Cleared. Kit questioned him. His first words were to ask whether you were alive.”
Henry looked at the ceiling. He owed her an apology. For the argument, for his anger, for sending her from the room. She had been right to investigate, right to push, right to look while he did nothing except make her feel she had no right to judge family because he had forgotten that she was family. All because he could not bear to look there himself.
Edmund had been entangled with the murderer, and Henry’s refusal to see it had almost cost him his life.
“I was wrong,” he said. “About Edmund. About what you suspected. You were looking where I would not, and I made you pay for it.”
“You were protecting someone you loved.”
“It was not protection. It was pride. I did not want the danger to come from inside my own house. I wanted it to be a stranger, a curse, a piece of rotten luck, anything that did not require me to doubt the people I trusted.” He paused. “That is not caution. That is vanity.”
