Page 129 of The English Wife

“What country, friend, is this?” demanded the herald, as he had been demanding every five minutes by the clock for the past hour.

“This,” shouted back his counterpart on the other side of the door, “is Illyria.”

Then they both lifted their trumpets to their lips for a royal, if slightly ragged, fanfare.

Georgie was beginning to hate those bloody trumpets.

“Welcome,” she said for the five hundredth time. “Welcome to Illyria.”

“So good of you,” Bay was saying by her side. “So good of you to come.”

To their left, the scene began again. “What country, friend—”

Georgie turned her head and grimaced at Bay. His eyes crinkled back at her, and she felt something catch in her chest at the ease of it, the familiarity. They had always been able to speak without words.

Just not about the things that mattered.

“Welcome to Illyria.” This time it was a man dressed in gold-chased armor so heavy that it creaked while he walked. Oliver Belmont? Georgie wasn’t sure; the visor had been down. What she was sure of was that whoever it was would dearly regret his costume choice within five minutes of entering the ballroom. It might be January, but the four hundred were generating their share of body heat.

“So good of you to come,” said Bay at her side.

Vizards and masks and visors, farthingales and ruffs and doublets. There were at least a dozen Mary, Queen of Scots, and, much to her mother-in-law’s annoyance, six rival Elizabeths. There were Sir Walter Raleighs and Sir Philip Sidneys spouting verse and a mournful Prospero toting his book and tripping over his robes, never mind that he was from the wrong play.

In all the mass of colorful characters, there was no sign of Giles.

That surprised her. She had rather expected him to stroll through the receiving line, just to put her on her guard, just to see what she would do. She was, Georgie thought wryly as she murmured greetings to yet another faceless guest, doing Giles too much credit. This was her fief, not his. Giles only had the gall to exercise his droit du seigneur where he knew he ruled unchallenged.

“Nothing?” murmured Bay in her ear, and Georgie shook her head in response.

“This isn’t Shakespeare,” she muttered to him. “It’s Dante.”

“The circle he never mentioned.” Bay’s face lit as he looked at her. There was a tenderness to it that made her chest ache. “Condemned to hear the same lines from Twelfth Night over and over from now unto eternity.”

Georgie smiled back with an effort. “We’ve made our own Inferno.”

“Not much longer now,” said Bay, and she knew he wasn’t just talking about the receiving line. They’d agreed to postpone any discussion of their future until after the ball. It lent a strange poignancy to the simplest utterances, the most mundane gestures. Watching Bay spoon jam onto his muffin at breakfast had nearly made her weep. “We’ve stood here long enough to satisfy the sticklers.”

“Good. This dress weighs more than the twins.” It had seemed such a statement to wear no jewels, to have crystals and aquamarines embroidered into the fabric of her gown: one in the eye for the gem-decked matrons. But she could feel the weight of Bay’s wealth dragging her down.

Bay put a hand to the dagger at his belt. “Would you like me to slash your laces?”

“Stop playing with that,” said Georgie. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

Bay looked like Bast, balked of a toy. “It’s just a bauble.”

“A very sharp bauble.” A band of wandering minstrels roamed past, crooning about Greensleeves. “If you must use it, apply it to the man with the lute.”

“He wasn’t that bad,” said Bay. His eyes met hers, that deceptively clear blue, like the sky on a cloudless day. “He’s simply not as good as you.”

So many memories. It was as if burning their past had simply released it into the air between them; they couldn’t take a breath without choking on memories.

Despite herself, Georgie reached for her husband’s hand, squeezed it. “I’m done performing, remember?”

“I know,” said Bay, and there was so much unspoken between them that Georgie couldn’t stand it anymore.

“I need a breath of air,” she said, faking a smile as best she could. “We’ve nearly an hour until the German. Make sure everyone’s tucked in at the trough?”

Bay covered her hand in his, a courtly gesture that caused whispers and snickers among the viewers. “Don’t be too long. We don’t know who might be out there.”