Page 22
“Edmund!”
Sophie heaved herself toward the prone figure and clasped his shoulder. His head was turned away but tossed, suddenly, to face her.
The features weren’t her brother’s. They were too young—pink cheeks and green eyes glazed with unconsciousness. A child.
Barnard.
Her cry broke in her empty bedchamber in Berkeley Square.
She gasped for breath, blinking furiously until her mind could make sense of what her eyes saw. The same blank walls and bleak sunlight that ushered in every morning were fixed squarely in their places. Her pulse thundered in her ears and the bedlinens were tangled inside her clammy fists. A chiffchaff sang merrily in the garden below. It was April. April 1812.
She ran trembling fingers through her hair and found it sweat-dampened. She never should have gone to see that dratted ship. She had passed two bleary days and three horrific nights since, the darkness always inviting the same visions of salt and smoke and screams. But keeping her eyes closed had worked before. She’d never heard—never seen—
A tremor rippled from her toes to her nape and she burrowed into her pillow, shielding her gaze from the crimson bedhanging above. Hiding in this house wasn’t helping. She would get out today. Breathe clean air and warm her skin beneath the sun.
Someone rapped on the door three times—that would be Anne, come to help Sophie ready for the day. She wanted to protest, plead illness and let the threads of the dream fully snap before rising, but she didn’t.
Anne entered with a bent chin, a frown, and an ewer of steaming water. “G’morning, miss.”
The maid’s sentiments couldn’t have been more bitter if she’d spoken them around a mouthful of ash. Still, there was something marginally comforting about the presence of another person in the room.
Sophie exhaled. “Good morning, Anne.”
“Would you like the printed muslin this morning, miss? Her ladyship asked that you wear the grey silk tonight.”
“Silk?” The gritting of teeth must have been more than a figment of the dream. Her molars ached, and her fingertips felt raw and burnt. “For what?”
“You have an engagement tonight,” Anne said, as she poured water into the basin on the dressing table. “A dinner at the Bancroft residence, miss.”
Sophie groaned aloud. “No. No muslin. I have a riding habit here, don’t I?”
Anne’s lips shrunk to a disapproving pucker. “I believe I unpacked a habit when you first arrived, yes.”
“I believe it’s time I saw Hyde Park on horseback.”
Riding had once been a favorite pastime, but like so much of Sophie’s life, she had shared it with Edmund and largely avoided it since his death. Now that she was dressed for the task, crop in hand and walking toward the mews with her groom trailing close behind, it seemed horrid that she hadn’t so much as visited her brother’s horse, Nelson, since they had come to London.
It would be nice to draw strength from the high vantage of the saddle. To seize the precarious, balancing act thrill of a full gallop.
“Pardon, miss, would ye like me to sweep the crossin’ for ye?” A boy with unevenly cut, fair hair stepped into Sophie’s path, a broom in his hand. Her groom was intervening in the next instant, bearing down on the child with a grim look.
“Wait.” Sophie stopped the groom with a hand before addressing the boy. “That would be very fine. Thank you, sir.”
The child’s smile revealed dimples, and he set to work sweeping the path—which was almost entirely clean to begin with. When he finished, she bent to place two shillings in his palm.
“G’day, miss!” He took his coin and darted away before she realized he had placed a piece of parchment in the open reticule dangling from her wrist. She resumed her walk at a brisk pace and lifted one tightly folded corner.
Addressed to Mr. Rafe Balfour and postmarked Greenwich.
If this was his way of passing on what information he’d learned about Barnard, he’d chosen a peculiar way of going about it! It wouldn’t have been proper for him to write to her directly, and heaven knows he didn’t want to call on her, but he was betting on odds that she would stop and pay that boy to sweep an already clean street.
I don’t play lightly with odds of chance.
Recalling his words drew unwelcome heat into her cheeks. He knew her well enough to know she’d have a softness for that child. He recognized some splinter of her as good, even after how rude she had been when he offered to walk her home three nights past.
Rude? You were a crow. And still he had seen her safely home.
Hyde Park’s Rotten Row was sparsely populated when Sophie reached it, the mature beech trees and rolling hills more redolent of home than town. Nelson’s alert ears and smooth trot were more familiar still. For the dozenth time this morning, she reached down to pat the old stallion’s neck. His coat had once been a rich grey—a fierce shade that would have matched the storm clouds moving in off the horizon—but the years had turned him nearly white.
