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Mariah was grateful she was wearing such a high-cut gown. She could sense a telltale heat blooming at her chest, beginning its ascent toward her throat. She willed it not to show on her face. Curse her Irish skin for showing too many emotions. Long had she worked to tame her face into the perfect aristocratic wife. One she would never truly be. One that reflected her father’s hopes and dreams. Which was enough.

She had no desire for her husband to learn that she had hung upon his every word when they first met. When she had believed she had met her intellectual and spiritual equal, only to realize their marriage would be one in name only.

She crushed those tender feelings and hopefulness into dust. The arrival of the Cotton Famine from the west, spilling its misery from Lancashire, possessed a cruel efficiency in extinguishing any remaining softness from her spirit. Though she remained steadfast in her convictions regarding President Lincoln’s blockade and the sacrifices made by the workers for the cause of abolition, she yearned to offer something more enduring than just rashers of bacon and brick-and-mortar shelters. How could people have time to care about literature if they could not even feed their families?

Mariah started as the realization dawned that her silence had stretched too thin, yet across the mahogany table, her husband was similarly adrift in his own inner thoughts. His pale gaze was fixed upon a canvas on the wall, a landscape whose composition mirrored the one in the drawing room.

“That p-painting.” She cleared her throat, cursing her stutter, but forging ahead. “It is of the same location as the one in the drawing room, yes?”

“Yes,” he answered. After a beat, he wrenched himself from the painting, favoring her with a smile that possessed far too much studied nonchalance. “It is our family estate in Derbyshire. Bedford Grange.” His face colored as he said the name, which was odd, for her husband rarely flushed as she did..

“Oh,” She did not know what to say, so she took a sip of tea. If she had been alone, she would have likely gulped it, but, conscious of her husband’s presence, she gave the ladylike sip her governess had trained her to take as she absorbed this information.

Derbyshire was not so far away from Bailey Hall. It was strange that she had never been there. Then again, it’s not as if they spent much time together for him to show her his properties.

“Does your family still…own Bedford Grange?” she asked tentatively, aware of the fragile nature of their conversation but also unsure of how to move forward.

St. George made a show of choosing another strip of bacon from his plate before he chewed on the end. “It is unentailed but I did inherit when Lionel died.” He was still rather flushed, and for a man so accustomed to navigating life with charm and a silver tongue, he appeared remarkably incapable of meeting her gaze.

The hairs on the back of Mariah’s neck rose, yet she still did not know how to navigate this unsteady ground so she changed the subject.

“How long do you plan to remain at Bailey Hall, my lord”

At last confronting her unblinking stare, his jaw twitched a fraction, then he set down his bacon. “Likely until Christmastide, my lady.”

Mariah willed herself not to blink. Christmastide was over a month away. She had assumed he would be in residence for a few days, as was his wont. He was rather serious about begetting his heir, which had yet to arrive, she thought as heat to once more bloomed along her throat.

“For so long, my lord?”

“I decided I should like to spend Christmas at home. At Bailey Hall, that is,” he answered. Rather too easily for her liking. “And now to find that my dear brother will be visiting as well…”

She studied him as he returned to his plate of bacon. While she could ascribe his interest as a sudden fit of jealousy, she discounted that theory. St. George had never been jealous of her, because he did not care about her as more than a means to an end. Oh, he was pleasant, and he was not outright cruel, but the cold truth remained: he harbored no deeper sentiment for her that would ignite possessive indignation. No, this interest in remaining at Bailey Hall for almost two months must have some deeper motivation.

She resolved to remain vigilant, for the true nature of his sudden inspiration likely held a darker intent.

“You will not return to London for the Little Season?” she asked. I know how you love spending my father’s hard-earned money on your own pursuits. Having seen first-hand how hard her father worked to build his linen mill while paying his workers a decent wage, that alone had killed any soft or tender feelings she had entertained at the dawn of their marriage. She understood disappointment in life only too well, yet she could not excuse his reckless spending in London while she saw so much suffering here in Barnsley. Again, he was not a monster, she reminded herself. But he was not the hero she had imagined him to be when they first wed.

He shook his head, a long lock falling from behind his ear. At the beginning of their marriage, she might have been tempted to push it back behind his ear, to kiss his jawline. But he was no hero, she reminded herself. She had to be the heroine in her own life, and he was no part of that.

Very well, they could avoid each other through Twelfth Night…

“What are your plans today?” he asked, not caring to right the rogue hair.

“M-my plans?” She took another sip of tea before responding, taking the opportunity to calibrate how much to tell him. Nothing she had planned to do was scandalous. She accounted for her charitable giving in the legers. And yet, she had never shared with him what she did.

What if he desired those funds for himself?

“I stop by the school every afternoon. Miss Mason has allowed me to lead them in performing a play. Or at least parts of a play.” Even before her marriage, she had pushed her father to open a school for the children of the mill workers in Barnsley. Only in the last year had she begun to work on plays with them. Since she was not able, nor did she have time to achieve her dreams of writing plays, at least she could feed her creativity in another way.

“A play?” St. George hummed at the information, then chose another slice of bacon.

“Henry V. Or s-selections from it. I thought it would be a way to honor Harrison, as he had invited several friends to attend.”

“Ah, ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ Yes?” he quoted, and Mariah was reminded of how she briefly thought she had married an intellectual soulmate when they were first wed. She cast that thought aside quickly.

“Yes, the St. Crispin's Day sp-speech.”

“Shakespeare seems very ambitious,” he noted, then took a large bite of his bacon.