“I should have known.”
Winnie clenched her jaw against the unexpected flinch his words engendered.
Of course he should have known. That was what she did, was it not? Lied. Deceived. Invented stories that suited her own purposes.
For twenty years of her life she had studied her mother: the way she spoke, the way she moved. She had trained herself to emulate her mother’s tone of voice, the angle of Eliza’s head and the unruffled calm of her hands. These things—the social grease of polite phrases, the natural fluidity of the body—did not come naturally to Winnie. But she had taught herself, painfully, sometimes in front of a mirror while she watched her own mouth move.
She had not realized she remembered those lessons so clearly. It had been easy—so shockingly easy—to slip back into the role. Even after all this time.
In the carriage, from time to time, she had considered telling Spencer the truth about her mother and the necklaces. He’d laughed when describing his sisters’ antics; he had not judged them for what others might have called frivolity or recklessness.
She’d thought perhaps he would not condemn her scheme to return the jewels. He might even understand. But her hopefulness was outweighed by her fear—that she would end up back in a cell, perhaps. That she would involve him in her machinations and he would somehow suffer.
So she had not told him. She did not plan to.
“You should read your letters,” she said stiffly. “I can make myself scarce. I’m sure Fairhope can show me to my chamber or—”
He sighed and moved toward a wide mahogany desk. “Never mind. Stay here. I’ll only be a moment.”
As he seated himself and sorted through his correspondence, Winnie let herself circle the perimeter of the library. It had been a long time since she’d seen such a trove of books. Her mother had not kept many in their apartment, so Winnie had done her reading tucked between the shelves at Heavisides’ Select Library. The thin cloth bindings on the circulating library’s books had smelled like a new beginning.
Here the books spilled jumbled and worn from the shelves. She could see the evidence of his absent sisters: board-bound novels, their pages thumbed and curled at the corners, dozens of art books piled haphazardly at the edges, leaning drunkenly against one another.
As she continued her circumnavigation of the room, her steps naturally drew her back to Spencer’s desk. On the shelves beside him stood books on estate management and law and investing, each lined up neatly and alphabetized.
He muttered something to himself as he stared at the letters.
“Is something wrong?”
He tilted his head toward her, as if surprised to find her so close. There was a long pause, and Winnie felt heat rise in her face. Perhaps he did not want to confide in her. Perhaps she ought to have stayed quiet. Somehow her fingers found a lock of her hair that had come loose from her pins.
But finally he shook his head. “I’m not certain. Matilda says she has eloped with the Marquess of Ashford.”
Winnie disguised an exclamation as a cough. She recalled the notorious marquess even from ten years ago in London. She was fairly certain he was said to have murdered his wife.
Hisfirstwife, presumably, if Matilda was his new bride. That seemed rather inauspicious for Matilda.
“But Margo,” Spencer went on, “says Matilda hasnoteloped—at least, I think that’s what she means by,Not to worry—we’ll be back home as uncoupled as ever!Henry also says not to worry, which I would find reassuring except that the letter contains eleven obscenities.”
“He is not, er, usually given to swearing?”
“Not as a general rule. In two separate places, he appears to have inserted the wordMargowithout noticing.”
Winnie pressed her lips together to smother a laugh. “I see. Is your life usually so… unpredictable?”
“Unfortunately,” he said, “yes.”
Standing beside him while he sat over his letters gave her a different vantage of his face. Even seated across from him in the carriage she’d had to look up to meet his gaze. She had grown accustomed to the sharp line of his jaw as seen from beneath. From above he looked younger, somehow. Less an invulnerable Viking warrior and more… touchable. She longed suddenly to slide her thumb from the ridge of his cheekbone down to the faint depression at the side of his mouth.
It would be a dimple, she thought, when he smiled.
But he was not smiling now. In fact, he looked rather miserable, baffled and wretched, as he shook his head. “I don’t know what the devil to do.”
“About your sisters?”
“Yes. I’m not sure if I should try to chase them down—or go straight to Ashford’s country seat—if Matilda’s even there at all—or wait to see if Henry writes me again—” He broke off and scrubbed a hand through his hair, disarranging all that heavy red-gold.
Her fingers itched to push it back. To ease him, if she could. “Do you trust them—your sisters?”
