He looked at her smile and at the tempered metal of it, and his doubt grew ashamed of itself for a heartbeat. Then the door opened, the tide flowed back; they rejoined the room.
Alistair had found his stride. He hailed them with a cheer that drew two tables’ worth of eyes.
“Sister!” he cried, and kissed her cheek too hard.
“Wexford! Fine show. Fine girl.” He clapped Edward’s shoulder with the heavy affection of a man who would regret it by evening. Isla took his glass from him with a little sleight of hand that fooled no one and passed it to a hovering footman with a look that suggested drowning as a gentle alternative to continued proximity.
“Dance,” Alistair demanded as the musicians struck a country air, “let them see you.”
“Later,” Edward said pleasantly, and set a hand at Isla’s back to move them cleanly out of the path of her brother’s exuberance. Over Alistair’s shoulder he caught Charlotte Pembroke’s glance and the sliver of satisfaction there she was careful to hide before any other eye might catch it.
Glenmore watched the room as if he owned a ledger detailing every marriage here and the cost of each. Morlich had set himself with a pack of glossy young men, and told a story that made them tilt their heads toward Isla with interest that was far too interested.
Henry reappeared near the mantel, hands behind his back, the physical embodiment of a promise to be exactly where needed when needed. Edward felt the brief steadiness that came of knowing one honest man in a crowd.
He turned to Isla to say something light and found that sometime between the terrace and the threshold his speech had stiffened. Words came cold. His smile set like plaster. He asked after her comfort with the distant correctness of a man speaking through a steward.
What chance the same suspicions I had, would manifest in such a tale.Isla felt it at once. He saw the small flinch she smothered,the way her breath shortened before her gown required it. He hated himself for the manner and could not unlearn it in a moment. A seed had been planted, no larger than a pin’s head, light as dust, and yet he felt it beneath every step.
He could not disbelieve a pattern that had, for one instant, aligned too neatly. A brother with a decanter, a house without pictures, a story told by those who profited from it.
“After the toasts,” he said, “we will leave for Wexford House.”
“Yes,” she answered, frowning.
He would not be unkind. He would not. He would be careful and clean and a better man than the room wanted him to be. He looked at her profile and found that the vows he had made at the rail demanded a sort of courage more exhausting than any he had been taught at sea.
When he finished the orchestra took a happier air and the company spilled again into its bright lanes. He offered Isla his arm, she laid her fingers on it with perfect grace. They began the first figure of a dance neither of them had chosen. Across the room, Henry’s steady gaze found Edward’s and held it an instant.
Hold your heading.
Edward did not know yet whether the wind favored him or meant to force him onto a lee shore. He only knew he was the man at the wheel, and every eye in the ship waited to learn whether he was worthy of it.
Chapter 10
She had counted the turns and still lost herself. Left at the tall window with its cataract of ivy, right where the portrait of the gentleman with the ridiculous lace collar glowered, straight on until the floorboards changed their song beneath her slippers from respectful hush to an oaken creak that warned of older timber.
Ravenscroft Hall did not lie, it withheld. Corridors narrowed without warning, staircases swerved as though shying from some memory, and entire wings appeared, presented their long backs of paneled doors, and then slipped away behind a corner like shy deer. The house had been built over centuries, in moods and styles without any apparent rational plan.
Isla paused at a landing window and set her palm to the cold glass. Below, the west lawn unrolled to a stand of chestnut trees where the late sun struck their leaves. The air, even filtered through old wavy panes, smelled of lavender and the faint iron of rain promised for later. Somewhere deeper in the house a clock beat the afternoon into orderly pieces. She tried to lean her breathing around it.
The breakfast was finished. The last carriage had taken its congratulations and its appetite away. Isla had helped steer Alistair laughing and unsteady, into his own coach, helped by Victoria. Edward, her husband, had vanished into the machinery of Wexford.
He had been kind enough when they parted at the top of the great stair, courteous as any gentleman might be to a guest, and then his eyes had slid away as if something inward troubled him. He had smiled when someone needed smiling at.
Isla pressed her forehead to the glass until it cooled the place that pounded there. The gown she had chosen for the afternoon, a soft muslin the color of cream with a sash of green, offered her ribs mercy after a morning of fashionable torture. Even so, she could not shake the sensation of constraint.
Wife. I am a wife. I possess a husband. What a peculiar notion.
She left the window and walked on. At a turning where the wainscot changed from walnut to a plainer oak, a door waited. Its paint was a sober cream like the others, its brass latch clean and dull. She reached for the latch but it did not move. Not stiff with age nor stubborn with paint. It was locked.
This is the first locked door I have come across. Why lock a door in a house? There is no-one here who shouldn’t be.
She leaned and listened. The silence on the other side was absolute.
“Lady Isla.”
She turned. The Dowager Duchess stood at the head of the short passage, black silk neat, jet catching what light the corridor allowed. She did not look winded at having found her prey, nor surprised.
