“Hattie doesn’t get cross,” he told her. “Not really. If you write, she will write you back.”
“A wife who doesn’t get cross?” his stepfather echoed, yawning again. “Marvels continue.”
Elias rolled his eyes and waved them off, turning toward the carriage that awaited him with his wife inside.
When he crossed the drive and stepped into the thing, he found she had Peach in her lap and both had already begun to doze against the doorframe next to her.
It warmed him, and instead of slapping the roof as one often did, he leaned out and motioned to the driver so that he would not startle them back to the land of waking. And this way, for the whole of the ride, he could observe her in her slumber, cradling a tiny pig in her royal skirts.
By the time they’d arrived at the house, she had been jostled enough that she had started to wake on her own, her eyelids fluttering and her mouth pursing in clear disapproval at the interruption.
“Come on,” he said as the doors opened. “You don’t want to fall asleep in a corset.”
She insisted on carrying Peach herself back up to the room, pig under one arm and tiger-striped trick box under the other, blinking blearily as she stumbled forward the whole way. Once inside their suite, however, she did relinquish both and submit to his assistance in getting out of the layered confines of her costume.
“You asked if I knew how to lace a corset,” he reminded her as he slid the suede layer off her arms, the full skirt of her dress crinkling around her legs. “What if I didn’t know how to unlace it afterward?”
“Then I should be very concerned for you,” she replied sleepily. “And your motivations.”
He laughed and then proceeded to demonstrate that his motivations were not a cause for concern at all, easing the grip around her ribs and freeing her from the press of fabric that had held her aloft all day.
“Polish,” he said as she stepped toward the waiting bath, her chemise floating around her legs. “It was very… dense. Wasn’t it? Chewy.”
“‘Chewy,’” she echoed with a dreamy sound of something like approval. “Yes, it is rather, isn’t it?Uwielbiam cie.”
“Indeed?” he replied, watching her lift the chemise off and step into the warm water with a sigh of relief. “And what does that mean?”
She smiled at him drowsily, dropping her head to the side onto her shoulder, the braid sagging down over her ear where the pins had come loose against her scalp, tilting her crown.
“Ah,” he said, his heart aching. “The feeling is mutual. Shall I unbraid your hair?”
“Once I am clean,” she murmured, turning and sinking down into the water until her breath bubbled up from beneath it, submerged to her cheekbones.
He watched her with a fond warmth in his bones, removing his orange cravat and unbuttoning his marigold waistcoat, sighing at the freedom of his own ribs after a long day as he craned his neck from side to side.
He emptied his jacket pockets before sliding it off, carefully setting the fan of art cards on the bed and considering them ashe shrugged himself down to his shirtsleeves and began to tug up the tail of it from his waistband.
Yes, there was no doubt. There were eight of them.
Not seven.
Eight.
He paused, reaching out to spread them into a larger spray across the coverlet, examining the destinations depicted on each card.
And he spotted the new one immediately.
Brighton, it read.England.
He frowned at it, pulling his shirt over his head. Blinking. Shaking his head. Giving his eyes a rub.
But it was still there.
Behind him, he could hear his wife emerging from the bath.
“Hattie,” he said, pulling the new card forward with two fingertips and then lifting it up, tentatively, in front of his face. “You were right. Someone put a new one in with the old.”
“Oh?” she said, and a few moments later, she appeared at his side, her skin damp and warm through the clinging fabric of her red dressing gown. “May I see?”
