“I beg your pardons, but will you please tell me what happened here?” Ophelia poured for the both of them, looking up only when she’d completed her task.
Eleanor looked at her with a small amount of pity, not a great amount, but it was still there. Ophelia was very sensitive to pity.
“He was clearly wearing clothes from yesterday,” Eleanor said.
Ophelia glanced at her mother. “How would we know what he wore yesterday?”
“They were evening clothes, dear. Not something a man puts on first thing in the morning if he has a choice.” Her mother sipped at her tea, looking far off in the distance.
“Oh,” Ophelia sank back in her chair a moment, trying to recall what he was wearing. But she was so focused on trying to meet his gaze, trying to capture that elusive attention. She liked that when he called upon them that he turned his inky gaze on her, and she felt like the sun shone only upon her. As if she were special. Not in anIsn’t she odd?Sort of way. Nor in aHer father is a viscount, sort of way. But in a treasured sort of way. But there was something else in his demeanor that she detected but couldn’t parse. “There is another clue you aren’t telling me.”
“Ophelia,” Eleanor said in a low voice. “Not here.”
“Then where?” Ophelia asked, and she could feel a wildness trying to tear out of her throat. The kind of shrieking frustration she’d felt as a child when she realized how utterly unfair life would be for her and not for her brothers. The kind that Portia didn’t seem to mind or care to protest.
Lady Rascomb looked at Eleanor and put her hand on Ophelia’s wrist. “Darling. He looked and smelled as if he’d recently bedded a woman.”
The news sank in slowly, a lump of sugar sinking and dissolving all at once. “How can you know that?” she insisted.
Eleanor made a strange face.
“Once you are married, you will understand what the signs are. It is—” Lady Rascomb choked on her words.
“The signs are easy to spot when you know them. Like knowing a knot will easily fray, once you’ve tied enough of them.”
Ophelia nodded and drank her tea, suddenly feeling very, very stupid. She was. She was a spinster, no need to hide from that title. And as one, she wouldn’t know the signs of physical intimacy. It was an experience outside her own, and one that she would likely never have.
While the thought of never having children didn’t pain her, the thought of never knowing that sort of love did. The one that could be expressed physically. The kind that her mother and father had shared. The kind that swept over Tristan and Eleanor, Prudence and Mr. Moon, Justine and Karl Vogel. She was alone in her naivety.
She was a silly fool who would never climb a mountain, never find love, and never bed a man. Full of illusions of grandeur, what was real anymore? What had her life been except a string of humiliations?
