“He might not,” Albina agreed. “That is possible.”
“And then I will have lost Elias and still be exactly where I am now.”
“Yes,” Albina said. “But you will not have spent thirty years finding out.”
She went inside after saying that.
Temperance stood on the step for a moment and then followed, and the house was warm around her, and she went upstairs and sat on the end of her bed and looked at nothing for a long time.
Instead, the only person on her mind was Harper.
The green dress had been in the wardrobe since the night it arrived.
Temperance had put it there herself, on the left side behind the blue silk, and she had been choosing other things ever since. Themorning of the ball she opened the wardrobe and stood there for a moment and then took it out.
Mary, the housemaid, came in twenty minutes later to help with her hair and stopped in the doorway.
“Oh,” she said.
Temperance looked at her in the mirror. “What?”
“Nothing, miss.” Mary came forward and began unpinning her hair but her eyes kept moving to the dress in the mirror, and after a moment she said, “It’s just that it’s a very good color on you.”
“Thank you,” Temperance said.
“I don’t mean it the way people say it to be polite,” Mary said. “I mean it’s exactly right, like it was made for you specifically.”
Temperance looked at herself in the mirror.
“It was.”
Mary said nothing. She pinned a section of hair with careful concentration and then met Temperance’s eyes in the mirror briefly.
“Whoever chose it,” Mary said, “chose well.”
Temperance looked at the dress.
It was a practical thing, yes? Nothing more to it.
Mary finished her hair and stepped back and looked at her in the mirror with the satisfied expression of someone whose work was done.
“You’ll be the finest one there tonight, miss,” she said, and went out.
Temperance sat alone at the dressing table and looked at herself for a long time.
She thought about a shop on Regent Street. About him seeing something in a window and thinking of her before he had decided to think of her. About a dress the color of her eyes that fit exactly, which was not an accident and had never been an accident, and which she had been calling practical for months.
There was nothing practical about it and it was time that she stopped lying to herself about it.
CHAPTER 23
Harper had not slept.
He had gone to bed at eleven and lain there for an hour and then got up and gone to the study and sat there until three, and then gone back to bed, and the result was that he was standing at his mirror at six in the morning looking at someone he did not entirely recognize.
There was grey at his jaw that he had not addressed in two days and shadows under his eyes. He looked, in short, like a man who had been losing an argument with himself for several days running and had not yet found a way to win it.
But he had no time to think about that right now.
