“Eat your breakfast,” she said, then returned to her book.
The breakfast room at Blackmoor was the best room for mornings. East-facing, flooded with light by eight o’clock, it smelled of toast and the roses that Cecily had arranged in a lowbowl at the center of the table, white and yellow and very slightly overblown.
Outside the window, the park was looking unreasonably beautiful, the long grass silvered with dew, the old oak at the bottom of the slope throwing its shadow in the wrong direction at this hour so that it seemed larger than it was.
Isadora was on her third cup of tea and had read the same paragraph four times. She knew this because the paragraph talked about the migratory habits of swallows, which was not in itself difficult. She had simply not been reading it. She had beenlookingat it, which was different.
“Stay here.”
She turned the page, read the first line of the next paragraph, but did not retain it.
It had been a week. She was aware that it had been a week, and she was furthermore aware that a week was a sufficient amount of time to have processed the events of one evening and cataloged them appropriately. But she had not managed to do this, which was irritating.
She kept seeing James’s face on the terrace. Not the easy, jovial face, but the pale, shocked one.
James Harcliffe was many things. She had spent years compiling an exhaustive and well-evidenced list. He knew exactly howcharming he was, which should have diminished the effect, but somehow never did.
He was irreverent on principle and occasionally on purpose just to see what happened. He moved through difficult situations with an ease that suggested either nerves of steel or a complete failure to appreciate their gravity, and she had never been entirely sure which.
She had never seen him shaken.
That was the thing she could not set down. In all the years she had known him—watching him across dinner tables, enduring his commentary in her brother’s study, existing in the same rooms as him with the particular resigned familiarity she had not once seen him look the way he had looked on that terrace.
It had done something to her that she was not willing to admit to.
She turned another page.
The door opened, and William came in.
He had been up for hours, with the way he moved to the sideboard with the ease of a man who had already managed three things before the rest of the house was awake. He was still in his riding clothes, which meant he had been out already, which meant it was later than she thought.
He poured his coffee, glanced at the table, then looked at her book.
“Swallows,” he said.
“Migration patterns,” she confirmed.
“Riveting.”
“Extremely.”
He sat at the head of the table, a comfortable silence falling over them. Letitia was cutting her toast with the focused deliberation of someone still composing a mental argument about Thomas Bellamy.
Cecily appeared a few minutes later, slightly breathless in the pleasant way she often was in the mornings, as though she had already been in motion for some time and the breakfast room was simply one stop on a longer journey. She pressed a kiss to William’s temple before sitting, which was such a habitual and unstudied gesture that Isadora suspected neither of them noticed they did it anymore.
Shenoticed.
She looked back at her swallows.
“A letter had arrived this morning,” William said.
Something in his tone made Isadora look up.
“From James,” he added.
She set down her book.
William had his coffee in one hand and the expression of a man choosing his words with care. Cecily seemed to know; her expectant posture suggested she had been told already, probably upstairs before they came down.
