Page 126 of Lord Hartwell’s Refuge

“My dear, half the gentlemen in the room have already noticed you, and the other half soon will.”

The young woman looked simultaneously thrilled and terrified.

A young gentleman approached. Tamsin recognized him vaguely; Daphne knew him. That mattered more. He bowed, Daphne curtseyed, and he requested the next dance. Roman remained by her side, speaking to Anne of the weather, distracting her pleasantly. Her stepmother was proud of having a baron for a son-in-law, even if it confused her.

A few moments later, Tamsin watched her youngest grown sister take her first steps in a public ballroom dance. A peculiar ache filled her: pride, love, and perhaps the smallest measure of grief for a role she had occupied so long she had thought there was nothing else for her.

“She is beautiful,” Matilda said in a whisper.

“She is.”

“You did beautifully.”

Tamsin glanced at her friend whose expression was warm. She looked back at Daphne. Her sister was smiling at her partner now, truly smiling, the nervousness vanished beneath the movement of the dance.

“I suppose I can take some of the credit,” Tamsin said softly.

Matilda shook her head, her disagreement well-seasoned by good humor, and slipped her arm through Tamsin’s. “They are going to be perfectly fine. All of them.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I think so, too.”

On her other side, Roman’s hand settled briefly at the small of her back—not directing or summoning her, merely letting her know he was there.

Tamsin looked across the bright assembly room: Daphne dancing, her stepmother talking animatedly to another matron, Pearl and Seraphina together near the edge of the floor, Matilda on one side of her, and Roman on the other. Nobody needed rescuing. Nobody needed managing.

And yet there was still a place for her here.

Tamsin leaned a fraction closer to Roman and his gaze dropped to hers.

“Is all well, my lady?”

She looked once more at her sister, then at her husband. “Yes. Everything is precisely as it should be.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

January passed beneath snow—not a great deal of it, by Yorkshire standards, but enough to soften the roofs of York and collect along the walls. Tamsin learned which of the windows at Hartwell House admitted a draft and which stretch of pavement outside the house became treacherous after sunset. And somewhere between Christmas and preparations to remove to London, without Tamsin quite knowing when it happened, her marriage ceased to feel…new.

There was no single morning when she woke and thought, Now I am properly Lady Hartwell, no exact dinner at which Roman ceased to be the man she had married under circumstances of mutual practicality and became simply her husband.

It happened in smaller ways.

She learned Roman disliked marmalade but would eat it if it was set nearest his hand rather than trouble someone to pass what he actually wanted. So she asked Mrs. Briers to ensure that the honey was placed nearer him, even though it was her favorite.

He noticed after the third morning. “How…have you done this deliberately?”

Tamsin looked up from her tea and marmalade toast. “Doing what?”

“The honey.”

She glanced toward the little pot between them. “I cannot imagine what you mean.”

Roman narrowed his eyes. Tamsin drank her tea with innocently raised brows. The next morning the honey was beside her plate instead. She looked at it, then at him. Roman was reading the paper and did not lift his head.

That was marriage, apparently.

It was Roman coming home and finding Matilda Elgin in the drawing room with Tamsin and asking warmly, and without surprise, whether she would remain to dine. It was Tamsin knowing when he had a difficult piece of news before he said a word but waiting for him to decide whether he wished to tell her about it. More often than not, he did.

The Yorkshire Philosophical Society occupied a considerable portion of his attention. William Salmond was forever producing some new matter requiring discussion, and Roman had begun bringing home papers and letters with an enthusiasm that might have amused Tamsin if she had not found it rather endearing.