Page 114 of The Earl She Once Saved

Verity stepped inside. Sergeant followed and immediately began investigating the hearthrug.

Win remained at the door. “Three minutes.”

Verity went first to the writing desk. She opened the upper drawer. Inside were estate receipts, sticks of sealing wax, and a penknife. The second held a bundle of correspondence tied with black ribbon. Her fingers hesitated over it.

This is wrong.

The knowledge did not stop her from lifting the letters. She examined the names upon them: Ezra Bellamy, a former colonel, a tailor in London. Nothing from Roland.

Beneath the letters lay several sheets of estate calculations written in Rafe’s hand. He had marked repairs to cottages, the cost of timber, and the amount needed to replace a tenant’s cattle lost in the flood. Not one figure had been concealed from her. Shame heated her skin.

She replaced everything precisely and opened the next drawer.

Empty.

“My lady,” Win whispered from the passage.

“One moment.”

“You have had two.”

Verity turned. A small campaign chest rested beneath the window. Its lid stood slightly open. She crossed the room and knelt before it. The scent of old leather rose as she lifted the lid. Inside lay gloves, ribbons, folded papers, and a pair of worn pistol cases. There was also an empty leather box shaped to hold a pendant.

Verity touched the jewel at her throat. Even here, he had told her the truth.

Sergeant came to sit beside her, his broad shoulder pressing against hers.

“I know,” she whispered.

She began to lower the lid. Then she saw the corner of a leather folio beneath the folded shirts. Verity drew it out. The cover was scratched and darkened by years of handling. A faded cord had been wound around it twice. Her fingers trembled as she untied it.

She expected letters. The first sheet was a portrait.

Verity stopped breathing. A young woman bent over a wounded man beneath the light of a single lamp. Her sleeves were rolled beyond the elbows. Strands of dark hair had escaped their pins, and exhaustion drew shadows beneath her eyes.

Verity knew the tent. She knew the battered table and the surgeon’s instruments laid upon it. She remembered the rain beating against the canvas and the smell of blood, wet wool and spirits. She remembered the soldier whose fever had finally broken near dawn.

He had drawn her as she had been that night. There were stains upon her apron and strain around her mouth. Yet every line had been made with a tenderness that altered the face without flattering it.

In one corner, written small, was a date. Verity touched it. He had drawn the portrait three weeks after they parted.

She lifted the sheet. There was another beneath it, with her face in profile, the eyes lowered. Another showed only her hands, one holding a bandage while the other rested against a man’s brow. Beneath that was the curve of her mouth, imperfectly remembered.

Page after page, and the paper changed. Some sheets had yellowed, while others were torn from military dispatches or the backs of old letters. Dates followed the armies across countries and years.

On one sheet, he had drawn her beside a road she had never seen. On another, she stood beneath trees with sunlight in her hair. In some, memory had blurred the precise shape of her features. He had drawn them again beneath, correcting himself until he found her, the same face, again and again, years of it.

Verity sat back upon her heels. Something inside her, held rigid for so long that she had mistaken it for bone, simply gave way.

He had not forgotten. All these years, while she told herself that a wounded soldier’s gratitude vanished with the fever, Rafe carried her face with him. While she married his brother, buried her mother and fought to save a house that never welcomed her, he remembered until the act of remembering wore the paper thin beneath his hand.

Verity pressed her fingers to her mouth. Her eyes burned. A tear struck the portrait before she could stop it. She wiped it away carefully, terrified of blurring the charcoal.

In the passage, Win began speaking. “What a surprise, my lord.”

Verity’s head came up.

Ezra answered first. “Mrs. Hale, that expression suggests either delight or a serious domestic emergency.”