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“He taught me that every card face-up on the table is a fact, and facts are the only friends I may rely upon in deep play. That I watch a man’s hands as well as his face. A man minds his face. He forgets his fingers. And how to tell when a man is betting loudly with nothing to back it at all.”

Warmth climbing into her voice. She let it climb. Let him hear it.

“He never treated me as an ornament. I was a player at his table from six years old. He called me his luck.”

“He sounds a better instructor than most colonels I have served under,” Damian said.

It came out of that grave face so dry and so sudden that she nearly laughed. She caught it behind her teeth. The humor was in there. Like a card up a sleeve. Produced so seldom that nobody had learned to watch for it.

“He was,” she said. Then she swallowed. “He is.”

And then, because the story was owed whole or not at all: “His luck turned. One stake too deep, and a deeper one to mend it. That is always the way of it. The mending is the ruin. Debts. And one morning he was simply gone. We had to wave him off when he took a ship for the Americas.”

The rooks racketed overhead.

“He did not want to subject us to the passage. The seas. The fevers. The uncertainty of it. That we should do far better in England.”

She kept her eyes on the lime walk.

Damian said nothing.

She had sat across from enough opponents to know one silence from another. Some men went quiet because they had already begun to count what one was worth. Some went quiet because they were waiting for the next card.

He was the second kind.

“Mama and Lady Archer made their come-out the same Season. They have been writing to one another for thirty years. So.” She turned her free hand over, palm up, and dealt the conclusion as she would have dealt a last trump. “A sharp’s daughter, with no dowry worth the word and a father beyond reach. And your brother in want of a wife. It was a rescue made up to look like a match, and everybody agreed to admire the tailoring.”

Four more steps.

“I liked him.”

Ahead, above the limes, the oaks towered in the lightening skies. She fixed her eyes on them. Before her nerve could fail her⁠—

“I am increasing.”

Three steps.

Cold had soaked through the seam of her half-boot. She felt it late, as if the wet belonged to someone else’s foot.

“The child is Edward’s.”

And the last of it, before the breath ran out:

“Our mothers have put a tale about. They have arranged the dates so that it falls to our wedding night. I have not corrected them.”

Then there was nothing to do but keep walking. So she kept walking. She counted his silence in steps, because counting was the only thing left her.

Watch a man’s hands.

His free hand hung at his side, gloved, and told her nothing. His face was the unmarked side, the side he always gave her, and it told her no more than the glove did. She could read a man’s fingers across a card-room. She could not raise so much as a knave from her own husband.

Six steps.

Nine.

A wood pigeon called somewhere in the hedges, absurdly placid.

She ran the odds because she could not stop herself. A quiet establishment in the north. Separate wings. Thirty years of civility at dinner. The cold courtesy paid to a wife dealt under false colors. Men forgave debts sooner than they forgave a predecessor. However kind. However dutiful. She did not know one man in England who would care to learn that his bride had come to him no maiden, and carrying the proof.