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He did not fall down.

That was the first wrong thing. An oak rail burst like kindling. Damian stayed on his feet, caught the rein, and gave the colt back to the white-faced groom as if he were handing over a quill.

Only then did she see the sleeve. Torn from elbow to wrist where the split wood had raked him. Blood coming through dark and fast, turning good wool black.

“I shall send a lad for the surgeon, my lord.”

“No.”

Not sharp. Final. The same considered click as the study door.

She was already moving. She had gathered her skirts without deciding to. Then she stopped at the yard’s edge, because he had already stripped off his neckcloth, one-handed, and was binding his own forearm, drawing the knot tight with his teeth. His collar hung open. For half a heartbeat, before he turned, she saw a line of scarring vanish under the linen at his throat.

“Damian.”

Her voice came out strange in the cold air.

“It is nothing, milady.”

He picked his hat off the ground, put it on, and walked out of the yard the way another man might observe that it looked like rain. The grooms stood staring after him.

So, she found, did she.

That evening she assembled her authority with the basin. Lint. Basilicum powder. A roll of good bandage. She knocked at his dressing-room door and heard him go still on the other side of it.

“It ought to be properly dressed,” she told the oak. “Torn wood festers. I have a sure hand. Ask anyone I have ever fleeced.”

A pause. She had meant the joke as a card slid across to him, face up, hers. He did not pick it up.

“It is seen to. You are kind. Good night, Madam.”

This door did not even have to close on her. It had never opened.

Two days later Lady Archer wanted him found. A letter had come from the London man of business. The steward hovered in the hall and Delilah’s delicate hands flew like startled birds. Ophelia, dearest, you might just⁠—

So Ophelia went along the ground floor trying doors, and found the gun room standing ajar.

Oil and metal on the air. He was at the bench in his shirtsleeves. In his shirtsleeves. She had not seen that once since he had come home. A pistol lay in pieces on the green baize before him, of all cloths. His right sleeve was rolled above the elbow. His arm was turned to the window light. He was examining it.

She had come to say the steward wanted him. Instead she stared at the arm.

She knew what ought to be there. She had watched the wood slice it open. She had watched blood soak through to his wrist. There should have been a wound two days old. An angry seam. Crusted. Stitched or wanting stitching. The flesh proud and hot around it. She had dressed her father’s hand once when a bottle broke in it, and that had been an ugly fortnight over a cut half the size.

There was a thin pink line. Clean. Closed. Almost nothing. A scratch a month healed. The ghost of an injury that had bled through good wool two days gone.

She stood staring too long. She knew she stood too long. She could feel the seconds ticking by, and she could not move, or arrange her face.

He glanced up. He watched her stare. He did not cover the arm at once. That was the strange mercy of it, or the strange cruelty. He simply watched her. Then something went shut behind his face, as quiet and decisive as the study door.

He rolled the sleeve down and buttoned the cuff. Not a word.

“The steward,” she heard herself say. “A letter has come. Your mother⁠—”

“Thank you.” He turned back to the pistol.

In the corridor she set her back against the cool plaster and folded her hands at her waist. She pretended she was a lady waiting for her carriage.

She considered his face. When he had first stood in Edward’s doorway in the summer, travel-stained, impossible, back from the dead as the whole county had it, the scarring up the left side of his face had been more prominent. Deeper. She remembered thinking, with the ruthless arithmetic of a frightened woman, that it would scare children … Her child … in the future.