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His father’s Mantons in their rack, sweet as the day they were made. Edward’s fowling piece with the checkering worn silk-smooth at the wrist from many seasons of a hand that would not hold it again.

He let his thumb rest in the worn place for a moment. Then he made himself move on. Grief was a door and he had no leisure for doors when he must face his past.

The case of holster pistols. He drew them. Knapped the flints sharp. Checked the powder dry. With this weather cooling, that would want watching. He loaded both fresh, and set them back where a hand crossing the room in the dark could find them by feel.

This was the room where she had caught him with his sleeves up. He was aware of it the whole time, the way he had once been aware of a sniper’s hedge. Right there, by the window. In his shirtsleeves like a fool. Ophelia in the doorway with her eyes on his bare forearm, where the colt’s gash should have been a stitched and angry mess and was instead a thin pink line, nearly healed. She had stared too long. He had felt the stare travel up his arm like a physical hand. And in her face there had been no disgust at all, which was worse. There had been calculation. His wife adding up facts. The same sum a muttering foreigner was now taking round the public houses of the county. Do the wounds mend? Do the scars fade? Do the eyes match? What is he?

Two mouths. One question. He filed his wife’s stare and his maker’s questions in the same drawer, turned the key on both, and told himself it was tidiness when he had never wanted more than to find her and tell her the truth of who, or what, he was.

The gun room key he took from the lock and put in his waistcoat pocket. It lay against his ribs, heavy and cold and definite, all through dinner.

Dinner was silent, and the silence was all his.

He knew it, carving the saddle of mutton with the fixed attention he used drawing a fuse, while the footmen moved round the table and the candle flames stood up straight in the breathless air. He had wanted quiet at his own table all summer. He had it now. It sat on the meal like a mortar shell.

His mother had folded her hands. Delilah Archer’s hands had talked her whole life. Fluttering. Patting. Conducting invisible orchestras of worry. Tonight they lay folded beside her plate like a pair of shot birds, and on her that was nearly illness. Once, over the soup, she drew breath and began, “Damian, dearest—” and stopped. Her eyes went down the table to Lady Clarke. A look passed between the two mothers. She finished, faintly, “the salt, if you would be so good.”

He passed the salt.

Lady Clarke tried the weather. “They say the storm will continue through tonight,” she offered, to the table at large. “The glass has fallen a full—a good deal, I understand.” No one took it up. The thunder took it up instead, a long rolling answer away over the downs, and Lady Clarke stared at her wine as if it had contradicted her.

And at the foot of the table sat his wife, correct as a fashion plate from a lady’s magazine. Candlelight found the line of her cheek and the pale hair at her temple. He saw it and went on carving even while his heart betrayed him with a flutter.

“Thank you, Stroud,” she uttered, and ate as if the silence belonged to someone else. She looked at him once. It was level, polite, general. The kind she might give a portrait of somebody’s uncle. Then she returned her attention to her dinner plate. She was keeping her vow with the unshowy thoroughness of a card player keeping count. I shall not ask again, my lord. She was not asking. She was not asking so completely that the not-asking filled the room to the very ceiling.

The mothers exchanged their look again over the second remove. One look, held a moment too long, carrying between them a whole fortnight of the conversation neither would now have at table. What has he done? What has she done? What is to become of them? Passed hand to hand like a dish. His mother’s chatter he could have withstood till doomsday. The look went through him like a puddle through a boot.

He sat at his own table, present, closed, doing garrison arithmetic behind his eyes. He knew he was grim and he could not help it. All he could think about was the lodge, the dogs, the gun room key against his ribs, and the state of the powder.

He had fortified this house so thoroughly, but the enemy was already inside it. The enemy was at the head of the table, carving mutton and feigning life.

The storm came up over the downs after midnight. Thunder walked in slow. Each roll took the floorboards under his boots.

Damian was still dressed. He had walked the house, the hall doors, the garden door, the library window with the latch that had never sat true, and the servants’ passage.

At each fastening the lightning got a little nearer and the count got a little shorter. Flash, and then the count: nine, and the roll. Flash: seven. He counted before he chose to. Nine years of counting a battery’s range off its flash did not resign with a commission.

His body, whatever else his body had become, had kept all its old habits along with its new ones. His home was under siege, and his soldier’s training would not relent. The seams along his shoulder ached in long slow pulls, keeping time with the bad weather. The left eye. He did not think about the left eye. There was a faint wrongness in it tonight, a prickle, the way a limb knows rain. He did not think about it, with great firmness and thoroughness, all the way up the stairs.

The family corridor lay dark. Under her door ran a thread of candlelight.

He had meant to pass it. He stopped instead.

Through the door came the minor industry of a woman not asleep. The whisper of movement. A drawer running home. Then a sound he knew: the soft riffling ladder of a pack of cards under a practiced thumb. A pause. The tick of a card laid down. Another. Another.

Patience. His wife was sitting up past midnight playing patience against herself, because her husband would no longer sit down to a game with Ophelia Archer.

His hand had come up. He watched it reach to her as if it belonged to someone else, knuckle poised an inch from the panel.

She would open the door. She would stand there with the cards still in her hand and her golden hair falling down her back. She would not gape or flinch. She never flinched. That was the whole terror and wonder of her. She would say something dry and let him in.

And then he would have to say … what?

That the man asking after his scars had sewn them. That there was a voice he had heard muttering in three tongues over a heap of dead soldiers, and it had crossed the sea, and it was now in their county. That her husband had died on the eighteenth of June last, and everything since had been a lie. A monstrosity. That the babe she carried, Edward’s child, the child Damian had sworn on a deathbed to shelter, would grow up in a house with an unholy experim⁠—

He did not finish the word, even inwardly. He hated the word.

Here was the trap of her, the thing that kept his knuckle hanging an inch from the wood. She might understand. She of anyone alive. She had taken the worst hand a gently bred girl could be dealt and played it standing up, without one tear that he had ever seen. She did not deal in tears. She dealt in stakes. She had stared at a wound that healed too fast and done arithmetic. If any woman in England could hear I died, and my death has followed me home and simply draw up a chair to it, it was the one shuffling cards on the other side of this door.