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“There is a very great deal she may do,” Augusta said comfortably from the fire, “and I shall be happy to be every shabby item of it.” She set her needle down with great deliberation before she went on. “A girl who has crossed a whole ballroom away from her mother does not lack for a roof while the calendar catches up to her good sense. You shall be married out of this house if it comes to that, Phoebe, and your mother may come or stay away as she pleases.”

Stephen looked at her as though she had handed him the deed to a county. “Lady Holt, I do not know how to⁠—”

“Then do not, for thanks are tedious and I am too old for them.” Yet her dryness softened at its edge, just the once. “Sit by the fire and tell me you will be good to her, and that you have some notion of an income. I have buried one good man, and I know the sound of another. You will do.”

He sat, and told her about the income, and about drainage, until Augusta began to regard him with something very near approval.

“A Christmas betrothal!” Charlotte declared, dabbing at her eyes. “I am sure I shall never recover from it, and I do not intend to try.”

Rosalind sat in the middle of it and let the gladness come up warm through her. She was not glad from the edge of it any longer, but from inside it. I am owed a share of this too.

* * *

Augusta found her at the window an hour after the Danforths had gone. Outside, the snow had begun again over the street, fine and slow.

“You were watching the Marbury carriage,” Augusta said. “It went by ten minutes since, and I marked it just as you did.”

The carriage had passed slowly beneath the window on its way toward Grosvenor Street. Through the glass Rosalind had seen Selina in dark figured silk, sitting straight-backed beside Cassandra. Selina had not once turned her head toward Augusta’s house. She will never look. She would die before she looked.

“She has not forgiven me for any of it,” Rosalind said. “Not Phoebe, nor Lord Dover, nor the blooming. She believes I did it all to spite her.”

“She believes everything is done to spite her, for it spares her the trouble of being sorry. She will go down into the country sour, and she will stay sour.”

“I do not wish them ill, and I do not wish them anything at all.” Rosalind turned from the glass. “I have stopped sending my heart after that carriage to be turned away.”

“Good. That is the healthiest thing you have said all season.” Augusta moved to the small table where the tray had come, and poured. There was a small ordinary peace in it, the two of them with the snow at the glass and the fire settling low. “Your father called this morning, before you came down.”

Rosalind’s hand was not quite steady on the cup she took, and she wondered at herself. Why should her heart jump so, at the mere mention of him? “Did he?”

“He did, though he did not stay. He never stays, for he arrives at a hard place and cannot bear to be in it above ten minutes.” Augusta seated herself once more before she continued. “He came to ask after you in his roundabout way, and to leave a thing for you, which is on the hall table. A small parcel, something of your mother’s by the shape of it, a thing he has kept back all this while and has found the courage to part with at last.”

“He said nothing of what it was?”

“He did not, and I have not opened it, for it is not mine to open.” Her lips pressed together for a moment. “Late. Always late, with Edmund. The man cannot do a kind thing until the hour for it has nearly gone by.”

“You are angry with him still, are you not?”

“I have been angry with your father for eleven years.” Augusta set down her cup, and the old precision came into her voice. The edge was there, and the heat beneath the edge was not. “Eleven years, since before your mother was cold in the ground. He let Cecily be lonely and called it a quiet marriage, and he let you be put aside and called it peace.”

She turned her cup upon its saucer, once, and did not drink.

“Every Christmas that I watched you fetch and carry for a family that did not deserve the sweeping of your floors, I hated him a little harder for it, and I told myself I was right to.”

“You were right to.”

“I was right to. But being right did not make it pleasant.” Augusta set down her cup. “Then he stood up at the Stamfords’, with half London watching and Selina already reaching for his arm, and said the thing I had waited eleven years to hear him say.”

“Too late,” Rosalind said quietly.

“Entirely too late. That is what makes him so aggravating.” Augusta’s mouth tightened. “But he said it. I can no longer hate him as though he were still the man who kept turning away, because this time he turned back.”

“Does that mean you forgive him?”

“Certainly not. Do not be ridiculous.” The answer came so quickly that Rosalind almost smiled. “It does not give you back your childhood, and it does not make Cecily less lonely. If he comes to my Christmas table, he shall have civility and no more. But I am tired of giving him this much room in my temper. He has finally done the thing I demanded of him for eleven years. I shall not go on hating him for refusing to do it after he has done it.”

Rosalind looked at her aunt. “So you are putting it down.”

“I am attempting to. Do not make a ceremony of it, or I may pick it up again out of irritation.”