Page 24 of Two Blessings For His Duchess
She took a small step forward, keeping her voice gentle. “Georgianna. I think you had a bad dream.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed.
“Whatever you saw, whatever happened in it... it was not real. I promise you.” She took another small step. “I am not your enemy. I would very much like for us to be friends, actually. You and Cordelia and I. I think we could get along rather well, if you gave it a chance. I mean, Cordelia and I already share a love of —”
Georgianna threw the doll before Euphemia could finish her sentence.
It was not a gentle throw. It left her hand fast and hard and caught Euphemia directly on the wrist. She pulled back with a sharp inhale, and then the doll hit the stone floor. The sound it made was not a good one. A clean, flat crack, shattering all over the floor.
Euphemia looked down at her wrist. A thin line of red was welling up where the porcelain edge had caught her. She looked at it for a moment, then she looked back at Georgianna before taking another step forward.
“Stay away from my sister.” The girl’s voice had gone up in pitch. “Stay away. Stay away from her.”
“Georgianna.” Euphemia kept moving. Slowly. “It’s all right. I’m not going to —”
“Stay away.”
“I only want to?—”
“Stay away from my sister!”
“Georgianna!”
Another voice cut through the hallway and both Euphemia and Georgianna stopped.
Nathaniel stood in the doorway. Hair disordered, a candle in his hand. He looked like he scurried out of bed and had not stopped to think about his appearance on the way. Behind him, half in shadow, stood a woman Euphemia did not recognize. Older. A cap. A governess, perhaps, or a nursemaid, someone, at any rate, who was supposed to have prevented exactly this.
Euphemia had never seen Nathaniel look like this.
She had seen him cold. She had seen him irritated. She had seen him. But this tight jaw, the eyes moving quickly between his daughter and Euphemia and the broken doll on the floor, this was something else. This was worry.
He looked at the woman behind him. “Take her back to her room.”
The woman moved forward. Georgianna, who had been rigid and furious and immovable for the past several minutes, went still the moment her father spoke, and allowed herself to be steered away with only the smallest resistance.
Euphemia watched her go and felt something pull in her chest.
She did not want the girl walking back down that corridor still believing what she believed. Still carrying whatever nightmare had brought her here, still convinced that Euphemia was something to be frightened of. She would go back to sleep with it, and it would still be there in the morning, and all of this... the creak of the door, the broken doll, the blood on her wrist she hadnot yet done anything about would have accomplished nothing except making things worse.
“Wait —”
She moved without fully deciding to, stepping forward, and Nathaniel’s head turned sharply toward her, but she kept her eyes on Georgianna.
“Georgianna.” She waited until the girl looked at her. It took a moment. “Cordelia and I played with the dogs yesterday. In the garden. Did she tell you?”
The girl said nothing. But she had stopped moving.
“She beat me thoroughly at fetch. The dogs listened to her and not at all to me, which I thought was very unfair. I thought perhaps, if you wanted, the three of us could —”
“That is enough.” Nathaniel’s voice interrupted.
Euphemia closed her mouth.
He looked at the woman and with a single nod, Georgianna was guided out into the corridor, and the darkness swallowed them both. Euphemia stood in the middle of her room with a bleeding wrist and a broken doll at her feet and Nathaniel watching her from the edge of the hallway. She did not quite know what to do with her hands as she cupped the bleeding wrist with her other hand, the warmth of her own blood sticky against her fingers.
A heavy, hollow weight settled in her stomach. It was a miserable feeling, realizing that a child had suffered a nightmare so vivid and terrible that she had cast the leading role as the monster. She had wanted so desperately to be on Georgianna’s good side, to find a way through the fierce, protective wall the girl built around herself and her sister. Instead, she was just standing here in the aftermath of a disaster.
Slowly, Euphemia turned her head and met Nathaniel’s gaze.
