Page 7 of Baron Bolt

The edges of the pack bit into her palm. She had picked the cards up without knowing it.

“You do not.”

“I heard the surgeon on the landing yesterday, when he thought I slept. The wound has gone bad past mending. It is a matter of days, and fewer of them than Mr. Pole may take to return.” He said it the way he might have reported rain before a journey. “So we will not spend what is left of my breath pretending, you and I. We have never pretended with each other until now. It is the thing I have liked best in the whole arrangement.”

She stared down at the cards in her hand and squared them, once, twice, the crisp sound of the deck coming true. When she was certain of her voice, she said, “Very well. No pretending.” And then, because it had been sitting between them for three weeks like a stake neither would name: “Then what are we going to do?”

“How long,” he asked, “before it shows?”

Her hand did not go to her middle. She had trained it out of going there weeks ago, before it could become a habit and hang her. “October, perhaps, if I am careful with my gowns. Michaelmas, if I am not lucky. I have not been very lucky lately.”

“And no one knows.”

“No one. Not your mother. Not mine.” Her mouth twisted. “Mama believes my pallor is grief and my sickness is nerves, and she is so glad I am bearing up that I cannot bring myself to correct her. She has enough to carry. My father saw to that before he sailed for the Americas.”

“Still nothing from him?”

“I have written to Boston, to Charleston, to a man in Baltimore who once owed him money. It is like posting letters into the sea.” She heard how resentful it came out and let it lie. Her father had taught her two things: how to play, and that a good player always leaves himself a way from the table. He had taken his way in March, one step ahead of a stake gone bad.

She could stand on her own feet. He had taught her that too, mostly by removing every other option. There was a hard injustice in being twenty-one, carrying a secret that would burn her reputation to the ground, and being unable to reach the one man alive who would have looked at this hand and known which card to lead.

Edward was watching her. The fever had stripped him down to essentials, and one of the things left, it turned out, was kindness.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I am sending for the rector.”

Her head came up.

“He will lodge here. In the house. And the hour Pole rides through that gate with the special license, we are married. From this bed. I have already spoken to him about the form of it. He made difficulties about the irregularity until I reminded him whose family put the roof on his church.” A ghost of the dry smile. “You will be Lady Archer before I am done being Lord Archer. Our child will be born an Archer, in wedlock, under this roof, with my name built around both of you like a wall. Whatever else fails, Ophelia, that will hold. That much I can still do, and by God I mean to do it.”

She had thought herself past being ambushed by emotion. She had budgeted for grief the way Mama budgeted tears, so much and no more. Here it came anyway. A hot sting at the back of her eyes, because he was spending his last strength arranging a wedding he would attend dying, in the tone of a gentleman settling a bill of exchange.

And underneath the sting, cold and hateful, and it would not stop, the other thought, the one that never left her. They had waited eight days for the license, and Edward did not have much time left. The race was too close.

What if the license does not arrive in time?

She was worried for Edward and she was worried for herself and worried for their babe and she could not make the three worries stand decently apart. They ran together like ink in the rain. The shame of that was yet another thing to carry, so she carried it.

“You will exhaust yourself,” she said. “Rectors, and licenses, and lectures about church roofs. Edward, the arranging of it will⁠—”

“Kill me?” His eyebrow tilted. “You will have to find a better threat.”

“That is not amusing.”

“It is a little amusing.”

He reached out and put his hand over hers, over the cards. His skin was dry and too hot, papery as his voice, and his grip had no strength in it at all. He was the only gentleman who had ever chosen her with his eyes open, and soon, too soon, she was going to lose him.

“You told me no pretending. So. I am dying, and I am not afraid of it, or not very. But I was afraid of leaving you and our child on a lost hand, and it is the only thing I have been afraid of, lying here. Let me fix what I can fix. Give me that, and I will drink the broth, and we will call it a fair trade.”

She turned her hand under his and held it carefully, fearful of crushing it. “You drive a hard bargain for a man who cannot sit up.”

“I learned it from my betrothed. She is a terror at the wagers.”

Somewhere below, a door boomed. The sound came up through the floorboards into the soles of her feet.

It was not a servant’s sound. Doors at Hartleigh closed all day long on their good country hinges, quiet as the vestry. This one had been thrown hard enough to carry up through two floors and find them.

After it came voices. Not the dining room’s murmur. Voices raised. A man’s, gruff and strange, and then the butler’s, and the butler’s voice cracked. Stroud, who had announced deaths and one house fire with the same dry gravity, came apart on a word she could not make out.