But that was the part he didn’t understand. The weight was not something she carried by obligation alone. It was ballast. Architecture. Remove it, and the structure of her life—the careful, controlled, purposeful structure she had built since girlhood—would simply collapse. And what would be left? A woman who wanted things she had no right to want. A woman who rode too fast and smiled too freely and stood too close to a man who would eventually grow bored of her and return to the glittering life that had always suited him.
She would not survive that. She knew it with the same certainty she knew the household accounts and the linen rotation. If sheallowed herself to want him—truly want him, not in the half-formed, easily denied way she’d been managing—and he turned out to be exactly what the world said he was, the fall would break her.
Better not to fall at all.
It meant nothing.
She changed into a clean dress. Repinned her hair with precision. Washed the flush from her cheeks with cold water until the woman in the mirror was once again composed, controlled, and entirely unconvincing.
By the time she descended for supper, her pretended nonchalance was back in place.
“How is the food?”
“It’s good. As always.”
His fork paused over his plate. She watched him absorb the word, watched him weigh it against the woman who’d been laughing on the hilltop three hours earlier.
He didn’t press. Didn’t tease. Simply watched her across the candlelight. “I’m glad,” he said in a voice so quiet she almost missed it.
She cut her meat with unnecessary precision and did not look up again.
She retired early, claiming a headache she did not have.
Sleep would not come. She lay in the dark, listening to the house settle around her—the creak of old timbers, the distant murmur of a servant banking the fires, the wind pressing softly against the windows. From the nursery, silence. Rose had been sleeping well these past few nights, a small mercy that left the hours empty and unguarded.
She turned onto her side. Pressed her face into the pillow.
It meant nothing.
The lie was growing harder to tell. She could feel it thinning, wearing through like the paper of Hyacinth’s letters, read too many times along the same folds. One more afternoon like this one. One more moment on a hilltop. One more time he looked at her as though she were the answer to a question he’d been afraid to ask. And the lie would tear entirely, and she would have to face what lay beneath it.
She did not sleep for a long time.
When at last she rose—driven not by rest but by the impossibility of lying still any longer—the house was wrapped in the deep quiet of very late evening. She reached for her wrapper and padded barefoot into the corridor, intending only a glass ofwater from the kitchen, or perhaps the comfort of checking on Rose.
She heard his voice before she reached the nursery door.
Low. Uncertain. Nothing like the polished drawl he wore in company. He was talking to someone—but the hour was impossible for visitors, and the only person in the nursery at this time would be?—
Penelope stopped. The door stood ajar, a thin band of candlelight falling across the corridor floor like a golden seam in the darkness. She pressed herself against the wall, the stone cold through the thin cotton of her wrapper, and listened.
“—cannot promise I’ll be any good at this,” Alastair was saying, his voice rougher than she’d ever heard it. “In fact, I can practically guarantee I’ll make a spectacular mess of it. That’s my specialty, you see. Spectacular messes.”
A small coo from Rose. The creak of the rocking chair.
“But I want you to know—” He broke off. Drew a breath that shuddered audibly. “I want you to know that someone is looking out for you. That you will grow up safe, and wanted, and—” Another pause, longer this time. “And loved. I don’t know whose you are, little one. But for now, you’re mine. And I swear to you, that means something.”
Penelope’s hand flew to her mouth.
She stood perfectly still in the dark corridor, her back pressed to the cold wall, her heart hammering so violently she was certain he must hear it through the door. Every careful argument she’d built—everyit meant nothing, everyhe’s a rake, every rational, sensible, self-protective wall—crumbled like ash.
Because the man in that nursery, holding a child that was not his, making promises in a voice stripped bare of every pretence he possessed?—
That man was not performing.
And she could no longer pretend she didn’t know it.
CHAPTER 20