Caroline stared at her. Then she set down her teacup with a decisiveclinkand leaned forward, elbows on her knees—a posture their mother would have called barbaric and that Caroline deployed exclusively when she was about to say something her listener did not want to hear.
“When William and I married,” she said, “I was terrified. Did you know that? I smiled and wore the dress and let Father walk me down the aisle, and underneath all of it I wassickwith fear. Because I loved him already—hopelessly, stupidly, completely—and I was certain,certain, that the moment we were married he would see me properly, see all the parts I’d been hiding, and realise he’d made a terrible mistake.”
Penelope’s throat tightened. “Caroline?—”
“I am not finished.” Her sister’s voice was gentle, which somehow made it worse. “I spent the first three months of my marriage waiting for the disappointment. Performing. Being the wife I thought he wanted rather than the woman I actually was. And do you know what happened?”
“He saw through it.”
“Immediately. Within aweek. He came into the breakfast room one morning and said,Caroline, for the love of God, stop arranging the flowers and tell me what’s wrong.And I burst into tears. Absolutely wept all over his eggs. And he sat there, with egg on his shirt and his coffee getting cold, and he said—he said,I didn’t marry the flowers, darling. I married the woman who keeps murdering them with too much attention.”
A sound escaped Penelope’s lips, one all too like a cry, and she pressed her lips together.
“What I am saying,” Caroline continued, “is that the terrifying part is not love. The terrifying part is believing you deserve it. And you, Penelope Hartwell, have spent your entire life believing that your own happiness is less important than everyone else’s.”
“That isn’t?—”
“You married a stranger to protect someone else’s child. You ran his household, nursed his baby, managed his estate, and somewhere in the middle of all that managing you fell in love with him. And instead of fighting for it—instead of standing in front of him and sayingI want this—you packed your trunk and left. Because leaving felt dutiful. Because leaving felt safe. Because wanting something for yourself has always been the one thing you cannot bring yourself to do.”
George had fallen asleep against Penelope’s chest, his breath warm and steady through the fabric of her dress. She looked down at his dark head, at the small fist curled around Captain’s remaining ear, and the tenderness of it—the unbearable, ordinary tenderness of a sleeping child who trusted her completely—pressed against the thing she had been holding shut for days.
“He didn’t ask me to stay.” Her voice came out raw. Scraped. The voice of a woman who had rehearsed composure for so long she had forgotten what truth sounded like underneath it. “I stood inhis study and told him I was leaving, and he saidif that’s what you want.And then I heard him tell Crawford—I heard him say—it was never meant to be anything else.”
“And you believed him.”
“What else should I?—”
“Youbelievedhim.” Caroline’s voice sharpened. “The man who stayed up all night with a sick baby. The man who threatened an earl to protect a child that wasn’t his. The man who rode to the Whitcombe estate with you, risked everything he had, stood between your friend and her parents without flinching.Thatman told you it meant nothing, and you believed him. Because believing it meant you didn’t have to stay and fight.”
The words landed like a slap.
Not cruel. Not unkind. Just precise, in the way only a sister could be—the clean, surgical accuracy of a woman who loved you enough to cut through the pretense and find the wound beneath.
Penelope’s arms tightened around George. The boy slept on, undisturbed. The clock ticked. The tea went cold.
She had no answer. Because Caroline was right, and the rightness of it sat in her stomach like a stone.
CHAPTER 29
The carriage ride back to Blackmere House took twenty minutes. Penelope counted the streets. Memorised the route. Noted the cracks in the pavement, the exact shade of the sky—pewter, smudged with chimney smoke, threatening rain that had not yet decided to fall. She did all of this with the focused intensity of a woman using the external world as ballast against the internal one, because the internal one had been cracked open at Caroline’s breakfast table and she was not yet certain she could hold it shut again.
She arrived to find Hyacinth Fairleigh in the entrance hall.
Hyacinth was pacing. Not the restless, theatrical pacing she deployed at balls when she wished to be noticed, but the tight, controlled circuits of a woman trying to outrun her own thoughts. Her pelisse was damp at the shoulders. Her bonnet hung from one hand by its ribbons, swinging with each turn. She had clearly been here for some time, because the footman stationed by the door had acquired the glassy expression of aman who had been watching someone walk back and forth for the better part of an hour.
“Oh, thank God.” Hyacinth stopped mid-stride. Her face was flushed, her hair escaping its pins, her composure so thoroughly shattered that the woman beneath it was visible like bone through broken skin. “I’ve been here since half past ten. Your housekeeper offered me tea four times. I have refused four times because if I sit down I will lose my nerve entirely, and Icannotlose my nerve, Penelope, because Sir Edmund Fairfax proposed to me last night and I have to give him an answer by tomorrow and I don’t know what to do.”
The entrance hall rang with the echo of it. The footman’s glassy expression intensified. Mrs. Alcott, who had materialised in the corridor behind Hyacinth looked to Penelope for instruction.
“The drawing room, please, Mrs. Alcott.” Penelope’s voice emerged steadier than it had any right to be. “And tea. This time she will drink it.”
She took Hyacinth’s arm. Led her down the corridor and through the double doors into the drawing room, where the fire was lit and the curtains were drawn and the chair she had stopped sitting in faced the one she occupied alone every evening. She guided Hyacinth to the settee and sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched, and waited.
Hyacinth’s hands were trembling. She clasped them in her lap, then unclasped them, then pressed them flat against herknees in a gesture so reminiscent of Penelope’s own coping mechanisms that it hurt to watch.
“Tell me,” Penelope said.
“The Carrington musicale. Last night.” Hyacinth’s words came fast, tumbling over each other with the breathless urgency of a confession too long contained. “He chose the interval—when the room was full, when everyone was watching. Got down on one knee. Produced a ring that could sink a frigate. Gave a speech about ourcompatible temperamentsand ourshared valuesand how our union would be acredit to both families.” Her laugh was a blade, thin and bright and sharp enough to draw blood. “My mother wept. Lady Carrington wept. Half the women in the room wept. And I stood there with three hundred people staring at me and I felt—I felt?—”