She stopped. Her jaw worked. Her fingers twisted in the fabric of her skirt.
“What did you feel?” Penelope asked quietly.
“Nothing.” The word fell like a dropped stone. “Absolutely nothing. He was on his knee, Penelope. This man—this wealthy, titled, perfectly groomed man with his three thousand acres and his excellent teeth—was offering me everything I have spent two Seasons pursuing. Everything I told myself I wanted. And I stood there and I thought about James Crawford’s handwriting.”
The tea arrived. Penelope poured. Her hands were steady, because pouring tea was something she could do, somethingconcrete and physical and useful, and useful was the last fortress she had left.
“His handwriting is terrible,” Hyacinth continued, accepting the cup without looking at it. “He writes as though the pen has done him a personal injury. Every letter looks like it was composed during an earthquake. But he—Penelope, he wrote to me after the trouble with the Whitcombes. A letter about the wild flowers in the meadow near the lake. Because I had mentioned,once, weeks earlier, that I thought they were lovely. One sentence. And he remembered.”
She lifted the tea. Set it down without drinking. Lifted it again.
“Sir Edmund does not remember what I say. He does not ask what I think. He tells me what he thinks, and waits for me to agree, and when I do agree he smiles as though I have performed a small trick successfully. He has never once asked me what sort of home I would want. He describeshishome,hisplans,hisimprovements, and assumes I will be grateful to inhabit them.” Her grip on the cup tightened until her knuckles blanched. “James Crawford asked me what books I read. What music I liked. Whether I preferred mornings or evenings. He asked me what I dreamt about, Penelope. Not myprospects. Mydreams. And I could not answer him, because no one has ever thought to ask.”
Penelope’s chest ached. The resonance of it—the echo between Hyacinth’s words and her own buried truth—vibrated through her like a bell struck in an empty church.
“You love him,” she said.
“I love him.” Hyacinth set down the cup with a sound like surrender. “I love a man who manages another man’s estate. Who earns his living with ledgers and crop reports. Who has no title, no fortune, and no earthly reason to interest a woman like me except that he is kind and honest and he makes melaugh, Penelope, he makes me laugh until my ribs ache, and I cannot remember the last time Sir Edmund made me feel anything at all.”
She turned on the settee, facing Penelope fully. Her red-rimmed gaze held the fierce, terrified clarity of a woman standing at the edge of a cliff and asking permission to jump.
“Am I mad? Tell me honestly. Am I throwing away security and comfort and everything a sensible woman should want because a man with bad handwriting asked me about wild flowers?”
Penelope opened her mouth. Closed it.
Because the answer was tangled up in everything she had been refusing to feel—in empty chairs and cold tea and the phantom weight of a baby who still reached for her in dreams. In a midnight corridor where a man’s fingers had trembled against her cheek. In a study where she had stood with her hands clasped and her heart hammering and waited—waited—for him to cross the room and saydon’t go, and he hadn’t, and she had walked out, and the walking out had been the most correct, sensible, proper thing she had ever done, and it was destroying her.
“No,” she said, and her voice cracked on the word like ice beneath a heel. “You are not mad, Hyacinth. You are brave. You are braver than I?—”
She stopped. Her throat closed. She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her finger—hard, harder, the sting of it a lifeline—but it was not enough. Nothing was enough. Caroline’s words were still lodged beneath her ribs—wanting something for yourself has always been the one thing you cannot bring yourself to do—and Hyacinth was sitting here, shaking with the courage to choose love over safety, and Penelope had packed a trunk and walked away from both.
“Penelope.” Hyacinth’s hand found hers. Gripped it. “What happened? Between you and Alastair. Tell me.”
“There is nothing to?—”
“Stop. Please.” Hyacinth’s voice softened into something raw and open and so unlike her usual arch performance that it broke through the last barricade Penelope had left. “I am sitting here asking you whether I should risk everything for love. You owe me the truth.”
The drawing room was very quiet. Rain had begun to fall—not the gentle English drizzle of the morning but a hard, insistent drumming against the windows, as though the sky had run out of patience. The fire hissed in the grate. The tea cooled in its cups.
“I love him,” Penelope said.
Three words. They left her mouth and hung in the air between them, and the sound of them—spoken aloud, in this room, to another person—made them real in a way that thinking them had not. Her entire body shuddered. Her vision blurred.
“I love him, and I left, and he let me go.” She could not look at Hyacinth. She looked at their joined hands instead—at her own white knuckles, at the crescent marks she kept pressing into her own skin, at the place where her wedding ring sat on a finger that had grown thinner. “I stood in his study and I gave him every chance to stop me. I walked to the door so slowly it must have taken a century. And he said—he saidthis was always the arrangement.He said I wasreading too much into things.And I left, because staying would have meant begging, and I could not—” Her breath hitched. She caught it. Held it. Forced it out. “I could not beg a man to love me. Not even him.”
Hyacinth’s grip on her hand tightened until the bones pressed together.
“He’s a fool,” she said fiercely.
“Perhaps.” Penelope’s laugh was a ragged, wet sound, nothing like laughter at all. “Or perhaps he simply told the truth. Perhaps it was only ever an arrangement, and I invented the rest because I wanted it so desperately. The nursery, the arguments, the midnight corridor—perhaps it was all proximity and crisis and nothing more.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I am trying very hard to believe it. Believing it is the only way I can—” She gestured at the room, at the perfectly maintained house, at the life she was supposed to be inhabiting. “Function.”
Hyacinth was quiet for a long moment. The rain hammered. The fire shifted, sending a scatter of sparks against the grate.
“Then we are a fine pair,” she said at last, and her voice held the trembling ghost of her old wryness. “You, in love with a man you’re too afraid to fight for. Me, in love with a man I’m too afraid to choose. Between us we have the combined romantic courage of anapkin.”