Now she was to go to London. To her mother.
She would go, of course, as she had promised, and she would not complain or sabotage Charles’s plans for her, but she would not shrink. Not smooth herself into something smaller. Not dim the parts of her that had flourished in that quiet, timber-scented house.
She had learned what it felt like to be whole.
“Charles is being a brute.” Josephine’s declaration startled Rosamund out of her thoughts. “If Rosa is banished to London, there will be only three remaining members of the Busty Bodice Club at home.”
“She is not perishing,” Eugenia replied dryly, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. “She is merely visiting Mother.”
“Which may very well prove fatal,” Josephine countered darkly.
Rosamund almost smiled.
“You mustn’t blame Charles,” she said gently. “This was just part of our agreement.”
In truth, she was the only one of her sisters who had not implored him to change his mind.
She paused, surveying the chamber for anything overlooked, thenslipped her journal and a small bundle of folded pages into her traveling satchel. The Club’s minutes, as Josephine liked to call them.
Behind her, she sensed her sisters drifting toward the window one by one, attention captured by something down in the yard.
“Who might that be, do you think?”
“And what on earth is that on the back of the cart?”
Rosamund did not turn at first. “A cart?” she repeated absently.
“I think it’s a chair,” Eugenia breathed.
“That is unmistakably a chair,” Penelope agreed.
A…a chair?
Rosamund crossed the room in three strides so she could see for herself.
She recognized not only the cart that was parked right beneath the entrance awning, but the horse pulling it. And secured upright in the back?—
Rosamund let out a shaky breath.
Even at this distance she recognized the elegant, deliberate lines. And the wood, unfinished pine.
She wasn’t certain whether she ought to believe what she was seeing.
Josephine leaned so far forward her breath fogged the glass. “I can’t see him now.”
“You won’t,” Rosamund said faintly. “Not from this angle.”
It was something one learned after a lifetime of watching from windows while imagining stories to write.
“He wore a patch,” Imogen said suddenly. “Over one eye.”
All of them froze.
“It has to be him,” Penelope said.
Rosamund turned slowly from the window. “But… why?” Her mouth had gone dry, making her voice little more than a whisper.
Less than four days had passed since he had ordered her out of his dining room.