“Yes. Thank you. I didn’t know hairpins were considered a weapon. Or the leg of a stool.”
She had no idea why these were the first things she would say to her husband in five years. Shewas apparently too tired to filter her thoughts before they emerged as words.
“Anything can be a weapon.” He sounded faintly surprised. As if this was something everyone ought to have been born knowing.
Silly Alexandra. Then again, he supposed he’d been forced to view the whole of life that way.
She cleared her throat. “Are...you...sound?”
He snorted softly.
And he still didn’t turn his head to look at her.
With a sense of unreality, she surreptitiously studied the profile of this familiar stranger to whom she was bound for life. The sun revealed shadows of sleeplessness beneath his eyes. Lines, earned through years of peering across battlefields or into the souls of enemies or squinting at maps and dispatches by firelight, rayed from the corners.
Seconds after they’d first been introduced, he’d held her fast in his cool, remote gaze for several potent seconds, during which she could have sworn he didn’t draw a breath.
And then his eyes had kindled to the warm blue at the center of a flame, and a wry, intimate smile had tipped one corner of his mouth. As if he knew things about her even she had yet to discover, and liked them all.
She wondered if he’d ever anticipated then there would be a time he couldn’t bear to look at her, let alone speak to her.
Perhaps she reeked of the prison. Or appeared haggard from sleeplessness.
Her vanity stung at the thought.
What a luxury it was to worry about how she looked, she realized. Despite its strifes, heartaches, and upheavals, her entire life, end to end, was comprised of luxuries such as those. From now on, no matter what happened, she would never let herself forget it.
And besides, she could hardly smell worse than the soldiers he’d lived with for months on end.
She tried again. “I wasn’t aware you had returned from Spain.”
He’d been there for nearly the whole of the last five years; they’d made him a diplomat after the war.
As his new wife, she was supposed to have gone with him. Destiny had thrown a flaming grenade into those plans.
Well,shehad. She was the one who’d thrown the grenade.
It occurred to her then: What if he’d actually been in London for weeks and hadn’t bothered to tell her? Her stomach twisted at the implications.
But would it have really mattered?
“I arrived only a day ago. I sent word to you of my arrival via Mr. Lawler.”
Mr. Lawler. The solicitor through whom they had conducted all matters between them for the last five years. He administered to Alexandra her reasonable allowance and approved and paid all of her expenses, including clothing, servants, household furnishings, travel, like her upcoming trip to New York, and entertainments.
Like the opera she was supposed to have attended when she was arrested.
In all of that time she had not exchanged one word directly with her husband, written or spoken. She had been kept apprised of whether he was alive or not, and she assumed Mr. Lawler had likewise reported on her continued existence to Brightwall. All Brightwall had asked in return was that she discreetly conduct herself in a way becoming of the wife of a man of his stature.
And it ought to have been so easy: she’d been raised to do, and be, exactly that, her entire life.
How had she failed?
“Lawler would have conveyed word of my presence to you had you been available to receive it,” he added.
Oh, so very dry: In other words, if you had not been in prison due to a lark, Alexandra.
“How did you hear that I was in...” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it.