Chapter 20
“You are full of surprises tonight, Your Grace.”
Evander’s hand settled at her waist, warm and steady through the sapphire silk, and Mary placed her hand on his shoulder and let him lead her into the waltz.
The orchestra played something slow and elegant, and the ballroom spun in a blur of candlelight and silk, and for the first time all evening, Mary felt the knot in her chest loosen.
“I was not aware that asking one’s wife to dance qualified as a surprise,” Evander said.
“It does when the husband in question has spent six weeks treating conversation as an act of war.” Mary let him turn her, and the skirt of her gown swept across the polished floor in a wash of blue. “This is the first time you have touched me in public.”
“I am correcting an oversight.”
“Is that what this is?”
Evander’s grip tightened at her waist, barely perceptible, and he pulled her a fraction closer than the waltz required. “That is what I am calling it.”
Mary smiled. The room continued to turn around them, faces and gowns and glittering chandeliers, and none of it mattered because Evander was looking at her the way he had looked at her in the carriage, as though the rest of the world had been reduced to background noise, and she was the only signal.
He leaned closer. His mouth near her ear, close enough that his breath stirred the loose strands of hair at her temple. “I have a lead on the Italian woman.”
The shift from intimacy to investigation should have surprised her. It did not. This was how Evander operated. He opened a door, let her glimpse what lay behind it, then redirected before either of them could dwell.
“How?” she asked.
“Godfrey has contacts in the Italian community near Clerkenwell. There are not so many Italian women in London, and one who frequents a pleasure house in Hampstead doesn’t go unnoticed. A name, an address, a connection to Richard. Any of those would narrow the search.”
“You sound very optimistic.”
He turned Mary through a corner of the floor, his hand firm at her waist. “This is the best lead I have had so far. If I can trace the woman, I can trace Richard. And if I can trace Richard, I can find Charlotte.”
Mary’s smile held. She willed it to hold.
“And then Tommy goes to his parents,” she said.
“That has always been the plan.” Evander guided her through the next turn. “Richard and Charlotte will marry. I’ll ensure that Tommy is made legitimate. The scandal will be resolved.”
“And everything goes back to how it was.”
“Everything gets set right.”
Mary let the words settle.
The waltz carried them past Isabella, who raised her glass, and past Lord Langham, who was pretending to listen to Lady Heathcote, and past three hundred people who saw the Duke and Duchess of Blackholm dancing together and assumed it meant the marriage was solid, the scandal was managed, and the story had a shape they could understand.
None of them could see what Mary felt breaking apart beneath the sapphire silk.
Tommy would go to his parents. That had always been the plan, and Mary had agreed to it.
It was right, it was fair. The baby she had rocked to sleep every night for six weeks, whose breathing she knew better than her own, whose grip on her collar was the first thing she felt every morning and the last thing she felt every night, would be taken from her arms and given to a mother who had not been there, and a father who had left him in a basket on a doorstep.
And Evander…
The marriage had been built around Tommy. Without the baby, without the scandal, without the tangled obligations that had forced them together, what held this marriage in place? Evander had said it himself, weeks ago in his study.
We will not need to trouble each other.
The music swelled. Evander turned her through the final measures, his hand warm at her waist, his eyes on her face. Mary smiled because she was the Duchess of Blackholm at the Atherton ball, and smiling was what duchesses did when the ground was falling away beneath their feet.
The waltz ended. The orchestra paused. Evander released her waist but kept her hand.
“You danced beautifully,” he said.
“Thank you. I would like to go home now.”
Evander studied her face. “The evening is young.”
“I know. I am tired.” She withdrew her hand from his and adjusted a pin in her hair that did not need adjusting. “Tommy will need his midnight feeding, and I would rather be there for it.”
Evander searched her expression for several seconds.
Mary held it steady and gave him nothing, because giving him the truth would mean explaining that she was losing the baby and possibly losing him.
She could not say those words in a ballroom surrounded by three hundred people who expected her to be grateful for the life she had been given.
“Of course,” Evander said. “I will call the carriage.”
After they’d said their goodbyes to the hosts, Isabella caught Mary’s arm on the way out.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
Mary squeezed her hand and said, “Tired.”
Isabella’s eyes said she did not believe it, but she let her go.
Evander sat beside her in the carriage instead of across from her, which was new, and his arm rested along the seat behind her shoulders, which was newer.
The closeness of him made everything worse because it reminded her of the carriage ride from Hampstead, and the taste of his mouth, and the way his hands had moved in the dark, and all of it, every moment of tenderness and heat and slow, grudging intimacy they had built over six weeks, rested on a foundation that would vanish the moment Richard and Charlotte were found—
“Mary.” His voice pulled her out of her panicked reverie.
“Hmm?” She raised her brows, trying to keep her expression neutral.
“Are you certain you are all right?”
“I am tired. It was a long evening.” She rested her head against his shoulder because she wanted to, and because it might be one of the last times she could, and because the sapphire gown deserved at least one honest moment before the night was over.
The carriage stopped. They entered the house. Evander touched her arm in the entrance hall, a brief, warm pressure.
“Goodnight, Mary.”
Mary waited. One breath. Two. His hand still rested on her arm, warm through the silk, and she waited for him to tighten his grip.
To pull her closer. To say something, anything, beyond the careful courtesy of a man escorting a guest to the door.
She looked at his face and searched for the man who had whispered against her jaw on the dance floor, who had silenced Lord Whitmore with a single step, who had chosen the sapphire because it would suit her and not the family.
He was there. She could see him, just behind the composure, pressing against the surface. All he had to do was stay. All he had to do was not let go.
Evander withdrew his hand. “Goodnight.”
She climbed the stairs and went to the nursery first. Mrs. Bridwell dozed in the rocking chair, and Tommy slept on his back with his fists above his head, peaceful and oblivious.
Mary stood over the crib and touched his cheek. His skin was warm. His breathing was steady. His fingers curled in his sleep, gripping at nothing.
“What am I to do without you, darling?” she whispered. The words came from a place she could not control. “I’ll be all alone in this massive house.”
Mary kissed his forehead. She walked to her room, closed the door, and undressed in the dark. Hattie had left a nightgown on the bed. Mary pulled it on, sat on the edge of the mattress, and pressed her hands against her face.
The tears came. These were the tears of a woman who had held herself together through a scandal, a jilting, a marriage to a stranger, and six weeks of learning to love a child and a man who might both be taken from her, and who had finally, in the dark of her own room with no one watching, run out of the strength to pretend she was fine.
She cried until her ribs ached. Then she lay down, pulled the coverlet to her chin, and stared at the ceiling, and the sapphire gown hung on the wardrobe door like the ghost of an evening that had promised everything and delivered the one thing she had not been prepared for.
The knowledge that she could lose it all.