Mrs. Hope-Wallace threw the bonnet down in disgust and leapt to her feet. Several discarded plumes fell from her skirts to the ground, as though she had begun slowly and decorously molting.
“This is ridiculous,” she declared. She began to circumnavigate the room with the general air of an outraged pigeon.
Lydia set her teacup down. “Mother.”
Huw Trefor, who had mostly spent the last day or two hiding from Lydia’s mother, peered out from a wingback chair, half-concealed behind a book on hoof diseases he had discovered in the Hope-Wallace library. At the sight of Mrs. Hope-Wallace’s small form striding toward him—a coronet of roses bristling with outrage on the top of her head—he ducked back behind the tome. Lydia admired his equanimity.
“How much longer does he expect us to wait upon him?” Mrs. Hope-Wallace demanded. She extended one delicate finger and nudged Huw’s book aside.
“Mother,” Lydia said again. Her voice was still quiet but her tone this time was firmer.
There was a part of her, even now, that wanted to make herself small. Perhaps there always would be. She would never be the model of social ease that Georgiana was, at home in any circumstance. She would never command a room like Selina.
But her own voice—soft and sometimes wobbly as it was—was enough.
She was trying very hard, despite everything, to believe that that was so. She was trying to share in Huw’s steady calm.
“Ah,” Huw said, “I am afraid I haven’t a precise timetable for his return, but I assure you, if you’ll only be patient—”
Mrs. Hope-Wallace spun on her heel. “Be patient!” She threw up her hands, and one of the roses succumbed to the power of her emotions and toppled off her head. “Be patient! When that—that—nincompoopreturns to my household, I shall show him where to put his patience—”
There was a sudden, vociferous, and very familiar clamor in the hall. Something crashed—from the sound of it, something made of porcelain. Muffled shouting was followed by the thud of bone meeting flesh.
Lydia leapt to her feet.
“Over my—dead—body!” That was Ned, who’d quite lost his head this last week. “I—will—murder—you—first—”
Something else smashed. This time it sounded like furniture.
Arthur burst through the door.
Lydia’s hand, which had been tangled in her skirts, flew up to her mouth to hold in an indelicate sound of alarm.
His curls were standing on end. He had a brilliant red contusion across one cheekbone, and nearly two weeks’ growth of beard. His jacket had come off one arm, and Ned was clinging wild-eyed to the dangling fabric like a dog on a leash.
Arthur shook off Ned and crossed the room to Lydia in three long strides. “Lydia!” His hands rose as if to pull her into his arms, then dropped helplessly to his sides. He searched her face. His left eye was rapidly swelling closed. “Am I too late? Oh Christ, please tell me I’m not too late.”
She paused to consider the question, her heart in her throat.
“No,” she managed finally. “No, you’re not too late.”
He made a wordless, torn-off sound. Instead of dragging her to him, he only touched the side of her face with the tips of his fingers, gentle and searching and afraid. “Lydia,” he said hoarsely.
Mrs. Hope-Wallace, whose remaining roses were now hanging drunkenly off the side of her head, interposed herself between them, jabbing one small finger into Arthur’s broad chest. “You,” she snapped. “How dare you?”
“I’m sorry—” he began, looking rather desperately between Lydia and her mother, but Mrs. Hope-Wallace cut him off.
“I should hope so! Why, if Mr. Trefor here had not assured us that you were called away on emergency business, I would have thought you had abandoned my daughter after one of the most terrifying experiences of her life!” She pursed her lips, glaring up at Arthur. “To leave your wife for so long with no word of when you would return! I am gravely disappointed in you, Strathrannoch. You may call me Mrs. Hope-Wallace until further notice.”
Arthur looked as though he had been struck in the head. His bewildered gaze sought out Huw, still in the corner in the wingback chair. “Huw said—” His eyes, a thousand shades of blue and green and gold, came back to Lydia’s face. “You’re not—”
“Mother,” Lydia said. “Ned. Everyone. Perhaps Lord Strathrannoch and I could have a few moments alone.”
And to her great surprise, without a word of argument, everyone filed out the door, even Sir Francis Bacon. Huw, as he passed, gave her upper arm a comforting squeeze and murmured something under his breath to Arthur that sounded rather likeGrovel.
But perhaps she had not heard correctly.
Before the door had even closed behind her family, Arthur had her hands in his. “Lydia,” he said again, as if her name were the only word he knew, the only thing that was certain in a madly spinning world.
