A simple enough request, but Frances understood what it meant. Every day, she realized, he must encounter something that had changed because of his injury. Losing an arm meant losing so much more: independence, comfort, even the easy courtesy of one’s acquaintances, as they had seen yesterday.
Frances knew this well, for she had once lost too. Not a limb, but a whole person. A whole family. The finest part of herself.
Oh, she knew the sick dullness of loss. And anything she could help Henry gain, she would, even if it earned her nothing but his gratitude.
“All right,” Frances agreed. “I’ll write something.”
She selected a quill, dipped it in the ink, then wiped the nib. She drew each letter deliberately, rounding it into a perfect feminine copperplate, loops and vowels as open as the model script in a writing primer. Bearing no resemblance to the writing in the letter she’d sent.
HENRY IS TOO DEMANDING.
He laughed. “I see there’s nothing wrong with your handwriting at all.”
Frances sanded the letters as carefully as she would an invitation for the queen, then set the paper aside. “As I said. You couldn’t believe me without seeing it for yourself, could you? Is that because you’re a solider or an artist?”
He narrowed his eyes, the look she now knew meant he was collecting details. “I’ve always been that way, so maybe it is an artist’s curse. But I am curious, why do you speak so readily about soldiering? You seem to understand the life as many women do not.”
His words startled Frances, silencing her for a too-long moment. No one had asked her about her past since she’d come to London with Caroline. It was scarred over, but not truly healed. Most wounds she had unwittingly inflicted herself.
She mustered a reply. “Yes. My late husband, Charles, was a soldier. He died during the siege of Walcheren.” A quagmire. Pointless.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Henry said.
“You need not be. It was almost six years ago; I’ve had plenty of time to come to terms with it.”
This was quite true. Nearly six years was enough time to stop missing the man himself, whom she had long since grown past in years. Charles had died at twenty-two, and Frances would be thirty in a few more months.
“He must have been a marvelous man to deserve you,” Henry said. He really did have fine manners.
“He was far too handsome for me,” Frances murmured, “but I was more than willing to allow the imbalance.”
Her eyes flicked over Henry’s face—hair like morning sun, eyes like afternoon sky. He resembled night-tinted Charles not at all, except that both were far too handsome for her.
Charles’s face had not been the only imbalance in their marriage. For Charles, Frances had tipped so far from her center, she hadn’t righted herself for years. In some ways, she still hadn’t. But she’d found a new equilibrium instead.
Or had, until Henry started studying her with those clear eyes of his, making her think of rolling over again. She knew from long months of watching the ton just how many secrets people betrayed without realizing.
She wondered what Henry saw in her now.
“After Charles died,” Frances said, tugging her eyes down to the safety of the paper on which Henry had been writing. ABCDEFGHIJK. Blot. “I used to look over everything I had of his every day: a sketch of him, some letters. But I have not needed to for a very long time.”
It didn’t bring him closer to look through his things, and it didn’t send him farther when she kept them hidden away. Sometimes she didn’t want him close at all; she only wanted to forget what she’d done to him.
But she couldn’t forget anything, ever.
Henry’s left hand tightened around his pen, then he laid it aside. “I am honored by your confidence.”
She gave him a tight smile and smoothed a lock of her hair trying to uncoil from its pins. If only it was so simple to tidy up unruly emotion. “I probably spoke out of place, Henry. Your wound is much fresher than mine.” Charles, after all these long years, awoke more guilt than grief.
Henry’s clenched left hand unfolded, so close she could almost touch it. And so she did, just a brush over the back of his hand.
Their hands were freed from formal gloves, and Henry was warm skin under her skin—solid bone, sinew, all working perfectly together. To touch him was a wonder. A hand was a living miracle. She supposed Henry knew that better than anyone.
Again, she met his gaze. He was watching her closely as she traced lightly over his hand, his eyes deep and blue enough to drown in.
She sputtered for words, resisting the undertow. “Do you want to talk about it? Your injured arm?”
“No,” he said, but his eyes did not cool with this refusal. “Though I thank you for asking about it. It’s a part of me now.”
He twisted his living left hand beneath her right—she thought at first to free it from her grasp. But he simply rotated it, placing his hand palm to palm with hers. Fingers wrapped around fingers, their sensitive pads awakening each other with pressure as light as the feather on a quill. The contact was simple, everyday, yet almost unbearably intimate.
And it was too uncertain; it could mean everything or nothing. A naked hand to a naked hand was a pact between business partners, a promise between friends, a beginning for lovers.
It was with Caroline he wished a beginning. And Frances had promised to help.
That was better than a pact, at least.
“Well.” She freed her hand, found a quill they hadn’t ruined yet. “Let’s write that letter. You can start again with C.”
My caro, she thought, though she could never say it now.
Six
“Too bad you remembered to cover the carpet this time.” Emily sighed from the doorway of the morning room. “I could use some guilt ammunition.”
Henry turned to look at his sister-in-law, more relieved than annoyed by the interruption. His latest effort at painting—this time with watercolors—was not going nearly as well as had this afternoon’s writing lesson. “Emily. You’re plotting something again?”
“I’m always plotting something.” She trailed into the room and stood beside him, lowering her pointed chin to fix him with the full force of her bright eyes. A vivid green touched with blue; nearly the same shade as Caro’s.
There was a pigment for creating just such a color. Paris Green, Henry had heard it called. It was a new formula, no more than a year old. Derived from copper and arsenic, and remarkably dangerous to work with, as so many of the richest colors were.
“Aren’t you going to ask what I’m plotting?” Her eyes narrowed.
He set down his brush and turned to sit on the edge of the baroque table they’d painted a few days before. “Aren’t you going to tell me what you’re plotting?” he mimicked. “I can tell you want to. You’re all swelled up like a pufferfish.”
“I’m—” She looked down the smooth line of her alizarin-red gown. “I am not. Hal, you’re as bad as my boys.”
He grinned. “No one could ever be as bad as your boys.” He loved his nephews deeply, but they were an exhausting pair.
“True, true,” Emily granted. “This is the plan: since you’ve decided to stay in London, Jemmy and I are planning a ball for you.”
Henry lurched, then scrabbled at the edge of the small table to steady himself. “A ball. You’re planning a ball for me.”
“Yes.” Emily looked pleased. “The ton is marriage-mad during the final gasps of the season. It’s gasping longer than usual this year, for everyone’s staying through Prinny’s birthday. I am sure that, with a ball in your honor, we can draw all the attention to you that you deserve.”