She bent her head to the map and he spied a single white hair on her otherwise raven head. Long ago she’d told him that because her mother had needed to dye her hair from her midthirties, she, too, expected to be prematurely grey. They’d joked that when it happened, he’d call her Gran and she’d call him Sonny.
His heart filled with a painful tenderness. He wanted so much for her to be happy, to be once again fearless and vibrant, not this shadow of her former self, this adrift vessel desperately in search of an anchor.
But was a man who thought far more often of another woman the right one to accompany her on the path back to confidence and joy?
Outside her house, he sent away his carriage and walked. There was no doubt which choice he wanted to make—every fiber of his being yearned toward Millie. But that would be putting his own happiness above Isabelle’s.
As much as she had suffered eight years ago, she had not blamed him. This time there were no external forces acting against her desires, only the changes that had taken place in the intervening years.
Only the man he’d become and the wife he’d come to cherish.
But was it too selfish to want to hold on to what he had when Isabelle needed him so? Could he possibly derail her dreams again?
He was no closer to an answer when he arrived at his own house. Cobble informed him that a report he’d been waiting for had been delivered from Cresswell & Graves. He sat down in his study, opened the report, but could not understand a single sentence therein. After a quarter hour he tossed aside the report and crossed the room to the mantel.
Alice was in her spot. He gazed upon her as if she might have the answer, she who’d been with him through some of the most difficult months of his life. But she, in her eternal rest, could not help him. He sighed, lifted the bell jar that covered her, and stroked her along her back.
“Does she feel soft?” Millie asked from behind him.
He stilled—he almost did not trust himself to turn around. But he did. She stood at the exact spot where he’d ravished her. Heat rose in great coils from his soles to the back of his neck. “You’ve never felt her?”
Millie shook her head. Of course, he’d never offered her Alice to hold while Alice yet lived and Millie was not the sort to take the liberty just because now Alice was dead.
He picked up the hazel-wood base on which Alice rested and extended it to her. “Go ahead.”
She came forward. He could not take his eyes off her: her hair, pulled back ever so neatly; her neck, slender and elegant; her simple tea gown, small roses printed on white silk, that had been a part of her wardrobe for years, He’d never told her the dress was one of his favorites.
She extended her fingers tentatively toward Alice—and drew back, surprised, when she came into contact with the dormouse: Although Alice gave the impression of being warm and pliant, in fact she was quite rigid, her body the same temperature as the room.
“She’s gone,” he said, “as dead as the pharaohs.”
And would that he’d understood it sooner. What he’d felt for Isabelle, in those first moments of seeing her again, had been as lifelike as Alice. But like Alice, they, too, were but a preserved relic of an earlier age.
He replaced the bell jar and put Alice back on the mantel. “And how are you, my dear Millie? Were you looking for me?”
He looked weary. She knew he hadn’t been sleeping well. In the week since he stopped coming to her bed, nightly he would leave his own bed for his study, return some time later, then repeat the same excursion again.
She, too, had been lying awake, staring into the dark. But unlike him, she had come to a decision.
This impasse could not be blamed entirely—or even largely—on him. Nor on Mrs. Englewood. If anyone should have acted different, it was Millie. Sometimes changes happened imperceptibly; he could be excused for not quite realizing that he had fallen in love with someone he’d considered only a very good friend. But she, she’d known from the very beginning that she loved him.
She should have done something about it years ago. Instead, she’d been too proud and too afraid to let him know how she felt, for fear that should things not go well, she would be left without even her hope, her mainstay all these years.
No more. No more cowardice. No more holding back. No more hanging on to a hope without ever putting it into action.
“Everything still proceeding as you’d planned?” she asked.
He looked at her and did not answer.
“I am going to Henley Park for a few days,” she said. “And when I come back, we should give serious consideration to going our separate ways.”
He blenched with shock. “What do you mean?” His voice rose; he almost never raised his voice. “We are not about to go our separate ways, Millie. We—”
She put her hands on his arms, the wool of his jacket warm beneath her palms. “Listen to me, Fitz. Listen to me. Think of Mrs. Englewood’s children. How will you explain your arrangement to them? What will other people say?”