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.”

Henry looked down at his right arm, waiting for a movement that never came. A constant reminder of Quatre Bras, of his failure. “I already have what I deserve.”

Emily began to pace; he could hear the rustle and shush of her skirts as she paced around the dimming confines of the morning room. “You won’t have what you deserve until you’re as happy as you were before you left. If your brother and I can do anything to help, we will. And that includes finding you a wife. And that includes hosting a ball for you.”

Henry continued to stare at his arm. Bundled in a coat sleeve, it looked almost normal, except for its eerie stillness. “It’s not up to you to remake my life, Emily.”

The sound of her pacing stopped, and Henry looked up. She was facing the mural of Odysseus, blinking hard. “I really ought to have this painted over with something more pleasant. Perhaps a pastoral scene.”

“It’ll still be there, even if you paint it over,” Henry murmured.

Emily pressed her lips together. “It doesn’t matter what’s below, as long as one can recreate the surface anew.”

Her voice fell, and she added low, “Please, Hal. Let us do this. We must do something.”

He knew that desperate feeling well enough. The need to escape the present, to change it in some way. That slippery discontent had almost pushed him all the way to Winter Cottage.

But there was one unavoidable flaw in Emily’s plan. A flaw that unpinned his knees, made him want to sit down on the cloth-covered floor.

“I can’t…” He swallowed, hating to have to say the words. He jerked his head toward his right shoulder, and Emily’s face softened with understanding.

“Dear Hal,” she said, walking back to his side. “We shall open the ball with a traditional minuet. You need hardly use your arms at all. And after that first dance, you may use your arms however you wish.”

She winked at him roguishly, then patted his cheek, her smile lopsided. “I hope you know that we only want your happiness.”

“I know,” Henry replied. His insides had not yet returned to order. His stomach was twisting, his heart thumping. He was to open a ball—he, with one arm, dancing before the whole ton.

Jem and Emily had never thrown him a ball in all the years before the war. They had always wanted his happiness, but they’d never felt the need to intercede with such a heavy hand. Another reminder that the world didn’t see him as it once had.

For good or ill, just as Frances had said.

Somehow, he would have to make sure it was the former.

“Now that you’re acquainted with my scheme,” Emily wheedled, “do tell me about your painting. Is it some sort of jungle creature?”

Actually, it was a first attempt at a human. But considering the elegant brutality of the ton… “Yes, it is,” Henry answered with a sigh.

“Delightful! And might I paint Aunt Matilda’s table some more?”

***

When Bart Crosby called an hour later, Henry was more than ready to leave behind his snarled-up painting and Emily’s persistent discussion of the ball’s details. He followed Bart down the front steps of Tallant House, where waited the new curricle of which he’d heard so much.

The small open carriage was a graceful, glossy rocker perched atop high spoked wheels. Its reins were held by a tiger in a snug coat and immaculate buckskin breeches; a boy so small that he looked unable to hold the horses if they should bolt. But the two fine grays, matched to the very blaze and stockings, stood with a calm that spoke to Lady Crosby’s—and her son’s—light and skillful hand with horseflesh.

The whole affair seemed precarious and fragile; Henry thought he could have pulled it himself without much effort. It looked far more hazardous than the sturdy gun carriages and supply wagons that had rolled next to Henry for hundreds of miles and hundreds of days.

Bart tapped a crop in the palm of one gloved hand, waiting for the verdict.

“It’s just as fine as you described it,” Henry said, knowing he’d given the right answer when Bart grinned.

“I wanted a phaeton,” Bart excused in a quiet voice, so the wide-eyed tiger would not overhear, “but, well, you know how mothers are. Always sure a fellow’s going to overturn and break his neck. Ah—beg pardon, Hal. You know. About your mother.” He swatted his crop against his thigh, marking the pale dun nap of his buckskin breeches.

“There’s no need to apologize,” Henry said. “The loss of my mother is hardly a fresh one. Besides, your mother has an excellent eye. I am sure this is very modish.”

“Modish isn’t the word, old fellow,” Bart said with a waggle of his dark brows. “It’s all the crack. Don’t you know?”

No, he didn’t. He felt a heavy, sliding awareness that he had missed out on a great deal.

He shook it off and summoned a smile. “So even modish words are modish now. Well, well. Such is life in the beau monde.”

“Where do you want to go?” Bart asked. “We can go anywhere you like.” He rubbed the neck of the near horse, which whickered and bobbed its finely molded head.