instantly bracketed her like two clucking bookends, their hands fluttering on her back and her arm like anxious butterflies unsure of where to land.
Nora wrestled with her runaway emotion, doing her best to rein it back in, but each bawl seemed more gasping than the last, until every breath dragged through hiccupping sobs.
Felicity crooned to her, rubbing little comforting circles against her spine as Mercy affixed a one-handed makeshift bandage on her own palm.
“You love Titus, don’t you?” Felicity sighed, resting her chin on Nora’s uninjured shoulder.
Nora shook her head, accepting the handkerchief Felicity handed her, and dabbing at her eyes and nose. “Don’t mark this, either of you. It’s been a trying time and I’m…it doesn’t matter.”
She took in a deep, painful breath and swallowed the ocean of tears threatening to sweep her into the tide. “What matters is that next year I’ll be married to a Duke’s son, Titus will be the toast of the elite scientific and surgical community, and you… you’ll be the belles of the season with dowries the size of which London has not yet seen, if Father is to be believed.” She smoothed the skirt of her black gown and took in several calming breaths. “There’s still hope,” she reminded herself.
Felicity pulled her hands back as if she were made of burning rubbish. “Hope for what?”
“For you both. For good marriages.”
The twins looked quizzically at her, and then each other, before they astonished her by bursting into peals of unladylike guffaws.
“What on earth makes you think we want to be married?” Mercy ended a chortle with an accidental snort, which sent them both into another tumult of amusement.
Felicity wiped tears from the corner of her eyes. “I believe the idioms, not if the entire world depended on it, and never in a million years have been batted around.”
Nora stared at them as if they were each two heads of a hydra. “But…you’re being bullied terribly. Shunned from society. Not invited to participate in the season.”
“And?” Mercy shrugged. “That leaves us time to attend lectures and meetings, and it’s ever so much easier on Felicity that she doesn’t have to talk to men. Or look at them. Let alone marry one, can you imagine?”
Felicity sobered at this a little, but seemed sincere when she said, “We’ve decided all we need is each other’s company. No husbands. Ever.”
Nora shook her head, unable to comprehend. “But… without husbands how will you afford to live?”
Mercy shrugged. “Well, Father’s on the hook for our upkeep indefinitely.”
Alarmed, Nora grasped her uninjured hand and forced Mercy to meet her gaze. “Father is unforgiving if you defy him like this. He’ll throw you to the wolves if you’re of no use to him; believe me when I tell you that.”
Mercy stood, pulling her hand from Nora’s frantic grasp, her eyes blazing with a sapphire zeal. “We’ll become governesses then, or seamstresses. Companions or stuffy old librarians. But I’ll see a cold day in hell before I see myself in a church as a bride.”
Felicity put her hand on Nora’s knee. “Is that why you came back, Nora? To fix our reputations?”
Choking on another sob, Nora clapped a hand over her mouth.
Mercy sighed and regained her seat at Nora’s side, her curls spilling over her riotous magenta bodice. This time, she seized Nora’s hand, and then thought better of it, gripping her beneath the chin like a recalcitrant child. “Stop it,” she ordered with much more confidence and command than her tender years should have afforded her. “You stop martyring yourself for us or for anyone else. I’ll not have it. Neither of us gives a fig if the house of Goode is sullied, and—regardless of what Father says—it’s certainly no fault of yours.”
“Go be happy, Nora. Please,” Felicity admonished. “We’ll be all right. We’ll be better than that. The worst has already happened, the damage has been done. Not by you but your terrible husband.”
Mercy released her so she could look over to Felicity, an identical face, if softer and more earnest. “You needn’t endure any longer. You never should have done. Father is dreaming if he thinks this marriage will save everything. But one thing isn’t a dream… Titus Conleith loves you. He has always loved you. And you love him, I think.”
Nora shook her head, her heart bursting with love for her sisters and pain for her loss.
Of course she loved Titus. All she’d ever done was because she’d loved him.
“He hates me now, I’m certain of it,” she