have a tiny endowment.’”
She burst out laughing. “What did you say to that?”
“I sputtered something, protesting that hadn’t been what I’d meant, but I couldn’t exactly pull down my trousers to prove you wrong. You, coldhearted wench, you retorted, ‘I’m sure you didn’t mean to divulge such embarrassing personal details, but don’t worry. Pay the barmaids enough and they won’t laugh at you.’ Then you winked at me. I was utterly humiliated.”
She chortled with glee. “My, I was something else.”
“So was I, one might say, quite the annoying twit.”
And was that conclusion enough to explain his alarm at the possible return of her memory?
She covered her mouth and yawned. “Excuse me. I can’t believe how much sleep I need these days.”
He felt himself unknotting with relief. “Then sleep. Your health is the most important thing right now.”
“Would you mind starting the next chapter of the book?”
“Of course not. I’ll read until you fall asleep.”
She took one of his curls between her fingers. “Fitz has a room for you. You don’t need to sit in a chair all night.”
He rubbed a finger on the edge of the book. “I want to.”
Now she lay her entire palm against the ends of his hair. “In case I wake up in the middle of the night crying again and need someone to smack some sense into me?”
In case this was the last night he was allowed such a privilege.
“Something like that,” he answered. “I might have been a twit and a snot earlier in life, but I’ve grown up to be the voice of reason and the repository of good sense.”
Helena’s stitches were removed the next morning. She was also declared to be out of danger, no more fears of cranial bleeding. She immediately wanted to be out and about, but acquiesced under the combined weight of Miss Redmayne’s advice and her family’s insistence that she continued her bed rest for a few more days.
At least she was allowed to read. Hastings introduced her to the book she’d written for writers seeking to understand the inner workings of publishing. He also brought her secretary, Miss Boyle, to her bedside, to furnish the necessary explanations for her to deal with Fitzhugh and Company correspondence that had accumulated during her absence.
It was, interestingly enough, not as dispiriting a process as she’d thought it would be, trying to relearn in scant days everything that had earlier taken her years to master. She was more frustrated by the lack of progress on the part of her memory. Given that she’d regained a not insignificant portion soon after she awakened, she’d expected to make similar progress, if not every day, then at least every other day.
But the recovery of memory, alas, followed no regular schedule. She was beginning to fret that nothing else would come back when, on the fourth day after she awakened, while Hastings was again away in Kent to visit his daughter, she suddenly recalled the weeks surrounding Venetia’s first wedding.
Venetia had been seventeen and Helena and Fitz fifteen. Most of Helena’s thoughts at the time had revolved around her fear that Venetia might have made a terrible mistake in her choice of a bridegroom. Hastings, alas, did not feature at all in the resurfaced memories, except as an aside from Helena to Fitz, hoping he wouldn’t bring his stupid friend to the festivities, and Fitz replying that Hastings couldn’t come even if he wanted to, as he had to attend his guardian’s funeral on the same day.
When Hastings returned, she eagerly recounted her new recollections and teased him for his unfounded fear: Her opinion of him in the present hadn’t been at all affected by the new revelations of the past.
He took a deep breath. “But I wasn’t wrong. You didn’t like me in the past.”
“In the distant past,” she pointed out. “And I already knew that.”
He smiled rather wanly. “Well, congratulations. I know how much you wanted to remember more.”
She fluffed his lovely hair. “Don’t be so afraid. I’ll keep you—if just for your curls.”
This second recovery of memory dispelled much of her anxiety: It was only a matter of time before she had everything back. And in the meanwhile, her physical self grew ever stronger and more energetic, her siblings were both well and happy, and she had Hastings, who, when her eyes grew sore and weary from reading correspondence addressed to Fitzhugh and Company, read the letters aloud to her, making even the driest business dispatches sound like love letters from Keats