to be shredding grief for your late husband.”
Delilah breathed in and released the breath slowly. Behind her, both the fire and the man snoring next to it crackled.
“I tried.” Her voice was hoarse. He’d frowned in discomfort when she was playful or laughed too loud. And yet he always, always expected her to smile.
And suddenly the regret for years she’d lost in that loveless stasis was lacerating. To what end? She had ensured the last years of her parents’ lives were comfortable. Was safety worth it?
“I was grateful to him.” Her voice was frayed. “I truly was. He wanted an heir. And I felt as though I failed him. I wanted children, and a house full of music, of—”
“Guilt is ballast,” Angelique said so startlingly firmly. “Release it. It won’t serve you in your—our—current circumstances.”
Ah, yes. The current circumstances.
Delilah fell silent again, as the current circumstances asserted themselves through remembering where they were: a pub by the docks, because she was penniless.
“He held you in the utmost esteem, you know,” Angelique said gently, ironically. “Derring did.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. It seemed impossible that you could truly care for someone and leave them ignorant of living on the knife-edge of disaster.
“If only one could pay the landlord with esteem,” Delilah mused.
Angelique gave another slow smile, as if everything about Delilah was both unexpected and a little entertaining.
“Haven’t you family, Lady Derring? A place to live?”
Delilah slowly shook her head. “I was an only child. I haven’t family on this continent, anyhow. I have Dot.” They looked over at Dot, her petite frame slumped in the chair, mouth open, snoring softly. “She’s the only one who didn’t flee. And . . . I haven’t decided yet where I might go. My options are limited and unattractive and involve the sort of begging for charity.”
Angelique quirked the corner of her mouth. “I had two servants who abandoned me with alacrity when they sussed out the state of things. And no place to go.”
She tapped her fingers against her sherry glass. “Imagine a world in which someone can buy an entire life—and two entire women—on credit propped up by virtue of a title. An accident of birth. Though of course some of them think their titles are ordained by God. The world is ridiculous.”
She said this last word with surprising venom.
Which made Delilah realize that Mrs. Breedlove was not so much cool as very, very controlled. That beneath her facade was, as she put it, a woman of feeling, and those feelings were as seething and complex as her own.
“How did you come to be here, in this pub, tonight, Mrs. Breedlove?”
Angelique sighed. “Oddly, it was where I met Derring. That’s the briefest answer.”
“You met Derring here? But how did . . .”
“I should like to briefly outline the events that led to our meeting. I will omit unnecessary details for the sake of brevity.”
Delilah nodded. “Very well. Carry on.”
“My mother died when I was young. My brother died in the war. My father was a surgeon and believed in educating girls, so I had excellent tutors. I can speak and write in several languages,” she said with a flash of faintly defensive pride. “But then my father fell gravely ill and to support us I became a governess for a wealthy family who had two young daughters.”
“Ah!” Delilah inadvertently said aloud. She could easily imagine Angelique as a governess. Bossy and certain of herself.
“The father of this family . . . took a fancy to me.” She cleared her throat. “He was handsome and persistent. I was flattered and naive and a little frightened. And then I was quite ruined. Dismissed from my position and turned out by the lady of the house just after my father died.”
She relayed this as steadily as a governess conducting a grammar lesson, but her hand had closed around her sherry glass as if it were the one thing anchoring her to the earth. Her knuckles were as white as little skulls. She didn’t wait for a response, and Delilah didn’t say a word. The muscles of her stomach had contracted.
“Without references, I could no longer work as a governess. None of my relatives—I’ve an uncle in Scotland, and an aunt and some cousins in Devonshire—were willing to take me in after that debacle. Eventually I found work in a tailor’s shop down the road from this pub. My needlework is fine and I’m unafraid of hard work.” Her chin went up a