his stomach. He could sit here all night, but for Cassandra, alone in her room, thinking badly of him.
He pushed back his chair. “I must have a conversation with my wife.”
Cassandra tried to get comfortable, but the bed jacket tangled about her legs, and the nightcap twisted on her head, and the bed was too big and empty. Well, she had better get used to it again, because tonight she would sleep alone. Not even with Mr. Twit, who still preferred Joshua’s bed.
Another traitor.
It is not a wife’s place to mind. Ha! Her own words rang mockingly in her ears. What a smug, naive fool she had been. Easy to spout such nonsense when one is not truly a wife. Her mistake had been to believe anything had changed. Everything had changed for her; nothing had changed for him.
She lay still only when she heard Joshua enter his own room, her ears straining at every sound, and when the connecting door eased open, she feigned sleep. The mattress sank as he sat on the side of the bed. He said nothing and she dared not breathe.
Which is probably why he knew she was awake.
“I’ve a ship leaving for New York tomorrow,” he said quietly. “We can put Lucy on it, if you’d like.”
A reluctant laugh slid out of her and she flopped over onto her back. “Britain’s last war with the Americans ended only recently. Send her there and we’ll start another one.”
In the faint light coming from his room, she could make out his shape, but not his expression. He made no move to touch her, and she sensed an uncharacteristic lack of energy about him that frightened her. She pressed her hands against her stomach, as if she could massage away the dread.
“I know I said I did not mind.” Her voice sounded small in the darkness. “And when I said it, it was true. We were strangers then. But I do mind. I don’t want to mind, but I do.”
He shifted on the bed, but said nothing.
“You never promised to be faithful.” She hated that her tongue tripped on that word, hated that he heard that, that now he knew. “But you did promise to be honest.”
“You are the only woman I have touched in nearly a year. You have disrupted my life so thoroughly that I would never have space for anyone else.”
She studied his dark shape. “You visit another woman.”
“Her name is Mrs. O’Dea. She has nothing to do with me. She was…” He leaped to his feet, but even though he roamed restlessly about the room, she sensed a flatness about him, a reflection of the odd bleakness she had noticed earlier in his eyes. It made her want to comfort him and she hated them both for that.
He stopped at the foot of the bed, like a visiting angel of doom.
“She was the mistress of…” He paused and continued hesitantly. “A friend of mine…He…It turns out that he…ah…he gave her my details before he died, and last month, she wrote to say she was unwell and needed money. So I called on her.”
He had hesitated. Joshua never hesitated.
“He must have been a very good friend,” she ventured.
His only response was to resume his pacing.
“You’re not telling me the full story.” She hauled herself up against the pillows. “There’s more. Who is she? Who was the man?”
With her eyes, she followed his prowling shadow. The silence grew and grew; it grew so thick that it squeezed her shoulders and choked up her throat and ate up all her air.
“No,” she whispered. “You’re lying.”
In two strides he was back on the bed. She curled into the pillows and realized he could not have lied when he had not spoken.
But she had heard him say it all the same. Papa.
Mama and Papa, flirting with each other on the night of Charlie’s twenty-first birthday, joking about how Charlie was “born early,” only eight months after their wedding, getting so bawdy that Miranda and Charlie fell to their knees and begged them to stop, but Mama and Papa only laughed and waltzed around the room.
Mama and Papa, the one sure thing in her world. They were so solid, so strong. Their family was built around them, and that’s why her family was strong. Why it would always endure. Why it was worth fighting for.
“No,” she said again. “Papa never had a mistress. Other men do, but not Papa. He was faithful to Mama. Always. They were devoted to