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attended. Meetings for which he was always late, despite Garland’s best efforts and the services of a talented but increasingly harried chauffeur.
    He rose and paced. Eyed the irons by the fire. He did not like to think of himself as a violent man. He was not prone to fits of temper, never had the real urge to strike another man—nor, God forbid, a woman or child. But in the past year, something hot and dangerous had been coiling within him, tightening by the barest degree with each solicitor he met and each social obligation he attended to. Of all the cruelties their father had enacted upon them, this was the worst: that Charles, who had loved the managing of the estate, should be cut off from it, and that Martin, who wanted nothing to do with it, should have its keeping.
    At last the back door was shut, cutting the shouting off abruptly. Martin nodded with satisfaction but also a small note of disappointment.
    A great thud sounded upstairs. He glanced up worriedly, but no further commotion followed; only Elinor, drifting into the room in that wraithlike way of hers, as if her feet did not quite meet the boards.
    â€œWhat was that?” she asked.
    â€œNothing to trouble yourself over, I’m sure,” he said, not certain if she meant the thump or the shouting. “You should be resting.”
    â€œI am not weary,” she said. Nonetheless, he moved to her and guided her into the chair he had occupied shortly before. She sat willingly and covered his hand with one of hers upon the arm of the chair. “I was glad to come to London,” she said. “And now I am very glad to be leaving.”
    â€œPerhaps you should have stayed at Birch Hall this year.” As she had the year before, and the year before that one. Had it really been so long? Since her fiancé’s death, certainly, and that was three years past now. Elinor loved the Season best from afar, but managed to forget that fact each year. Even when she was young, before the illness that had stolen her strength, she had only enjoyed herself once the Season was over, and it was all stories told rather than lived. He wished that just once she would remember how weary it all made her.
    â€œThere wouldn’t be any stories to tell if I didn’t make the effort every once in a while,” she said, as if reading his mind. And sometimes it seemed as if she did. They were twins, born scant minutes apart; through the years, more than one person had made the suggestion that there might be some supernatural link between them. If there was, it was purely one way. Only by chance did he ever guess at what thoughts cartwheeled through her agile mind.
    â€œStill, I’m glad you’ll be home soon,” he said.
    â€œYou should worry less for me,” she said. “And more for yourself.”
    â€œAh?”
    â€œYou are in want of a wife, Martin.”
    He laughed. “I don’t need one,” he said. “I have no need of money, nor stronger connections, so I am left only with the prospect of love.”
    â€œWhich is impossible, of course,” Elinor declared gravely, teasingly.
    He sighed. “Love requires a degree of mystery. And you, my dear sister, ensure that I know everything about every woman I so much as ask to dance. Besides which, I have you to look after, and to look after me.”
    â€œMartin, I love you dearly, but you are a poor substitute for a husband, and I am certainly no replacement for a wife.” She left unsaid that she would likely never be married. It had seemed a certain thing when she came out; there had been offers, of course, though Father insisted she wait until she was older, less flighty in her affections. Though really, Martin suspected the old man was waiting for the full bloom of beauty that had, indeed, come some two years later. But by then, the weakness was there, too. Months of weariness, breath that never quite filled her lungs. They had no name for it—or