I stood at the basin for longer than I should have.
When I finally returned to the drawing room, it was empty. The good china removed, the fire subsiding, Edward's cup still on the tray with his half-eaten biscuit beside it.
His embroidery lay abandoned on the chair to the left, the needle still threaded mid-stitch. He was gone. Lady Audrey was gone. Victoria was nowhere.
I stood in the centre of the room and catalogued the evidence of an occasion that had concluded without me.
Then I went to find Victoria.
I found her in the small sitting room at the back of the house, the one she favoured in the afternoons when the light came in at the angle that suited her complexion and she wished to be discovered looking her best without appearing to have arranged it.
She was reading. Or holding a book. The distinction, in Victoria's case, was occasionally significant.
She looked up when I entered and set the volume aside with the unhurried ease of a woman who has been expecting a visitor and has spent the intervening time deciding exactly how she will receive them.
"Rose," she said. "Sit down."
I remained standing. "Is this some manner of jest?"
"Sit down," she said again, pleasantly. As one speaks to a child who is about to make a scene in company.
I sat, because my legs suggested it and because standing whilst unravelling felt rather worse than unravelling in a chair.
The room smelled of Victoria's particular perfume — orange blossom, which she had worn since we were girls and which I had always associated with warmth and safety.
Which I now found required some deliberate effort to breathe around without my composure making unfortunate decisions.
"Tell me it is a joke," I said. "Tell me there has been some extraordinary confusion and that Edward came this morning on an entirely different matter and that I have simply, comprehensively, misunderstood the entire proceeding."
"You have not misunderstood," Victoria said.
"Then tell me how long."
She received the question with the patience of a woman who has been holding an answer for some time and finds the eventual asking of it something of a relief.
"Since the spring," she said. "The Hathersfield assembly. You were ill that week, if you recall, and could not attend."
I recalled. I had sent Victoria with her mother and spent three days in bed with a fever pressing cold cloths to my own forehead.
Edward had written me a letter so unexpectedly tender that I had read it four times and hidden it in my copy of Cowper's poems where nobody would think to look. It had seemed, at the time, like something precious worth protecting.
Meanwhile, my dearest friend had been making rather productive use of my absence.
"You pursued him deliberately," I said.
"I was well placed to do so." Her voice carried the candid quality of someone explaining a business arrangement to a party who had arrived without reading the relevant documents.
"I am a countess, Rose. He required a countess. Whatever he told you in private, a Duke of Beaumont was never going to the altar with a governess of unknown origin, however fond of her he may have been in the interim. I merely — accelerated the inevitable."
The word governess landed in the room like a small, neatly placed stone.
"You told him everything," I said. "Everything I confided to you about him. His fears, his ambitions, precisely what he was afraid of losing. I came to you in confidence, every evening, and laid it all out for you quite helpfully, didn't I?"
"You were very forthcoming," Victoria agreed, without inflection. "I have always admired that quality in you. An open heart is such a rare thing."
"How kind of you to make use of it." I heard my own voice as though from a slight distance — flat, and very precise, which was considerably more alarming than anything louder would have been.
"I trusted you. I thought you were the only person I had. The only one who knew. I told you everything because I believed you to be my sister in every sense that mattered, and you sat there evening after evening and listened and used every single word of it."
"Rose…"
"I am not finished." I pressed my palm flat against my knee.
"You took the man I loved using intelligence I gave you in confidence, and I should like you to at least refrain from dressing it in softer language whilst I am still in the room. I find I have rather limited patience for soft language today."
Victoria was quiet for a moment — a considered quiet, not an uncomfortable one.
"You are the closest person to me," she said at last. Her voice had shifted into the warmer register — the one that had always, until approximately this morning, meant something.
"Whatever has occurred between us, that has not changed. I should not wish to begin this new chapter of my life without you beside me." She paused.
"I should like you to stand with me at the wedding. As my Maid of Honour."
The fire in the grate made a small sound. Outside, a cart passed on the street. The world continued with its customary indifference to the specific.
I looked at her. "You are requesting that I serve as your Maid of Honour. At your wedding to Edward Beaumont."
"I am."
"Having just informed me that you spent the better part of a year engineering that wedding using information I gave you in good faith."
"You are the closest person to me," she repeated, with perfect composure. As though the first time had not quite taken and a second application was required.
I said nothing. The silence stretched between us — not companionable, as our silences had once been, but taut in the way of something that has been pulled rather further than its original design intended.
It was Victoria who spoke first.
"Did it not occur to you," she said, carefully, "that perhaps his interest in you was not entirely what you believed it to be? That a man who is preparing to make a formal proposal to a countess might — in the interim — seek more accessible company?"
A small pause. "I believe you loved him entirely. I am simply less persuaded the arrangement was quite so equal as you supposed."
The air left the room.
Accessible. The word settled into my chest with the quiet efficiency of something designed specifically for the purpose.
Not cruel — Victoria was rarely crude enough for cruelty — but precise. The particular observation delivered at the particular moment most likely to find purchase.
I looked at her and found I could not summon the argument against it with the full certainty I required. The letters. His arm across the desk. The practiced fluency of his reassurances. All will be well. You are my light. A man, in the interim, who had never once mentioned that the interim had an expiry.
I had been, in this construction, a pleasant diversion. Accessible. Available. The specific sort of company one keeps whilst one's real intentions are otherwise engaged.
I had given him everything I possessed — my confidence, my trust, the only thing I had that could not be returned — and he had received it in the manner of a man who already knew it was temporary and had simply not troubled himself to mention it.
"You do not know that," I said. My voice was less certain than I would have preferred.
"Perhaps not." She tilted her head. "But you need not take my word for it. Ask him yourself."
I stood. "Where is Edward?"
Something moved across her expression — brief, controlled, not quite a smile but the thing that precedes one in a woman too well-bred to produce the smile itself.
"He has agreed to everything," she said. "All the arrangements. He was quite decided about it." A small pause, placed with the care of a woman who has always known precisely when to pause.
"You could ask him, if you'd like."
Whatever else has occurred. I filed this alongside accelerated the inevitable and accessible and the space where sister used to be, and left her to the afternoon light she had arranged so deliberately around herself.
I walked down the corridor with the careful step of a woman who has decided not to put her hand against the wall for support.
It was a very close thing.