Half Past Three

"Sleep is a treacherous kindness. It gives you back your strength and then delivers you to the very thing you needed strength for."

Something was touching my shoulder.

I surfaced from a depth I had not expected to reach — thick, black, dreamless sleep that had swallowed me whole. My body resisted the return. Every limb felt weighted, pinned to the mattress by an exhaustion so complete it had become a physical substance, poured into me like lead. The room was darker than it should have been. The thin light through the curtains had shifted from morning grey to something deeper, more amber — afternoon, then. Hours had passed.

The hand on my shoulder again. Firmer now.

"Madelyn."

Victoria's voice. Close. In my room.

I opened my eyes and the world assembled itself in fragments. The canopy above me — dark wood, carved roses. The plum wool of my dress twisted beneath me where I had fallen asleep without pulling back the covers. The bedside table, and on it, the empty Talisker glass catching the last of the afternoon light. I stared at the glass for a confused moment, and then the morning flooded back — all of it, every terrible piece — and the weight in my limbs became something else entirely.

"Madelyn, you must wake up."

Victoria stood beside the bed, still in her riding habit, her gloved hand resting on my shoulder. Her face hovered above me, and even through the fog of waking I registered that something was different about her expression. Victoria's composure was as reliable as the walls of this house. I had seen her maintain it through colonial dinner parties that would have reduced lesser women to tears, through social slights that would have sent me to bed for a week, through every manner of difficulty that Van Diemen's Land had thrown at two Portsmouth girls far from home. But now there was a tightness around her mouth, a brightness in her eyes that I could only describe as agitation.

Victoria did not become agitated. Victoria became sharp, became focused, became formidable. She did not flutter.

She was fluttering now.

"I knocked," she said, as though this required explanation. "Several times. You did not answer. I was concerned."

I pushed myself upright. The room tilted and then righted itself. My hair had come partially undone during sleep — pins loosened, strands falling across my face — and my mouth tasted of oak and smoke and the sour residue of hours spent breathing through parted lips.

"What time is it?" My voice came out scraped and hoarse, barely my own.

"Half past three. Madelyn, listen to me." Victoria's hand left my shoulder and found my wrist instead, gripping it with an urgency that cut through the remaining fog. "Thomas has received word — the constable has been seen on the Hobart Town road. He will be here within the quarter hour."

The words landed one at a time, each requiring its own moment to be understood. Constable. Hobart Town road. Quarter hour.

I was on my feet before I had consciously decided to stand. The room swayed. Victoria caught my elbow and held it until the floor steadied beneath me.

"I must—" I started, but the sentence had nowhere to go. I must what? Prepare? Compose myself? Become, once again, the bewildered wife who knew nothing of her husband's secrets?

I caught sight of myself in the cheval glass and the woman reflected there was barely presentable. The plum dress was creased where I had lain on it, the fabric bunched at one hip and flattened across the bodice. My hair — the simple chignon I had managed that morning — had half collapsed, auburn strands hanging loose against my neck. My face was pale, yes, and the shadows beneath my eyes had deepened during sleep rather than diminished. But there was something else there too, something I had not expected. I looked rested. Not well — not recovered — but the wild, fractured quality that had defined my reflection all morning had been replaced by something quieter. The sleep and the Talisker had done their work.

"You cannot receive him looking like that," Victoria said, already moving toward my dressing table. Her hands found the brush and a handful of pins. "Sit."

I sat. Victoria's fingers worked through my hair with quick, competent strokes — not gentle, exactly, but efficient. She had done this before, during our girlhood in Portsmouth, when we had dressed for assemblies and dances in each other's bedrooms, passing pins back and forth and arguing over ribbons. The memory surfaced unbidden — a different world, a different life, two girls who had no idea what lay ahead of them.

"Hold still." She twisted the hair up and secured it with three pins in rapid succession. Not as neat as Sarah's work, but it would do. "Now stand."

I stood. Victoria circled me once, assessing. Her gloved fingers found the bunched fabric at my hip and smoothed it, then straightened the shawl at my shoulders. She stepped back, tilted her head, and gave a small, dissatisfied nod.

"You look like a woman who has been sleeping in her clothes," she said. "Which, I suppose, is at least honest. Though perhaps not the impression we wish to make upon the constabulary."

"It will have to suffice." I reached for the empty glass on the bedside table — an instinct to tidy, to remove the evidence of Thomas's quiet act of care — but Victoria's hand got there first. She picked it up, glanced at it, and then at me. One eyebrow lifted by a fraction.

"Talisker," she said. Not a question.

"Thomas thought it advisable. Given the circumstances."

"Did he." The eyebrow remained elevated for a moment longer, then lowered. Victoria set the glass back down without further comment, though I could see the observation being filed away behind those sharp hazel eyes, slotted into whatever catalogue of the day's irregularities she had been compiling since morning.

From below — distant but distinct — came the sound of the front door opening, and with it, voices. Thomas's measured tones, and beneath them, another voice. Male. Unfamiliar. Carrying the particular weight of someone accustomed to asking questions and expecting answers.

Victoria and I looked at each other.

"The constable," she said.

I drew a breath. Smoothed the front of my dress one final time. Felt the iron weight of the key in my pocket, and beside it, the crinkle of William's letter — both still there, both still mine, both still secret.

"Then we had best go down," I said.

We left the bedchamber together. The corridor stretched before us, the afternoon light falling in long slabs through the tall windows, and as we reached the top of the staircase the voices below grew clearer. Thomas's words were indistinct but his tone carried the particular formality he reserved for official visitors — measured, respectful, giving nothing away. The other voice was asking something. I could not make out the words, only the shape of them — the rising inflection, the pause that waited to be filled.

Victoria's hand found my arm as we began to descend. Her grip was firm — steadying, guiding, the same gesture she had used that morning when she steered me to the settee. I did not pull away. My legs were steady enough, but her hand on my arm told a different story to anyone watching from below: here was a woman being supported by her faithful friend, descending to face the worst day of her life.

Let them see that. Let them see exactly that.

We reached the landing and the entrance hall opened beneath us. Thomas stood near the front door, his back straight, his hands at his sides. And beside him — taller by an inch, broader across the shoulders, wearing the constable's uniform as though it had been built around him rather than merely put on — stood a man I had never seen before.

He looked up as we appeared on the staircase. Blue eyes. Direct. The kind of gaze that arrived at a person before the person arrived at it.

I met it, and held it, and continued down the stairs with Victoria's hand upon my arm and William's letter burning in my pocket.