The morning after she said it, the house seemed too small for the size of the words still echoing in her chest.
*I love you.*
It was absurd, Mira thought as she stared at the ceiling, that three simple syllables could make a well-built Hanover Square townhouse feel like a hat-box.
Sally tiptoed in with the breakfast tray, stopping short when she saw Mira already sitting up, hair unbound and wild around her shoulders.
“Oh!” Sally blinked. “You’re awake. Early.”
“Yes,” Mira said, folding her hands in her lap to keep from pressing them to her racing heart. “I seem to have misplaced sleep.”
Sally set the tray down and began fussing with the curtains. “Must’ve dropped it last night. It was a *late* one, Mrs. Willoughby says. She said if you weren’t up by noon, she’d send Daniel up with a bucket.”
Mira’s pulse did something unhelpful. “Mr. Ferris is here?”
“Not yet,” Sally said. “But he will be. He always does. Like a stray what’s learned where the scraps are.”
“Charming,” Mira murmured.
Sally busied herself with the teapot. “Did you…er…” She fidgeted. “Did you have a nice evening, ma’am?”
“Yes,” Mira said, and was surprised at her own honesty.
“Good.” Sally hesitated, then burst out, “I like him.”
“Who?” Mira asked, though she knew.
“Mr. Ferris,” Sally said, cheeks pink. “He makes you laugh. You haven’t laughed like that since—since before. With Mr. Godwin.”
Mira swallowed. “He does,” she agreed.
Sally nodded vigorously. “And he looks at you different. Not like them other men what see a widow and think ‘cheap house’ or ‘easy pickings.’ He looks like…like you’re a book he wants to read *proper,* not just peek at the pictures.”
Mira choked on a mouthful of toast.
“Sally,” she said when she could breathe, “you must stop listening to Cook’s cousin.”
Sally grinned, unrepentant. “He has good metaphors.”
“Bad habits are often wrapped in good words,” Mira said. “Remember that.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sally said. “But…you *do* like him. Proper-like. Don’t you?”
Mira stared at the teapot.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I do.”
Sally beamed, as if she had orchestrated the whole thing.
“Don’t tell Mrs. Willoughby,” Mira added quickly. “She will…explode.”
“She already knows,” Sally said. “She said as how she’d eat her favorite bonnet if you didn’t. Not that she wears it; she just likes knowin’ it’s there.”
Mira pressed a hand to her eyes. “Of course she does.”
Sally, oblivious, hummed as she poured the tea.
The day did not allow extended indulgence in tender thoughts.
By the time Mira came down to the morning room, her heart had rearranged itself into something resembling function again. Love, she decided, would have to sit in the corner and keep quiet until she had time to take it out and examine it properly.
Mrs. Willoughby and Lady Bennett were already at the breakfast table, the former in a wrapper the color of overripe peaches, the latter in slate grey that could have been mourning or merely habit.
“You look…luminous,” Mrs. Willoughby announced the moment Mira entered. “Either you’ve found God or Ferris said something foolish and you decided to keep him.”
Mira poured coffee. “Good morning.”
Lady Bennett peered at her over the rim of her cup. “Glowing,” she pronounced. “It is either love or fever. If it is fever, stay away; my constitution is too old for experiments.”
“It is not fever,” Mira said.
“Love, then,” Lady Bennett said briskly. “Excellent. It will make you even more dangerous. Men in love are predictable. Women in love are not.”
“Speak for yourself,” Mrs. Willoughby said. “I have always been delightfully unpredictable, with or without sentiment.”
Lady Bennett sniffed. “You simply forget what you planned to do.”
“Semantics,” Mrs. Willoughby said.
Mira felt her cheeks heating.
“I spoke to him,” she admitted.
Mrs. Willoughby sat up straighter. “You *what*?”
“Told him,” Mira said, taking an unwise gulp of coffee. It burned her tongue. She barely noticed. “That I…love him.”
Cutlery paused.
Even Lady Bennett’s eyebrows reached a new altitude.
“And?” Mrs. Willoughby demanded.
“And nothing,” Mira said. “We did not…do anything. We merely spoke.”
Mrs. Willoughby clutched her chest. “I am disappointed.”
Lady Bennett’s mouth twitched. “I am relieved,” she said. “Had you flung yourself at him in the street, half of London would have expired on the spot. Their hearts are very fragile.”
“They will die of something eventually,” Mrs. Willoughby said. “Why not romance?”
Mira set her cup down with care. “We chose to wait,” she said. “Until…things are less precarious.”
Lady Bennett snorted. “There is no time in this world when things are ‘less precarious.’ There is only ‘now’ and ‘oh dear, I shouldn’t have waited.’”
“Thank you for the comfort,” Mira said dryly.
“You did a brave thing,” Mrs. Willoughby said more gently. “To say it first. Men like Ferris will dither for years.”
“I know,” Mira said. “It is why I did not want him to carry that weight alone. He has enough.”
“And now you have it too,” Lady Bennett said. “Shared burdens are heavier, not lighter. Do not let the poets fool you.”
Mira huffed a laugh. “You are determined to strip every romantic notion from my mind.”
“Yes,” Lady Bennett said. “If anything remains when I am done, it will be worth keeping.”
***
Daniel did not come in the morning.
He arrived just after luncheon, the butler announcing him with his usual air of having been morally affronted by the man’s existence.
“Mr. Daniel Ferris, madam.”
Mira’s pulse jumped.
She was in the smaller sitting room, a book open in her lap. She set it aside, smoothing her skirts.
Daniel stepped in, bowing to Mrs. Willoughby and Lady Bennett before turning to her.
For a half-second, the room narrowed to just him: his smile, his eyes, the way his shoulders relaxed when he saw her.
“Mrs. Godwin,” he said. “Lady Bennett. Mrs. Willoughby.”
“Ferris,” Lady Bennett said. “You look annoyingly alive.”
“Your disappointment sustains me,” he said.
Mrs. Willoughby eyed them both. “Well,” she said. “I have embroidery to neglect elsewhere.”
Lady Bennett rose as well. “I have a magistrate to bully. You two may stare at each other unsupervised for five minutes.”
They swept out.
Silence fell, soft and charged.
Daniel stepped closer.
“I was going,” he said lightly, “to pretend nothing…changed. To speak of Milton and Harcourt and the scandal sheets as if yesterday were like any other.”
“And?” she asked.
“And I find,” he said, “that I am not that good an actor.”
Her lips curved. “No. You are terrible at pretending.”
He smiled.
He did not reach for her.
She did not reach for him.
But they both moved, as if by some unseen tug, toward the settee by the window, sitting close enough that her skirts brushed his knee.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I do not know,” she said honestly. “Different. The same. Lighter. Heavier.”
“Accurate,” he said. “My condolences. Love is a persistent condition.”
“Do you regret…anything?” she asked quietly.
He looked at her, his eyes unexpectedly grave.
“No,” he said. “Do you?”
“No,” she said. “Terrifying as it is, I…do not.”
He relaxed, minutely.
“Good,” he said. “Because I don’t know how to fall *less* in love now that you’ve decided to join me.”
She huffed. “You say things in the most inconvenient ways.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
They sat in companionable silence for a moment.
“Milton has been very busy,” he said at last, as if remembering they lived in a world beyond their shared orbit. “He’s been seen in conference with Arden twice. Harcourt refuses to see him. Pell lies low. Caine…” He shrugged.
“Caine does whatever amuses him,” she said.
“Exactly,” Daniel said. “At present, that seems to be…observing us.”
“Do you think he will tire?” she asked.
“Of us?” Daniel tilted his head. “Eventually. Of the game? Never.”
She nodded.
He watched her for a beat, then said, “I have something for you.”
Her pulse jumped again. “What?”
He reached into his coat and drew out a small, worn book.
Her breath caught.
“This was under the floorboards in Godwin’s office,” he said softly. “I helped Cobb clear out some of the papers they’d left. We missed it the first time. It fell when we moved the desk. I thought you’d want it.”
She took it, hands trembling.
Thomas’s hand.
His small private notebook, the leather scuffed where he’d tapped it with his thumb, the tie frayed.
“You read it?” she whispered.
“No,” Daniel said. “I opened it once, saw his hand, and…closed it. It felt…like walking into a room where I was not invited yet.”
Her throat closed.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I thought,” he said, voice roughening, “that if we are to build something—this strange, fragile, wonderful thing between us—it should have room for him too. Not as a ghost between us. As…history. Yours. Mine. Ours.”
Tears pricked.
She blinked them away.
“You say the most ridiculous, beautiful things,” she said huskily.
“Yes,” he said. “I am very annoying.”
She smiled through the wetness.
Later, alone in her room, she opened the notebook.
Thomas’s entries here were different from the sharp, anxious lines of the last months.
These were earlier. Younger. Filled with exclamation marks and underlined words.
*March 2 – Met young clerk today. Ferris. Red hair. Questions too big for his salary. May be useful.*
She laughed, a choked sound.
*April 15 – Mira scolded me today for leaving muddy boots on parlor rug. She said, “You are not the river, you may not leave bits of yourself everywhere.” I thought: I want to.*
Her heart squeezed.
There were entries about ventures, of course. Numbers. Ships. Names.
But also:
*June 10 – Ferris argued again. Says Pell too slick. He may be right. But profit sings louder than caution. I must be careful not to let song drown sense.*
*August 23 – Mira danced with me in the parlor. She laughed. I coughed. She kept laughing. I am a very lucky man.*
She closed the book gently.
Grief and love tangled.
She did not feel as if she were betraying Thomas by loving Daniel.
She felt, oddly, as if she were…fulfilling something he had wanted: that she not be left a ghost in his margins.
She tucked the notebook under her pillow.
For a while, it would be there.
Then, perhaps, she would move it to a shelf where both men’s hands might rest.
***
The days that followed were, in their own way, more dangerous than the overt crises had been.
There was less to *do*, on the surface.
Harcourt’s affairs crawled through legal processes.
Arden’s clerks totted up discrepancies.
Milton, true to his reluctant word, made a small but significant speech in a Board of Trade committee about the “urgent necessity of reevaluating certain long-standing practices in colonial imports.”
“It will bore half the room to sleep,” Lady Bennett reported, “but the other half will hear the word ‘urgent’ and twitch.”
Pell remained out of sight, sending only the occasional cryptic note through Cobbs and Bess.
*Do not let them hang me alone,* one read.
“Poetic,” Daniel said, when Mira showed it to him. “Self-serving, but poetic.”
Caine, meanwhile, slipped in and out of their days like a shadow.
Sometimes a nod in a street.
Sometimes a sardonically phrased note.
Once, astonishingly, a crate of oranges arrived at Mrs. Willoughby’s kitchen with no sender indicated, only a card:
*For Mrs. Godwin, who prefers fruit to flowers.*
“Smuggled, no doubt,” Mrs. Willoughby said, biting into one. “Tastes of sin. Delicious.”
Mira ate one and thought of ships.
Through it all, her love for Daniel settled into her like a new piece of furniture in a familiar room.
At first, she bumped into it constantly.
Then, gradually, she learned its corners.
They did not change their outward pattern much.
They still walked in the square after dinner, hands not quite touching.
They still argued over ledgers and strategies at Mrs. Willoughby’s little writing table.
They still went to taverns (fewer now) and tea-parties (more, irritatingly) and read scandal sheets, snorting.
Only sometimes, now, did their fingers brush and linger a heartbeat longer.
Only sometimes did his gaze drop, unintended, to her mouth, and her stomach flip.
Only sometimes did she lean a fraction too close over a column of figures and feel his breath warm against her temple.
It was, Mira thought, a different kind of peril.
A sweet one.
She was content, for the moment, to let it simmer.
There was time.
There had to be.
---