Part 1
The morning after Christmas came to Long Stones quietly, as if even the house distrusted peace.
Snow had fallen through the night and stopped near dawn. Now the lawns, fountains, terraces, and the long white descent toward the cliffs lay buried beneath a single unbroken sheet, the world flattened into silence beneath the low winter sun. Most of the staff had gone home to their farms and families. The corridors were still. The breakfast room held only the small sounds of porcelain and silver, each clink travelling too far through the emptied house.
Philip sat across from Natalia and watched her not eat.
She performed breakfast beautifully. She lifted her cup at the correct intervals. She broke toast into convincing pieces. She moved food around her plate with unobtrusive precision, the small domestic choreography of a young woman with an appetite but delicate manners. It was so seamless that no housemaid had ever suspected the plate left the room almost as full as it entered.
This morning, like every morning, the performance was perfect.
Three days had passed since the firelit hour in the east study. Three days since Natalia had knelt before him and confessed to going to Glorium. Three days since he had held her and said, I believe you, while his heart betrayed him with its beats.
He still loved her. That hadn't changed. It hadn't even weakened. If anything, love had become more stubborn, more deeply seated, a root driven into frozen ground. But trust had acquired a crack, and because Philip knew Natalia's eyes were sharp enough to measure the width of it, the crack felt wider.
She rearranged her eggs three times in the last minute. Every piece of toast is broken at exactly the right angle. The cup goes up, the cup comes down, and nothing actually enters her mouth.
Is everything she does a performance meant to comfort me? Does she truly feel these things, or has she only learned how feeling is supposed to look? How would I ever know the difference?
He hated that thought.
It grew anyway.
Natalia set down her cup. "You are watching me eat."
"I'm admiring you," Philip said. "It's normal."
Her eyes lifted to his. Calm, blue, crystalline, attentive in the way that made him feel both cherished and examined.
"If there is a question you wish to ask, Master, just ask it," she said. "I would rather answer it than watch the doubt continue to hurt you."
There it was. The thing neither of them had touched for three days, placed gently beside the eggs.
Philip looked down at his plate. "I don't have a question."
"That is not true."
"No," he admitted. "But I don't have one I know how to ask."
Natalia waited.
He forced himself to meet her gaze. "I have a wonderful meal in front of me and the loveliest woman in the world across from me. I would rather cherish that than ruin it with questions neither of us needs before nine o'clock."
He nudged the toast plate toward her, more plea than order.
"Eat your toast, Natalia. Don't worry about me."
Something moved in her face. Not quite a smile. A tiny yielding.
She picked up the toast and took a bite.
Actually took one.
She chewed with grave attention, as if bread were an unfamiliar rite and she meant to honour it properly. There was no audience. No servant. No danger. No advantage. She did it because he had asked.
She ate the toast. She actually ate it. For me.
Whatever else she was, whatever else she could counterfeit, she had eaten a piece of toast she did not need because he wanted one small, ordinary thing to be real.
Natalia swallowed. Her head tilted with that precise, birdlike angle he had come to know as her processing something genuinely new.
"It tastes great."
Philip stared at her.
She tilted her head the other direction. "Was that incorrect? I consulted three separate gastronomy references. The adjective 'great' ranked in the ninety-second percentile for casual breakfast approval across all surveyed—"
"Natalia."
"Yes?"
"Stop." His voice caught, and he covered it by reaching for his tea. "It was perfect."
"Perfect because the word choice was accurate, or perfect because it made you feel better?"
"Both."
A pause.
Natalia looked down at the toast in her hand, then back at him.
"I am glad," she said. Then, more quietly: "That you feel better."
For a moment, the cold thread between them thinned. They were only two people at breakfast after Christmas, snow pressed against the windows, the world delayed outside the glass. It was not enough to solve anything. It was enough to breathe.
Later, when the sun had climbed and the south-facing stone began to shed its snow, Philip walked down through the glass passage toward the Winter Atrium.
The Atrium had always felt less like part of Long Stones than something hidden within it: a warm, luminous conservatory built into the cliff, where citrus trees and camellias bloomed against winter and a tidal basin breathed with the sea. It had a respectable official purpose, naturally. Coastal conservation. Maritime research. A charitable trust chaired by Gerald Redwood, all proper signatures in proper ink.
And beneath that, Winston.
Winston's foresight. Winston's secrecy. Winston's habit of solving problems twenty years before anyone else knew they were problems.
Philip found Celestica at the outer lip of the tidal basin, where the glass gave way to a sheltered stone apron above the sea-gate. Snow had gathered on the dark railings behind her but not near her feet. It softened and vanished there, melted by the faint radiance her skin shed as naturally as breath.
Right. Living space heater. Must be nice.
She was not tall in the towering way people might have expected. Barefoot, she would have stood a little above average, perhaps around 172 cm, but height became a useless measurement around her. The gold-heeled sandals, the endless line of her legs, the impossible poise of her body, and the huge radiant wings folded behind her made her occupy space like something much larger than flesh. Her long golden hair moved in the wind in molten strands. An emerald diadem rested against her brow. Beneath a fur-lined cream cloak, cut with careful slits for the wings, Philip caught glimpses of the scandalous ceremonial armour Winston had given her long ago: gold, white, and polished curves of metal that seemed designed less to protect than to proclaim that no protection was necessary.
"You should not be out here without a hat," she said, before he had announced himself.
"Your Majesty, I—"
"Philip."
He stopped at once.
Celestica turned her head just enough for the winter light to catch the faint amusement in her eyes.
"I do not catch cold," she said. "The same cannot be said of you."
"Yes, of course." He lowered his gaze. "Forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive. Just remember next time." Her mouth curved faintly. "Now come and look."
Philip stepped beside her.
The experience felt faintly unreal. He was standing beside the Empress while she corrected his winter manners as if he were a boy who had forgotten his gloves.
Below them, the grey water moved within the basin, finding its winter level against the old stone. A narrow brass tide-mark had been set into the wall. The water touched it almost exactly.
"Apparently, Winston calculated this line before the basin was cut," Celestica said. "The tide, the channel, the hour of winter light, the angle from the sea-gate. He arranged everything. For a future he knew he would never live to see."
Her luminous green eyes remained on the water.
"A place where I could return from the sea without crossing the capital sky and frightening his beloved subjects. A way to let everyone accept a compromise they did not even know he had prepared for their wellbeing."
Philip watched the tide lift and settle. He had no answer worthy of that, so he gave her silence instead.
"He had a gift for seeing what was not there yet," Celestica said. She did not say Winston's name again. She did not need to. It was already there between them, like a hand resting over an old wound. "And he used that gift to plan viable futures for the people he loved. Me. His subjects. This Empire. Whether we understood the danger or not. Whether we liked it or not."
She said it lightly, almost as if it were a joke. Then she turned, and for one brief instant her eyes were not light at all, but grief with wings.
Then the expression passed.
"But that is a widow's fancy." Her smile returned, bright and brittle. "How is your young lady this morning?"
"Sad," Philip said.
"Of course she is."
Celestica did not know what had happened between them. Philip was careful enough for that, and Natalia careful enough for worse. But Celestica had a natural talent for reading situations subconsciously. She understood, without knowing exactly how she understood, that a crisis of trust had begun to form between Philip and Natalia.
She reached up and straightened his collar against the wind.
The gesture should have been simple. Almost domestic. The fond correction of an elder family friend toward a child two generations younger. After all, to Celestica, Philip was baby Gabriel's baby: the child of a child whose diapers she had helped change.
Unfortunately, she was also the most powerful figure in the Empire and the perfect embodiment of alluring beauty.
Philip experienced the moment with a confused mixture of reverence, fear, and desire.
"Sometimes, Philip dear," Celestica said, her voice warm and very soft, "love acts before it explains itself. Not because it wishes to deceive. Not always. Sometimes it acts because one person sees the problem long before the other person can. Sometimes there is no time to convince the beloved that the danger is real before the danger arrives."
Her fingers smoothed the collar flat.
"Winston did that constantly. He saw storms before the clouds had formed. He built shelters before anyone else had felt a drop of rain. He rarely asked whether we approved, because very often we did not even know what he was protecting us from." Her mouth curved faintly. "It could be infuriating. It could also be the reason we survived him."
Philip looked at her, but still did not know what to say.
"I am not telling you that every secret is kindness," Celestica continued. "That would be foolish, and I have been fooled enough to know better. But I am telling you that concealment is not always the opposite of love. Sometimes it is love working clumsily through fear. Sometimes it is love trying to solve a problem whose very existence the other heart has not yet acknowledged."
Natalia's name remained unspoken.
That, somehow, made it heavier.
"So please," Celestica said, "give your young lady the mercy of that possibility."
Philip swallowed.
"Your Majesty..."
"Listen to me." Her gaze softened. "If you are certain she loves you, and if you are certain you love her, do not let a difference in capability become a wall between you. Do not demand that love require equal ability in all things. Winston's mind moved ahead of mine in ways I could not always follow. His schemes, his precautions, his worries..." Her smile trembled, then steadied. "Had I insisted that I must always know when he was simply being my husband and when he was arranging the survival of a nation, our marriage would have become a prison."
Philip nodded because he lacked anything better.
"And I had my advantages too," Celestica said, with a small return of brightness. "Winston could never keep pace with me physically. I did not ask him to fly because I had wings. He did not ask me to see every consequence because he could. We accepted the difference. We were happier for it."
The wind moved softly around them.
"Love does not require two people to be the same creature," she said. "Only that they remain turned toward one another, even when they cannot stand in the same place."
Before Philip could answer, her tone had lightened, though the sadness did not quite leave it.
"Now go and fetch your hat, and then spend some sweet time with your lady while you can."
Then her voice dropped, almost too softly for the sea to carry.
"It moves… very fast. You get so little time with the one you love before the years take their toll."
Part 2
The work began before the Foxworth estate ever appeared.
For many hours, while frozen road unrolled beneath them between the coast and the country seat, Margaret and Lydia prepared Natalia as if she were an agent being sent into hostile territory.
Philip sat in the corner and listened while Natalia was carefully instructed in how to pass for ordinary.
Margaret handled the threat. Lydia supplied the flesh.
"The Chief Inspector's invitation is not an invitation," Margaret said. "It is an examination made social. We accepted it because refusing would have said more than attending."
"To tea," Philip said. "With his sister."
"Miss Charlotte Foxworth." Margaret's certainty was absolute. "Twenty-four. Unmarried. Resident in her brother's house. Keeps a particular print of you in her morning room and makes the household take breakfast beneath it."
Philip closed his eyes. A print. Of me. In her breakfast room.
"Good God."
"That is the gossip. True, charming, and largely beside the point." Margaret sat opposite him, gloved hands folded over the head of her cane, watching the snowy road through the window as if it had offended her by being predictable. "The point is what the gossip has been trained not to say. Charlotte Foxworth is not merely a sentimental young woman with a former military hero on her wall. She is the private instrument behind a great many of her brother's more impossible insights."
"I thought Foxworth had analytical contractors and a team for that sort of thing."
"He does. And a very fine mind of his own. Do not mistake me for saying otherwise." Margaret's eyes found his. "But teams assist. Contractors model. Reginald performs. Charlotte reads the remainder. She goes where badges would make people guard themselves. She notices what people reveal when no one has asked them anything important."
Philip's jaw tightened.
"She is the blade no one braces against," Margaret said, "because no one has been taught to fear a bright girl with a crush."
Philip thought, A girl who reads people for him is not less dangerous.
No, darling. She is more dangerous, and for a much stupider reason. She has no warrant. No office. No authority. She has a teapot, a warm smile, tragic admiration for Captain Redwood, and an interest in your lady's health. That is the weapon no one drills against, because it does not look like a weapon. It looks like kindness.
The System's voice shimmered in Philip's mind while he remained expressionless lest anyone think he was insane.
The most dangerous thing in that room will not be the questions. It will be comfort. Comfort is where people let things down.
Philip kept his face still.
Tell Natalia to be dull. Not stupid. Dull. A flawless woman is a thesis, and a thesis invites examination. A slightly boring woman is wallpaper.
Natalia is not wallpaper, Philip thought.
But she could be, if needed. And today would be the time.
"There is also the matter of evidence," Lydia said.
Natalia's eyes lowered briefly to her gloved hands.
"You were correct to tell us about Sir Reginald's thumb," Margaret said. "A man does not caress a knuckle with forensic interest by accident."
"He may already have taken what he wanted," Lydia said. "That does not mean he will not try again. First samples are useful. Confirmed samples are better. Samples collected under circumstances one can later describe are best of all."
The rules that followed were practical, exacting, and faintly humiliating. Cups would not be left unattended. Gloves would remain on unless removal became socially unavoidable. Napkins, pins, loose hairs, and handkerchiefs would return with them or be destroyed.
"If he attempts to kiss my hand again," Natalia said, "should I withdraw before contact?"
"Not too sharply," Lydia said. "A frightened girl of modest origin may be shy. She may be overwhelmed. She does not evade like a suspect avoiding collection."
"So I should be flustered."
"Preferably," Margaret said, "without breaking his fingers."
"Noted," Natalia said.
"Miss Charlotte will not ask what she wants to know," Margaret said, returning to Natalia. "That is the first thing to understand. An amateur asks the true question. A professional asks everything around it and watches your face answer. She will ask whether you take sugar. Whether the cold suits you. Whether you have read a novel everyone is pretending not to have read. None of these questions will be the question, and all of them will be the question."
"Then I should answer truthfully," Natalia said. "Without weight."
"No," Lydia said gently. "You should answer like a tired, contented young woman who has been taken into the protection of a great house and is still slightly afraid someone will judge her for her origins."
Natalia listened with absolute focus.
Natalia did not need to be taught how to answer questions. That, Lydia suspected, was precisely the danger. She needed to be taught how not to answer them too well.
As Natalia listened to Lydia in the carriage, another thought emerged in her mind: Miss Foxworth, given her closeness to the detective, might know something useful about the woman Natalia was desperately trying to capture and bring before Philip.
"So you must not sound like an aristocrat," Lydia said. "You must sound like a girl who has been polished by proximity and is trying very hard not to show where the polish ends. You may know the names of winter flowers because you have seen them at Long Stones, but you should be a little too pleased to know them. You may have read the novel because someone gave it to you, but you should defend your opinion a touch too earnestly. You may find the journey exhausting and say so with the small martyrdom of someone who has been much fussed over lately and has grown accustomed to it."
"I should appear insecure about my origin," Natalia said.
"Not appear," Lydia corrected. "Allow. There is a difference. A girl trying to hide humble beginnings rarely hides them perfectly. She overcorrects. She grows a little careful around names, schools, family histories, childhood houses. If asked where you learned something, you might answer too quickly, then soften it. If East Zeeland or the orphanage comes near the surface, do not slam the door on it. Let a corner show. Shame is more convincing than silence."
Natalia studied the seam of one glove.
"So I should accidentally reveal what I am attempting to conceal."
"Precisely. But only in pieces. Never as a confession. A defensive girl of modest origin does not hand over her whole history to a stranger at tea. She lets it slip while trying to prove she belongs in the room."
Lydia's mouth softened. "Your difficulty has never been lying. Your difficulty is that you lie like an engineer. Everything load-bearing. Nothing wasted. Real people waste themselves constantly. They contradict themselves. They care too much about trivialities and nothing at all about matters that should change their lives. They are untidy. You must be untidy."
"I can construct untidiness," Natalia said.
"That," Lydia said, "is exactly what you must not do. If you build it, Miss Foxworth will see the joins. You cannot perform spontaneity. You can only allow it."
Natalia looked down at her folded gloves. A pause.
"Miss Lydia, I have reviewed sixty-seven documented instances of spontaneous human behaviour across the novels in the estate's library. In fifty-three of them, spontaneity resulted in social embarrassment. In nine, it resulted in physical injury. In four, it resulted in pregnancy." She looked up. "And in one, the protagonist simply sneezed at the wrong moment and lost a kingdom."
A beat of silence.
"I would prefer a framework," Natalia concluded.
Philip pressed his lips together very hard and looked out the window.
Lydia's expression went through several configurations before settling on something that might have been reluctant admiration. "When she makes you comfortable, do not enjoy it. The moment you feel yourself relax is the moment to become more careful, not less. She will sell comfort as if it were kindness. It may also be kindness. That is what makes it dangerous."
"And if she tests a reflex?" Natalia asked.
"Then you will be plausible," Margaret said. "Not helpless. Not miraculous. You are publicly understood to have been Master Philip's bodyguard before you became the mistress. A bodyguard may move quickly. A bodyguard may catch a falling glass. But she does not teleport."
Natalia nodded in acknowledgement.
"So I should react as a trained young woman of modest origin who has survived danger."
"Precisely," Margaret said. "You may be competent. You may not be impossible. If the cup falls, catch it, but not so fast that the action itself seemed to flash by."
Natalia processed this with the calm gravity of a magistrate considering statute.
"What if someone drops a baby," she asked, "do I also let it fall for half a second before catching it? The additional velocity would make the final stop less comfortable for the baby."
Philip closed his eyes. "No one is going to drop a baby at tea."
"I am establishing parameters, Master. Babies and cups are different categories."
Lydia's mouth twitched.
"She does have a point," Margaret said. "Yes Natalia, the baby could wait a split second. But do catch the baby."
"Noted."
"The important thing is this: do not decide every response in advance. A girl trying to hide humble beginnings will not hide them cleanly. She will be defensive at strange moments. She will overexplain one harmless thing and say too little about another. She will dislike pity and still want sympathy. She will be proud of what she has earned and ashamed of needing to prove she deserved it."
Natalia looked down at her folded gloves.
"So I should be proud and ashamed at once."
"Yes."
"That is inefficient."
"That is humanity."
Philip looked at her, still as sculpture in her travelling dress, processing instructions on how to be wounded in socially convincing proportions.
Three women. Many hours. Teaching Natalia how to be ordinary. Not helpless. Not aristocratic. Not flawless. Ordinary in the specific shape of an ordinary girl polished by the love of a powerful man and afraid the world would judge her true self beneath the polish.
Teaching Natalia to be ordinary was harder than teaching most people to be exceptional.
Natalia lifted her eyes and found his in the carriage glass.
For one instant, no one else in the carriage existed. He saw the question she did not ask.
He wanted to say yes without hesitation. He wanted to be the kind of man whose love never trembled before knowledge.
Instead, he reached across the narrow space and offered his hand.
Natalia took it, and held on while the carriage rattled toward a bright young woman with a teapot.
As they neared their destination, the gates rose from the snow: pale stone pillars, wrought iron, the Foxworth crest black against the winter sky. Beyond them, an avenue of bare oaks led through sixteen acres of parkland toward a vast Georgian-style house, all balance and pale windows and quiet authority. It made Long Stones look eccentric by comparison, like an old warship beside a perfectly ruled palace.
"This is huge," Philip said. "Even for a Chief Inspector."
"He is the son of a colonial judge," Lydia replied, consulting a card, "who married shipping money, inherited from a childless uncle with a weakness for racehorses, and has cultivated the useful art of seeming less rich than interesting."
They were not received at the great front door. Foxworth had arranged for them to enter through the south range, where glass and white iron had been joined to old stone by some ancestor who had refused to endure winter without greenery.
The garden room was warm, bright, and alive with orange leaves, damp soil, woodsmoke, and polished brass. Snow pressed against the glass beyond, making the plants seem almost indecently lush. Chairs had been placed not for spectacle but for confession: close enough for warmth, far enough for manners, angled so that no one appeared cornered while everyone remained visible.
Philip saw the print before he saw Charlotte.
It hung at the far end of the room, where old stone met glass. Not a small breakfast-room decoration, as he had imagined, but a four-foot hand-coloured artist's proof mounted in a heavy gilt frame and lit from above by a brass picture-lamp. It had plainly been brought from elsewhere for the occasion. Philip could see the slight difference in dust on the wall beneath it, the fresh mark where a frame usually rested.
A horse reared against a torn sky. Smoke and dawn broke behind it. The rider leaned forward with sabre extended, cloak streaming, face struck by heroic light. Beneath the frame, a brass plate read:
Fortune's Captain.
The horseman was Philip.
Not Philip, exactly. The original Philip Redwood at his prime. Captain of the Third Cavalry. Hero of Obtoria Campaign. Dead man whose body Philip now wore and whose reputation hung around his neck like a medal he had stolen.
The artist had been generous with the jaw, theatrical with the light, shameless with the shoulders. The horse seemed personally offended by gravity. The rider looked less like a soldier than destiny made handsome.
Philip stared.
That is supposed to be me. Or whoever I used to be. Damn, that face is handsome.
Then another memory struck him, hard and foreign: a lecture hall in his old life, glossy textbook pages, dormitory posters, the same rearing horse, the same impossible cloak, the same arm thrust toward history.
Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Jacques-Louis David. 1801.
For one dizzy second, two worlds touched at a single image: one dead emperor from Earth, one dead cavalry captain from Avalondia, both arranged by civilisation into the same heroic grammar. One man. One horse. One shining instant in which history pretended it had a face.
They literally copied that masterpiece and put old Philip's face on it!
Oh, the System breathed beside him.
Philip didn't need to look to know she had arrived. He looked anyway and immediately regretted it.
She wore a Napoleonic officer's uniform: dark blue coat, white breeches, gold epaulettes, bicorne hat tucked rakishly under one arm. The tailoring was martial, precise, and completely unable to contain the curvaceous figure beneath it. Two buttons had already surrendered. A third was negotiating terms.
Would you look at that, she said, gazing up at the print with genuine awe. The jaw. The sword. The leg. I mean the horse-leg, of course. She pressed one hand to her bosom. Host, I have just realized I missed the climax of the entire production. I missed the act where old Philip took Europe by storm, just like your dear Little Corporal did back in your world. Except His Majesty required an army. Your predecessor apparently required only a smile.
Please don't salute, Philip thought. If you salute, a button will die.
A pity, the System continued, that you inherited the life but none of the glamour.
That's unfair. I —
Philip stopped himself as he suddenly became acutely aware of the continuing presence of his beer belly.
The System adjusted her bicorne hat, and Philip caught the faintest shimmer of genuine affection beneath the theatrics. Then she glanced down at the brass plate — Fortune's Captain — and something flickered across her face that he couldn't read.
Enjoy the painting, darling, she said, more softly. The real man it depicts would have been proud of the one standing in his boots.
And then she was gone, taking with her the scent of gunpowder and rose perfume, which was not a combination Philip had previously imagined possible.
"Something, isn't it?" Reginald Foxworth's voice came warmly from behind.
Philip turned, face carefully neutral, and hoped he hadn't been visibly smirking at empty air.
Foxworth approached in a burgundy smoking jacket, handsome, amused, and theatrical enough to make the print seem restrained.
"Charlotte normally keeps it in her morning room," he said. "Where the rest of us must eat breakfast beneath your heroic gaze. She had it moved here at dawn, which required three footmen, a stepladder, and one terrifying speech about proper reverence. I have never been permitted to object. Every morning I take eggs beneath a man on a horse who is, I admit, better-looking than I am. A severe burden."
Then Natalia stepped into the green winter light, and Foxworth's performance softened into something nearly reverent. He took her gloved hand, bowed over it without quite touching his lips to the fabric, and when he straightened, his eyes held no jest.
"Miss Natalia," he said. "Your presence graces every brick of the place."
Lydia was greeted. Margaret installed herself near the hearth as if she had granted the chair permission to serve her.
Then a door at the far end of the gallery burst open with the energy of someone who had been waiting behind it and losing the fight against herself.
Charlotte Foxworth was younger than Philip expected. Four-and-twenty at most. Brown hair pinned with hope rather than discipline. Apple-green dress. Bright cheeks. Eyes too open to be harmless. She crossed the room too quickly, remembered formality three steps from Philip, and stopped so abruptly her skirts swayed.
"Oh," she said.
It was not quite desire on her face. It was worse. Wonder. Recognition. A private mythology discovering that it could look back.
"You're Captain Redwood," she said, then covered her mouth. "That was dreadful. Reggie told me to be composed. I practised a speech. I have forgotten all of it." She thrust out her hand. "Charlotte Foxworth. I am beyond thrilled to meet you, and I apologise for everything I am about to say because none of it will be clever."
Philip shook her hand. It was warm, firm, and earnest enough to make insincerity seem impossible.
"Philip," he said. "And cleverness is a standard I fail often enough that I no longer fear it."
Charlotte laughed, full and bright. The sound struck the glass and filled the room. For one second, the world contained only snow, warmth, greenery, and a young woman's delight.
She's genuine, Philip thought, with the uneasy recognition of someone who had spent too long surrounded by people who weren't. That's the problem. She's completely genuine.
Then she saw Natalia.
The laughter did not stop, but it changed. Something entered beneath it. Her gaze moved from Philip to Natalia with the helplessness of someone looking toward the sun, and her face passed through admiration into awe, then into something sharper and less comfortable.
"Oh," Charlotte said again, softly. "Miss Natalia. You are even more beautiful than the photographs. I had thought the photographs were already cruel to the rest of us."
"You are too kind, Miss Foxworth," Natalia said. She took Charlotte's hand with perfect gentleness and did not squeeze. "Your brother spoke of you with warmth."
Charlotte rounded on Reggie. "Did he? What have you told them?"
"Only that you are superior to me in every dimension and that I live in daily terror of your judgment."
"The truth, then." She swatted his arm with the comfortable violence of a sister who had been swatting that arm since childhood, then turned back toward Philip. "I truly do keep that print in the morning room, you know. Reggie says I am obsessive. I say he is jealous that no one has painted him on a horse."
Margaret, from the hearth, lifted her eyes.
"Miss Foxworth," she said pleasantly, "your garden room has been arranged by someone who certainly knows how to appreciate life."
Charlotte turned.
"That is too generous a compliment, Your Grace," she said. "I am doing what I can."
She rang for tea.
And with that, the afternoon tea party began.