Lucien, for his part, endowed no dramatic charities in Peregrine's name. He did something smaller and harder: he sat with his new man of business every Thursday and read every paper that bore his crest before it left the house. He wrote the letters Isolde had required in his own hand. Mr. Trent at Brooks's later told a friend that the Duke of Thornmere had corrected a rumor "without asking for applause," which, in London, was a kind of legend in miniature.
He also declined, twice, to discuss Miss Fenwick at tables where men hoped for a spicy ending. The second refusal earned him a reputation for sudden dullness that he appeared willing to endure.
Christmas passed in the Fenwick house without much theater. They attended church. They ate a modest bird. Harriet insisted on a single sprig of holly on the mantel because, she said, grief should not be allowed to confiscate every custom. Isolde read Dryden by the fire and did not pretend the lines were written for her. Mrs. Fenwick slept through the afternoon like someone storing strength.
On Boxing Day a card arrived from Lady Prudence: *The milder parts have been digested. The sharper parts are being blamed on Vale, which is incomplete but useful. Do not correct the incompleteness in public. Correct it in drawers.* Isolde burned the card after memorizing it. Some allies preferred not to leave handwriting behind.
In January, a tradesman who had once refused Isolde's mother credit on the strength of club talk reversed himself with an apology so oily it required Croft's translation. The translation was: Thornmere's correction letters had arrived, and fear had changed direction. Isolde accepted the restored account without offering the man her hand. Manners, she was learning, were not the same as absolution either.
On a cold afternoon near the turn of the year, Isolde walked with Lady Harriet in Hyde Park, both of them wrapped against the wind. Hooves thudded on the Row. Somewhere a vendor called about roasted nuts. Frost made the grass brittle. Harriet linked her arm through Isolde's.
"You could still marry money and be done with worry," Harriet said, not seriously.
"I could still learn Italian and be done with England," Isolde replied, equally unserious. Then, quieter: "I want a life that does not require me to forget him in order to continue."
"Then continue without forgetting," Harriet said. "That is the only grown ending I trust."
They walked on. Isolde thought of cards face down on green baize, of a crest in cracked red wax, of a young man's smirk vanishing when truth arrived without permission. She thought of her own voice saying *Then deal*, and of all the dealing that had followed—ledgers, seals, letters, the slow labor of making a powerful house admit a wound.
She did not forgive the crest. She did not need to. She had made it answer.
And in a city that preferred its women ornamental and its dukes unexamined, that answer—imperfect, documented, unfinished—was as close to justice as paper and courage could buy.
Near the end of winter, Lucien requested—through Croft, properly—a final interview with Isolde present, not to reopen terms, but to place into her hands a bound copy of the reformed seal protocols of Thornmere: who might use which matrix, under what countersignature, with what register. It was a dry gift. Isolde valued it more than flowers.