"You will not speak of this here," the duchess said.
"Then where?" he asked. "In the library, where you prefer truths to be filed? In the hall, where Sir Walter's man is counting the hours until dinner? She is standing in front of me. I thought she was gone. You let me think she was gone."
"I let you think what would keep this house from becoming a story in other houses," Helena said. Her temper was not heat. It was iron cooled into a shape that would hold. "Your brother was three months in the ground. The estate is entailed and the debts are not. A cousin in London would sell the plate if he could make you look unfit for your own chair. A clandestine marriage to a wool factor's daughter, done by a chaplain who is conveniently dead, is not a romance. It is a weapon. I took it out of other men's hands."
"You put it in my sewing room," he said, and the bitterness surprised all three of them. "Under another name. Where you could correct her seams."
Mara almost laughed. It came out as a breath. "She does correct them," she said. "They are sometimes crooked. I am not a saint you mislaid, your grace. I am a woman who can sew and who was your wife for eleven days before the world resumed. If you mean to be shocked, be shocked at the correct thing."
The duchess stared at her as if a new and unwelcome intelligence had entered the house without a letter of introduction.
"Wife," she said.
"Yes."
"We will not use that word where a maid can hear it through a door."
"Then close the door," Edmund said.
Helena looked at him for a long moment. She was not seeing the boy she had sent to a regiment to have the softness sweated out of him. She was seeing a man who might, within the hour, do an irreparable thing for a reason she considered private. She shut the door herself. The muslin stayed over her arm.
"Speak, then," she said. "Both of you. And understand that I will not be made a villain in a play to ease your consciences. I did what kept you alive in the only world there is."