Abigail stood at the closet for a moment after she'd put the dress away, her hand still resting on the door.
Out of sight. That was supposed to help.
It didn't help.
She turned away and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the room—her room, familiar and unchanged—and tried to account for herself honestly, the way she usually could.
The summer party at Blissbury was, without question, the best day of her year. She knew this was a modest thing to say. She knew others would hear it and feel sorry for her, that a single annual banquet should represent a high-water mark of anything. She didn't feel sorry for herself. It simply was what it was.
She never danced—her legs made that impossible on a good day, and the long carriage ride to Blissbury made it worse. She sat in her corner while her mother attended to Julia and the others, and sometimes people glanced over at her with the particular soft expression that meant *how sad, she's only come to sit.* She didn't mind the glances much. She had long since stopped minding.
What she minded was not having it at all.
Eloise would come and find her during the evening, without fail. She would drop into the seat beside her and begin talking—the disasters of the preparation, the feuds she'd decoded from the seating arrangements, gossip collected from three towns, delivered in a low voice with precise dramatic timing. Abigail would listen and occasionally add something, and by the end of it she would know more about what was actually happening in Cambon than most people who lived there.
She wasn't lonely when Eloise was there.
Abigail's face closed.
She thought about Eloise at the Severtons' house, the day she'd come to pack for Blissbury. The easy way she'd handed her bag to Sergeant Thornton—not thinking about it, not making it a moment, just handing it over, the way you handed things to someone you trusted without having to decide to trust them.
Eloise didn't do that. Abigail had known her long enough to know what it meant that she did that now.
*I'll probably spend the rest of my life in Feltham. Better to learn to manage on my own.*
She had said it so matter-of-factly. They'd both said things like that, both made the same quiet accounting of their futures. No marriages, most likely. No particular prospects. Grow old together, keep drinking tea, become the two peculiar women in the village who frightened children with their sharp opinions and excessive books. It had seemed settled.
It had seemed like a plan Eloise was also following.
And now she smiled when she talked about him. Abigail couldn't have explained why that particular detail—a smile, a small change in expression—felt like watching someone slowly walk toward a door she couldn't follow through.
She couldn't say any of this to Eloise. She'd turned it over a hundred times and couldn't find a version of it that didn't sound like accusation, or smallness, or the complaint of someone who had no right to complain. *You're happy, and I resent you for it.* How did you say that to your oldest friend?
So she had said nothing, and locked herself in, and watched the preparations from a distance, and now she was sitting alone in a quiet house while the family went to Blissbury without her.
She wondered if Eloise had noticed, yet, that she wasn't there.
She wondered, and then felt ashamed of wondering, because she had engineered this absence herself and had no right to want it to mean anything.
Abigail took her crutch and went downstairs.
The maid had fallen asleep at the kitchen table, face turned against her folded arms. On the day the whole household decamped for a week, this was simply justice. Abigail moved carefully past her, lifted her hat from the hook without a sound, and let herself out.
If the maid woke and found her gone, she'd insist on coming along, and right now Abigail could not manage anyone else's concern. She wanted the river path, and the sound of water, and no one asking how she was.
The village was unusually quiet. Even those who weren't invited to the banquet seemed to have found somewhere else to be, the way people always did when a celebration pulled at the edges of a place.
She walked toward the south road, arguing with herself in a muted, tired way—*if Eloise has found someone good, you should want that for her, you should be glad, you have always wanted good things for her, what is wrong with you—*
The regret arrived, as it always did, too late to be useful. If she had sorted herself out a week ago, she could have gone. She could have sat in her corner and watched Eloise be happy and tried to be glad about it.
Now the family had taken the horses and the cart, and the banquet had already begun, and the only people making the journey at this hour would be strangers.
She was outside the village when she heard the hooves.
Two horses on the western road, both covered in mud to the shoulder—the deep, particular mud of the bog crossings that locals would never touch. Strangers, then, and recent arrivals, which meant she had no idea who they were or what they wanted.
The deserter was still fresh enough in memory that her feet moved backward before she'd made a decision to move.
Her crutch caught on something uneven.
She went down hard, crutch clattering away from her hand.
Before she had fully registered what had happened, one of the men had dismounted and was beside her, her crutch in his hand, kneeling so that he was not standing over her when he spoke.
"Forgive me—I'm sorry we startled you." His voice was unhurried, careful. The mud on his coat was impressive and appeared to tell quite a story. "My name is Philip Osborne. My companion is Richard Cameron." He gestured briefly toward the other rider. "Could you possibly direct us to Blissbury?"