The wind outside The Grange howled, and the sound of snow and hail battering the side of the house nearly drowned out Angelica at the pianoforte. The late spring storm had come upon them sudden and unexpected, as if mirroring Mercy’s tempestuous mood.

Never had a week felt longer or more wretched. Perhaps she exaggerated; she had certainly experienced worse, but time and distance had dulled past pains, even the ones that had made her lose her words and lock her heart away. This new paroxysm of torturous infatuation was a fresh and inescapable torment.

Why did I send it? Why?

She groaned in mortification as she ran the feather duster over the bust of Hamilton in the hallway, and his stone smirk seemed to mock her inner turmoil.

Not feeling quite so superior to my Eliza now, are you?

She swiped at the bust with a vicious barrage—as vicious an attack as could be meted out by feathers—but the smirk remained. So did the ache in her chest.

She’d thought herself so careful over the past several weeks. She’d had a system in place for when each letter arrived. She wouldn’t be foolish enough to allow herself to tear at the seal like a lovesick girl waiting for word from her lover. It was simply correspondence between two friends, she reasoned. She wouldn’t want anyone to be confused about that, least of all herself.

She waited forty-five minutes exactly before opening each letter. Forty-five minutes of telling herself that she wasn’t excited, that each slide of the minute hand across the clock face didn’t make her pulse race faster until her whole being was fairly throbbing. That finally sitting at her desk, removing the seal, and revealing Andromeda’s barely restrained script didn’t give her a delicious gratification that swept down from the nape of her neck to her toes.

She had developed a strict pattern for reading the letters too. Once quickly, once slowly, then once again the following morning, before she wrote out her response. She wouldn’t overindulge like a child let loose in a sweet shop, and she wouldn’t tempt herself by reading before bed. Because though Andromeda spoke of her shop, her plan to open a boarding house, and all manner of banal observations, there was a definite undercurrent to the words that might lead Mercy astray in her dreams, and she was already dangerously off course.

Andromeda had talked about Mercy coming in for a new dress, and then she’d described how she would take Mercy’s measurement—down to the very last detail. Mercy wasn’t certain how anyone could survive a fitting by Andromeda Stiel; she’d hardly survived just reading about it.

Holding herself away from everything had grown easy for Mercy, until Andromeda had come along and mucked it up. Mercy had been foolish, had read too much into Andromeda’s friendliness. She’d driven her away. Just the thought of it made her body go tight with anxiety.

Two weeks before, she’d taken a deep breath and, instead of her usual reply, she’d copied out a poem she’d written in her journal. The first poem she’d written in years.

Delicate hands flutter like two brown birds

Winging free over the verdant vale

Riding the currents of the warm spring gale

Stopping to sip at rushing creeks

Moving ever faster as they sing a song of

Unimaginable beauty

And, oh, how I wish

These untamable creatures

Would impart their wild wisdom

Upon me

She’d folded the letter, sealed it, taken the extra precaution of putting it into an envelope, and then mailed it out.

She hadn’t received anything from Andromeda since then.

Mercy had created a thousand excuses as to why a letter should take so long to arrive when they had been coming so regularly—her imagination really was back in top form. But she had eventually resigned herself to the fact she was the reason. She’d ruined everything. Why had she sent the poem? Had she thought to impress Andromeda?

The rebuke to the last poem she’d shown to the object of her admiration echoed in her head.

“Enough of these foolish words! I will marry, and that is final. What did you think would happen?”

Mercy skulked about The Grange, pinched with embarrassment every time she remembered that she’d exposed herself so shamefully. Again. She imagined Andromeda opening the letter, imagined her frowning at the flowery words on the page. Turning it over and holding it up to the light with that exaggerated manner of hers to see if she was perhaps missing something of note that would explain why Mercy would send her such a thing. What had Mercy thought could come of such audacity?

Nothing could come of it.

Nothing. What Andromeda should be to you.

Yes, she should be nothing. But somehow, nothing had become what lifted her out of bed every morning. Nothing was what made her feel like she was ascending again when she marched up the stairs, the possibility of a waiting letter pulling her into the light. Nothing had quite possibly become the something she had been hiding from all of these years.

And she had ruined it.

She had finished her dusting and was heading down to the kitchen when she heard the sound of hooves approaching during a lull in the storm.

“Henry, are we expecting anyone?” She poked her head into the kitchen in time to see the butler’s brows crease in annoyance. He placed the teakettle on the tray along with the cup.

“No, and even if we were, no one of sound mind would show up in this weather.”

“Perhaps I was mistaken,” she said, shaking her head. She handed him an extra cube of sugar to place beside Angelica’s cup; he knew she liked her tea sweet but discouraged her from the habit.

He sighed and accepted it, then both of their gazes darted abovestairs as the sound of the heavy knocker echoed in the hallway.

“Go get it before Angelica does,” Mercy said. Sometimes the woman would jump up in excitement and rush to the door, expecting Philip. “I’ll bring her tea.”

Henry dashed up the steps and Mercy hurried behind him as quickly as she could without spilling the hot liquid. She got to the door of the parlor just in time to intercept Angelica.

“Come, it’s time for your tea.”

“Whoever is at the door?” Angelica asked, eyes glossy with unshed tears.

“Likely someone lost in the storm,” Mercy said.

“Perhaps it’s—”

“No, it’s not him,” Mercy said gently. It will never be him.

“You don’t know that,” Angelica said mildly. “I miss him. Why hasn’t he come to visit us? Doesn’t he miss us?”

Her heart ached for the woman, trapped by the eternal torment of love. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to be punished for your capacity to care. Andromeda looked into Angelica’s tearstained eyes and wished the world weren’t so cruel to those who found the most beauty in it.

“He does miss you, very much. But he wouldn’t want you to worry so,” Mercy said. “He would want you to be happy.”

“It’s hard to be happy when the people you love leave you,” Angelica said. Mercy closed her eyes and heat pressed at her lids. She thought of her parents, cold and still. She thought of Jane’s lovely face, lovely even as she burned Mercy’s letters.

“You think me selfish, but this will protect you, too. One day you’ll understand.”

She opened them and tried to smile at Angelica. “It is hard, and we cannot always achieve this goal. But we can try, yes?”

Angelica nodded.

“Come, sit before the fire. Your hands must be chilled from playing.”

“Mine are about frozen through from holding the reins, so I do hope that’s an open invitation,” a familiar voice said, and Mercy nearly did drop the tray then. She turned and found Andromeda shivering in the doorway, arms wrapped about herself. Henry had taken her coat, but the skirt of her blue dress was dark with moisture and her hair was still festooned with snow and ice.

Mercy put the tray down carefully. “What are you doing here?”

“Lovely to see you, too,” Andromeda said through chattering teeth.

“Why were you out riding in this weather?”

To see me? The hope lodged in her fast and sharp.

“My grandmother was ill, so I went up to Suffolk for a few days. I was coming back when this storm blew in.” An involuntary shudder shook her from head to toe. “I didn’t think I could make it back to town and got a bit desperate.”

“Oh. Of course,” Mercy said. It had been silly to think that anyone would come explicitly for her. That didn’t stop the lump from forming in her throat at even the thought of the sickness that could beset Andromeda. Of the possibility Andromeda’s boundless energy wouldn’t pull her through it. She blinked away sudden ridiculous tears, the sight of Andromeda and the state she was in conspiring to overwhelm Mercy’s emotional parapets.

This is why. This was why she hadn’t wanted to feel. This was why she couldn’t. It was too much, and for what? Certain heartache.

Henry cleared his throat. “Given the…unusual circumstances of Miss Stiel’s arrival, I believe that Mrs. Hamilton would wish that she warm herself here. I’ll have Sarah arrange the fire belowstairs, too.”

Mercy wasn’t quite sure where Andromeda should go either. During her previous visit, she had arrived as a guest of Mrs. Hamilton’s, but now she was a Negro woman who had called unannounced.

Henry left and Mercy turned her attention back to their guest.

Andromeda’s eyes were overbright and she shivered uncontrollably. It reminded Mercy of her final days in the cellar on Gold Street, of her parents shaking with fever and her powerless to help them.

She wasn’t thinking when she marched over to Andromeda and grabbed the woman’s hands. Mercy pressed them together as if in prayer, then rubbed her own hands over them.

“You’re chilled to the bone!” She knew her voice was shrill but she couldn’t help it. She wanted to cry; shrillness was the preferable alternative.

“Well, I am now, but I’ll soon burst into flames if you keep at that,” Andromeda said.

Mercy wasn’t sure if Andromeda meant the innuendo in her words.

“I do need my fingers for my work, Mercy. And for other more pleasurable pursuits.” Andromeda’s voice went low at that last bit—she’d meant the innuendo, and then gone for more. It seemed even a devil of a chill couldn’t keep her from playing at seduction.

Mercy shook her head and began pulling Andromeda toward the hearth. “Of course you’d be foolish enough to ride out into a storm and catch your death of cold. Irresponsible, impulsive—”

Mercy was stopped by Andromeda tugging back, pulling her up short. Andromeda’s icy fingers slipped through Mercy’s, drawing their palms together. When Mercy turned back, the irksome woman was grinning at her.

“Careful,” she said, her voice still shiver-shaken. “I might think you’d care if I did.”

They looked at each other for a long moment, and it was Mercy who tore her gaze away first.

“Would you like some tea?” Angelica asked. Mercy had nearly forgotten her mistress was there.

“Actually, if you have any of that coffee…” Andromeda turned toward Mercy and batted her damp lashes. The glow of the flames illuminated her face, her stark beauty, and Mercy reminded herself of the hell this woman could drag her into if she let her.

She always had preferred the heat, unfortunately. She could only hope that she wouldn’t be burned too badly this time around.