The Secrets of Sir Richard Kenworthy

That was a problem easily remedied.

He downed the dregs and refilled the glass, raising it in a silent toast to the devil.

Would that all his problems had such easy answers.

Chapter Twenty

NEVER HAD MAYCLIFFE been such a cold and quiet house.

At breakfast the next morning, Richard sat in silence, his eyes following Fleur as she selected her food from the sideboard. She sat across from him, but they did not speak, and when Marie-Claire entered the room, their greetings were nothing but grunts.

Iris did not come down.

Richard did not see her all day, and when the dinner gong sounded, he lifted his hand to knock at her door, but he found himself frozen before he made contact with the wood. He could not forget the look on her face when he’d told her what she must do, could not erase the sound of her tears after she’d fled to her room.

He’d known this would happen. He’d been dreading it since the moment he slid his ring on her finger. But it was so much worse than his imaginings. The foreboding sense of guilt had been replaced by soul-deep loathing, and he truly wasn’t sure he’d ever feel at ease with himself again.

He used to be a good person. Maybe not the best person, but he’d been fundamentally good. Hadn’t he?

In the end, he did not knock at Iris’s door. He went down to the dining room by himself, stopping only to instruct a maid to have supper brought up to her on a tray.

Iris did not come down to breakfast the next day, either, prompting Marie-Claire to proclaim herself jealous. “It’s so unfair that married women can take their breakfast in bed, and I can’t,” she said as she stabbed her knife in the butter. “There’s really no—”

She stopped talking, Richard’s and Fleur’s twin expressions of ire enough to silence anyone.

The following morning Richard resolved to speak to his wife. He knew she deserved her privacy after such a shock, but she had to know as well as anyone that time was not their friend. He had given her three days; he could not give her any more.

Once again he breakfasted with his sisters, not that any of them spoke a word. He was trying to decide the best way to approach Iris, attempting to arrange his words into coherent and persuasive sentences, when she appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a frock of the palest blue—her favorite color, he’d deduced—and her hair had been dressed into an intricate twist of braids and loops and honestly, he didn’t know how to describe it except that she looked more done-up than he’d ever seen her.

She’d donned armor, he realized. He could not blame her.

Iris hovered in place for a moment, and he shot to his feet, suddenly aware that he’d been staring. “Lady Kenworthy,” he said with full respect. It was perhaps too formal, but his sisters were still at the table, and he would not have them think he held his wife in anything but the highest regard.

Iris glanced at him with icy blue eyes, dipped her chin in a small nod of recognition, and then busied herself at the sideboard. Richard watched as she spooned a small portion of eggs onto her plate, then added two pieces of bacon and a slice of ham. Her movements were steady and precise, and he could not help but admire her composure as she took her seat and greeted them one by one: “Marie-Claire,” then “Fleur,” and finally, “Sir Richard.”

“Lady Kenworthy,” Marie-Claire said in polite greeting.

Iris did not remind her to use her Christian name.

Richard looked down at his plate. He had just a few bites of food left. He wasn’t really hungry, but it felt as if he ought to be eating if Iris was, so he took a slice of toast from a plate at the center of the table and began to butter it. His knife scraped too hard against the bread, the sound grating and loud in the overwhelming silence.

“Richard?” Fleur murmured.

He looked at her. She glanced rather pointedly at his toast, which, it had to be said, was looking very sad and mangled.

Richard gave her a glare, for no logical reason whatsoever, and took a savage bite. Then coughed. Bloody hell. It was dry as dust. He looked down. All the butter he’d attempted to spread had scraped up onto the knife, all curled up like some sort of tortured dairy ribbon.

With a growl he slapped the now rather soft butter onto the toast and took another bite. Iris stared at him with a disconcertingly steady gaze, then said, with no inflection whatsoever, “Jam?”

He blinked, the sound of her voice startling in the silence. “Thank you,” he said, taking the small dish from her fingers. He had no idea what flavor it was—something crimson, so he’d probably like it—but he didn’t care. Other than his name, it was the first word she’d spoken to him in three days.

After another minute or so, however, he was beginning to think that it would be the only word for the next three days as well. Richard did not quite understand how silence could have varying degrees of awkwardness, but this four-person silence was infinitely more awful than the one he’d endured with just his sisters for company. A frigid mantle had come over the room, not of temperature but of mood, and every clink of fork against dish was like the crack of ice.

And then suddenly—thankfully—Marie-Claire spoke. It occurred to Richard that perhaps she was the only one who could. She was the only one who wasn’t playing a role in this macabre farce that had become his life.

“It is good to see you downstairs,” she said to Iris.

“It is good to be down,” Iris said with barely a glance in Marie-Claire’s direction. “I am feeling much better.”

Marie-Claire blinked. “Were you ill?”