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“A month!” Priscilla exclaimed as if the very idea were preposterous. “Certainly not. You must have noted it wrong, Benny. Perhaps you ought to write things down. Mixing these things up will make you look terribly foolish, you do know.”

“Do not start with me, Mother,” Benedict warned.

The Dowager, however, spoke over him. Ha. Emily hoped he liked getting that little taste of his own medicine. If the way his face reddened was any indication, he did not.

“Well, I’m back now, so there’s no use worrying over it, is there?” she said, waving a careless wrist. “Besides, I’m sure things have gone entirely to pot without me. Shall I speak to the cook to make sure we’ll have something suitable on the table to eat?”

This was, Emily decided, quite enough. Seeing Benedict’s irritation was not sufficient recompense for listening to this utter nonsense.

She would offer the Dowager one piece of praise, however.

The woman was so dreadfully rude that she let Emily behave just as badly without a single worry over the propriety of it all. It was liberating, Emily thought. Maybe her sisters were on to something.

It was, however, less satisfying than she’d hoped as she turned on her heel, leaving the room without a word—only to hear deafening silence call after her.

CHAPTER 19

Dinner was agony. Benedict recalled waking that morning and feeling optimistic and wished he could travel back in time and kick that poor, clueless idiot in the head.

It had taken less than a day for his mother to be revealed as the sort that hired a criminal, his wife to become furious with him, and his mother to return weeks earlier than expected.

Just his bloody luck.

It bore mentioning, however, he noted over dinner as he wondered if gulping his wine would make his nascent headache better or worse, that his wife and his mother showed their displeasure inhighlydifferent ways.

“This cut of beef feels thinner than usual,” his mother complained loudly, pushing the offending meat around her plate. She had not taken kindly to being told that she shouldleave the cook alone as managing the house was now Emily’s role, not hers.

Never mind that she’d hated doing it when itwasher role, Benedict had thought sourly as his mother had gasped and carried on, decrying the unspeakable pain (though she managed to speak it quite a lot, actually) of being replaced in one’s child’s affections.

“Hassomeone,” the Dowager went on, cutting a poisonous glance at Emily, “decided we ought to change butchers? We should really return to the old. This cheap cut reeks ofeconomizing.”

“The cook informed me she has been using this butcher for several years,” Emily said politely, her eyes on her own plate where she was eating her meal in careful, moderated bites. “I could not account for any difference, I’m afraid.”

“The beef is fine, Mother,” Benedict interjected, earning him a quick look of approval from his wife.

Emily had been the very picture of decorum through the first courses of dinner, treating each of his mother’s preposterous complaints as though they were innocuous observations and replying with perfect gentility. In another circumstance, Benedict would have been beside himself with delight over how visibly it rankled his mother that Emily was apparently entirely immune to her histrionics.

But his bride was no more pleased with him, at this moment, than she was with his mother—and wasn’tthatunpleasant company to be in.

Emily had been polite to him as well, almost aggressively so. He’d waited to see that flash of temper that she’d yielded against him so many times before, but it never appeared. Instead, her cool demeanor struck him as…resigned.

He hated it. He might even, he allowed, hate it more than his mother’s whining.

“It’ssupposedlythe same butcher,” Priscilla sniffed. “And we are just to believe words when our senses tell us something else entirely? I fear the great thinkers, in all their bothersome, plodding ways, would call us fools for even considering it.”

“I assure you, My Lady,” Emily replied with perfect equanimity, “I have no reason nor inclination to lie about the household’s butcher.”

He had to find a way to make Emily stop playing this horrid ‘perfect Society wife’ role. If he had to watch her give one more bland smile, he was going to suffer an apoplexy. But how to get his Emily—the real Emily—to show her face again?

“Perhaps not,” sniffed the Dowager. “But who among us can say that we always operate according to reason, hm? There is, in some of us, a perversity that encourages pursuing our own desires, no matter the consequences. Do you not agree, Miss Rutley?”

“I think you will find,” Benedict growled, “that it’s Lady Moore.”

Priscilla ignored him, her gaze intent on Emily. As much as Benedict had disliked his mother ignoring his wife, he found he liked her attention upon Emily even less.

But Emily looked entirely unconcerned.

“Perhaps,” she allows, “though I do endeavor to practice thinking in all my endeavors. I’m sure you understand, My Lady.”