“Peony says I’m going away,” she ventured, standing a little distance away.

“Aye,” Jamie answered hoarsely. “And so am I. We’re going ’ome, Duchess, to the farm.”

So he’d given up the gilded cage idea. At least she’d succeeded there. Bliss lowered her head for a moment. “What about Peony? Is she going, too?”

Jamie still didn’t look up. “She refuses to leave her business,” he said.

“But you asked her?”

At last, Jamie met Bliss’s gaze, and she saw a weary challenge in his eyes. “Yes, Duchess, I asked her,” he answered.

Bliss felt utterly defeated. “I see.”

Jamie shook his head. “No, I don’t think you do,” he replied, and once again, he was sharpening his knife.

Bliss took a single, tentative step nearer. “Explain it to me, then,” she said. “I do want to understand.”

The blade made a rhythmic, scraping sound against the stone. “Aye,” Jamie responded skeptically. “That was evident this mornin’.”

“I love you, Jamie. Believe it or not, that’s why I left you.”

His jawline tightened and he was stubbornly silent. The friction between blade and stone grew fiercer.

Bliss would almost have preferred the high-handed, jocular Jamie who had carried her so unceremoniously off the Queen Charlotte. At least that one had been willing to speak to her.

Just then, Peony and her maid came out of the bedroom. Jamie shoved his knife back into its scabbard and, without a word or a look for Bliss, donned his hat and coat and left with the two women.

Jamie’s only farewell to his wife was the grating of his key in the lock.

Bliss went to the desk and began a letter to her mother, weeping as she explained that she wouldn’t be coming to America.

Chapter 18

AFTER GIVING THE DOORKNOB A FEW FRUITLESS JIGGLES, BLISS moved to the suite’s window and looked out.

It was a long way to the ground.

On an impulse, she progressed to the bedroom and pulled back the draperies. A metal staircase, no doubt for the purpose of escaping fires, met her widening eyes.

“Eureka!” she breathed. Having read the word once in a book, Bliss had been waiting for a chance to try it out

The window catch was high up, so she dragged a chair over, climbed up to stand in its velvet-upholstered seat, and began working at the lock with her fingers. After almost a minute of unrewarded efforts, she sighed and looked around for something to pry the thing open with.

Just then, someone knocked at the door of the suite. Bliss got down from the chair and dashed into the front room.

“Hello? Who’s there?” she called, pressing her ear to the door.

“It’s Walter—Walter Davis.”

Bliss, hoping for a maid or a waiter—someone with a key—was disappointed. Too, she had her suspicions as to who had told Jamie where she’d gone that morning. “Traitor!” she called back.

Even through the heavy door, Bliss heard Walter’s sigh. “I had to tell him, Bliss. The man was frantic.”