“Augustine.”
His given name stopped him cold.
“Yes?” he asked.
Take it back. He must take it back. She had been impulsive, foolish, wild to come here just to see him again. She could not let him do this, unknowing of how she’d betrayed his trust. She had demanded a business arrangement, and he had agreed to it. Anything else was against both their wishes.
And yet … and yet she wanted, more than anything, for him to say it again. She set her glass aside and clutched her hands together, so tightly that the skin looked bleached. She hoped wildly, in two antithetical directions.
“Engaged?” she asked.
Without a word, Augustine reached for her, then past her, to the cabinet. He drew out one of the lower drawers. Several small curios were arrayed on the velvet-lined interior, and right in the center were two rings.
“I meant to give these to you,” he said. “Not today, of course. Even if—even if Mr. Renton had lived, it is still much too soon, but now it seems the most inauspicious start possible.” He glanced at her at last. “As I said, please forgive me.”
She joined him and looked more closely at the rings. They weren’t simple bands of metal, or even gem-studded jewelry, but instead made of many interlocking pieces of something white and matte.
Carved bone.
She reached out and traced one porous curve. At her ear, Augustine murmured, “I had a patient once, a man whose entire body ossified over his lifetime. I removed a series of growths that locked his elbow in place, and he had them fashioned into these.”
“The bones of a man,” she repeated. A man with an uncommon illness, one she had until now never imagined—she was beginning to see a pattern.
He picked up one of the rings and turned it around in the palm of his hand. “His name was Julian Aethridge. He had a unique sense of humor and asked that he be allowed to keep whatever we removed. Said he’d made it himself, after all. So we gave him the pieces, and he had some of them made into these rings. He tried to give them to his son and his son’s new wife, but they were disturbed. When he offered them to me, I accepted.”
Really, what better gift for a blood-soaked surgeon to give to his bride than a ring made of the fruits of his labor? And perhaps it was best that she bore a reminder of the inevitability of death, to chill her fevered thoughts.
She plucked the other ring from its velvet nest. She turned it over, looking at how the white bone had been carved so finely, with such care. A gentle touch with the pad of her thumb pushed the pieces into a new configuration, the hoop they formed narrower but taller than before. Genius, to take such a one-of-a-kind material and design the rings in such a way that they could fit throughout the seasons of life, on any number of people. The geometric figuring to make such a thing would have been extensive. She wished she could see the plans.
But Augustine was watching her. She should say something. Thank you, perhaps. Or no.
Or yes.
When she had decided to marry, she’d had Mrs. Cunningham write down a list of all the unwed men in town between two years her junior and fourteen her senior. From there, she had narrowed it based on income, filtering out all who made more than her guardians, and anybody earning much less. She’d used statistics, mathematics, to purify her choice. Her intent had been to avoid the most heated competition for the wealthiest bachelors, to save the Cunninghams from embarrassment at a lower match—and to increase the chances that she would be spared from bearing nine children to mind the family farm or trade, instead of working herself.
In the end, Larrenton and the nearest towns had boasted thirteen men who matched those requirements.
She’d asked only Augustine. He’d been at the top of her list. Perfect in every way. And then she’d met him, and for the last two days, she’d hardly been able to think straight.
She wanted, so badly, to say yes. And that was the problem. Her heart, normally such a measured and predictable thing, had grown erratic. For him. He had been so hesitant to consider marriage at all, and it had only been her terms, her dedication to avoiding intimacy, that had persuaded him.
There was still a chance she would return to normal. That he might never notice. But if he did …
Her fingers played with the ring, spiraling it in and out. “People aren’t static,” she said at last. “People aren’t perfect. An employee you can replace. And though this is a business arrangement, uppermost, a wife cannot be replaced so easily.”
Something darkened in his eyes. Thinking, no doubt, of all the widowers he had known in his career. And then he said, “Jane, I would never replace you.”