Reading her pulse was like listening to and deciphering a secret. And the longer I listened, the more I understood Her Ladyship. She was different from how she presented herself. She could lie to everyone, but her pulse could not. For a woman who was only three and twenty, her pulse was tight. She carried the pulse of a grief-stricken fifty-year-old with the propensity to worry, to be beaten daily down by waves of thoughts, the weight crushing.
