Ford's cheeks flushed slightly. He thought Tycho could probably guess what everyone thought, given that Ford was going to have to marry her, and he didn't really want to have to articulate all of it to fill in the blanks. "That I slept with her, I 'spose," he said a little lamely. Ford couldn't remember if Mr. Farley had actually said that when he'd come to call earlier that day, because so much of that conversation seemed like it had happened to someone else. He'd started off euphemistic, but of course they both knew exactly what he meant. "The Minister's wife walked in on us in a coatroom, in the middle of the ball — it looked bad, honestly," he admitted. "The door was locked and the room was dark and we'd both been out of the ball for a while already, and she had basically her entire corset off and her dress undone." It was difficult to imagine a situation which might have looked any worse, even if they had been carrying on together. He had admitted all of this without a second thought for how it would sound to Tycho, because Ford had such faith in their relationship that he did not imagine Tycho could think him guilty of anything no matter how badly it looked — but he had also not stopped to consider that it didn't make sense, his being in a locked room with an undressed woman after being absent from the party for some time, and so he did not rush to explain himself. "And everyone was talking about it, so then her father, today —" He cringed, unsure how exactly to summarize the visit from Mr. Farley.

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