Chapter 15
“She is staring at you again.”
James did not look up. He was standing perhaps twelve feet from the blanket with his hands in his pockets, ostensibly regarding the lake, which was behind him.
“I am aware.”
He took another step away from the blanket. Violet’s arm extended immediately in his direction, reaching with grunts and half-whines.
“She will stop in a moment.”
“She has been staring at you since you stood up. I do not think she is changing her mind.”
“I am ignoring it. I needed to stretch my legs.”
“I do not think it is working,” Isadora chuckled.
She looked down at Violet, who was sitting on the blanket with her full attention focused on James, a pout forming on her lips. She had been doing that since James had stationed himself a few feet from the blanket.
“She is not going to stop,” Isadora warned, reaching to adjust Violet’s bonnet, which the baby promptly yanked off.
“She’ll find something else to look at.”
“James, she has not blinked.”
He turned around.
Violet extended one arm toward him. “Ha.”
“She wants you to come closer,” Isadora explained.
“She wants a great many things,” James drawled. “She wanted to eat my cravat this morning when I went to say good morning to her. I did not comply with that either.”
“That was sensible. This is less so.”
He looked at her then, the sideways look he deployed when he found something mildly irritating and mildly amusing in equal measure.
Then Violet made a sound.
He took one step back toward the blanket. Violet’s arm lowered, and she immediately returned her attention to the flowers.
“There,” he said. “You see?”
“The matter is concluded because you did what she asked.”
“I did not do what she—” He stopped and looked at Violet, who was now examining a daisy with the utmost indifference. “This child is going to be an extraordinary problem.”
“She already is,” Isadora said cheerfully. “Come and sit down.”
He sat on the edge of the blanket.
Violet glanced at him, returned to the daisy, and held out the daisy to him without looking up. “Take.”
He took it.
“Thank you,” he said, turning it once between his fingers.
Isadora looked at the lake because his expression at that moment was not one she had been invited to witness.
The afternoon was mild, the lake entirely still, the old trees at the water’s edge sending their reflections straight down into the dark without disturbance.
Mrs. Plum had been persuaded into a garden chair thirty feet away with her knitting, close enough to be summoned and far enough to be comfortable, and Violet had been presented with the contents of the flower basket Isadora had brought out with optimism, knowing the basket would last approximately twenty minutes before its contents were redistributed across the blanket, the grass, and one small person.
She had been correct.
Violet was currently holding three flowers in her left hand, two in her right one, and examining a sixth with her mouth, which Isadora gently removed.
“Not that one.”
Violet looked at her. “No, no.”
“I know,” Isadora murmured. “It seems unfair, but it is not.”
Violet crawled closer to James and held out another one of the flowers in her left hand with the magnanimous air of someone offering a significant gift.
“Thank you,” James said seriously.
Violet handed one to Isadora and quickly retracted it.
“Ah,” he murmured.
“She’s decided you need more flowers than I do,” Isadora observed.
“She is correcting an imbalance.” He looked at the small pile on his knee. “Though I’m not sure what imbalance this is meant to address.”
“Perhaps she thinks you look like you need cheering up.”
“I was not aware I looked like I needed cheering up.”
“You have a very serious face,” Isadora said. “She may have taken it personally.”
He looked at her. She looked at the flower chain she was making, which was coming along well and which she was devoting approximately fifteen percent of her attention to.
“My face is—” he began.
Violet chose that moment to lean forward from her seated position, overbalance entirely, and end up face-down in the flowers. James hurriedly righted her, waving a flower to distract her.
She lifted her head and looked at him. He looked back at her with an expression of great concern. Then he wiggled his eyebrows and pouted his lips. She kept staring at him, and he did it again until she burst out laughing.
It was a full laugh, one that shook her whole body. She laughed until she ran out of breath and then laughed again.
James made the face a third time.
The third laugh was worse, if anything. She collapsed sideways onto the blanket and laughed at the sky.
Isadora had stopped making the flower chain. She was looking at him, while he was looking at Violet with an expression that was open and warm and entirely unguarded, the expression of a man who had been caught off guard by his own delight and had no interest in recovering from it.
He made the face again. Violet grabbed his hand and held it to her face, still laughing. He let her.
Isadora looked at the lake. She needed somewhere to direct her expression, and the lake was reliably neutral.
You are in a great deal of trouble.
After a while, Mrs. Plum rose from her chair. “We saw some very fine wildflowers along the path on the way down,” she said.
Violet was already crawling toward her. “Ta-ta.”
“Of course,” Isadora allowed.
Mrs. Plum lifted the baby and set off along the lake path, recounting a tale as she went. Violet was already pointing at something in the distance, babbling as they went.
Silence settled.
James was staring at the lake with the relaxed posture he had arrived at somewhere in the past hour without Isadora noticing, his hair tousled by the wind.
Suddenly, she realized how rarely she saw him like this.
She began dismantling the flower chain without purpose, needing something to do with her hands.
“I did not expect that it would feel like this,” James sighed.
She waited for him to continue.
“I did not expect to care about her this way.” He turned the daisy once more in his fingers.
“I expected—I thought it would feel like responsibility. Something to be managed correctly.” He paused.
“She grabbed my coat on the third day I met her. Just… grabbed the lapels and held on and looked at me as though she had already concluded something I had not been consulted about.” He took a breath.
“I had not decided anything yet, and she had apparently decided everything.”
Isadora said nothing. She understood he was not finished.
“My father died when I was seventeen.” He kept his eyes on the water.
“Old enough, people said. As though age alone could determine someone’s readiness.
” A pause. “We were strangers by then. Had been for years. But before that, I was young enough that I still wanted him to be different.” He looked down at the daisy.
“I spent a great deal of time in other people’s houses, being adequately managed.
Fed and clothed and delivered where I was supposed to be delivered.
” He stopped. “The people were not unkind. That is the thing I have never known how to explain. They were not unkind. They simply looked at me the way people look at things they are responsible for.” He paused. “Not things they chose.”
Isadora felt her heart clench at his words.
“The thought of Violet growing up in someone else’s house, being adequate, being managed by people who are perfectly decent and perfectly correct and who look at her the way my father’s cousins looked at me—” His jaw tightened.
“I will not have it. Whatever I am or fail to be, that I will not have.”
She looked at his profile. At the set of his jaw and the daisy he had kept turning in his fingers without thinking, and the fury underneath his composure, clean and old and entirely certain.
“She will never feel that,” she assured him.
“She does not. Children feel it in the arms that hold them, the voices that come back, the people who stay when they do not have to.” She paused.
“You always come back, James, even when she is making you feel entirely useless. Even when you do not know what you’re doing, you come back. ” She met his eyes. “She knows.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked back at the lake, and she saw him absorb her words. She returned to the ruined flower chain, giving him the space to do it.
A bird flew across the water.
“You’ve thought about this,” he noted.
“I watched my brother do it.” She shrugged. “For years. He comes back regardless. I know what it means.” She paused. “She is lucky, even if she cannot see it yet.”
The lake sat still. Somewhere along the path, Mrs. Plum was commenting on a wildflower. Violet’s babbling carried through the air.
“She has you,” James said after a while. “You know that. Entirely and without conditions.”
“She has us both,” Isadora reminded him. “Do not think I have not noticed the flowers on your knee.”
“Those were gifts. I was being polite.”
“You kept all of them.”
He looked down at his knee, at the small accumulation of daisies that he had kept without once showing any sign of putting it down.
“They were formally presented.” He shrugged with a smile.
She laughed. He looked at her when she did it.
“We should go back.”
He rose to his feet and offered her his hand, which was either habit or occasion. She took it.
They turned toward the path and fell into step beside each other with ease. Mrs. Plum was already making her way back with Violet and what appeared to be a thin stick.
The path narrowed near the curve. Isadora turned her head to say something about Mrs. Plum and the wildflowers and the thin stick. James turned toward her at the same moment.
They were so close that his hand brushed hers lightly.
The path, the light, the gradual shrinking of the distance between them—she could not pinpoint the moment it had happened, only that it did.
His face was close enough that she could see his expression, which was not composed or managed or any of the versions she had learned to read at a distance.
He was looking at her the way he had looked at her on the garden path, as though she were the fixed point.
His eyes dropped to her mouth, and she swallowed, unable to stop the heat from spreading across her face. And then, without warning, he leaned in.
Just slightly. Just the fraction of an inch that meant everything without saying anything, that lived entirely in the space between what was true and what had not yet been said.
She felt it the way she had felt his hand on her waist on the garden path, the way she had felt his proximity at the dinner table, the way she felt most things about him that she was not supposed to be feeling.
She did not step back.
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Plum’s voice sounded from ten feet away, and Isadora jumped, putting distance between them. “She has found a stick. She will not be parted from it.”
They both looked.
Mrs. Plum was holding the stick aloft, keeping Violet from putting it into her mouth. Violet turned to look at James with expectation.
He cleared his throat. “That’s nice.” His voice was level.
Isadora looked at the path. “She can keep it.” Her voice was also level.
I am becoming far too practiced at this.
They walked back to the house, and the stick was dropped, and Mrs. Plum chattered about the flowers, and neither of them said anything at all about the fraction of an inch that had existed briefly between them on the lake path and had been mercifully interrupted.