Chapter 22
“You cannot possibly expect me to race you to that tree.”
Tristan stood on the gravel path with his hands clasped behind his back and one brow raised.
. Clara had already bolted ahead, scattering a flock of pigeons into indignant flight across the Serpentine, and the spring afternoon lay open around them—absurdly, defiantly blue, the kind of London day that arrived without warning and departed before anyone thought to be grateful.
“I expect nothing,” he said. “I merely observed that Clara has issued a direct command, and you appear reluctant to comply.”
“Clara is six. She issues direct commands about everything, including the dietary preferences of imaginary rabbits.”
“The Earl of Carrots has very specific requirements. I would not dismiss them.”
Rosamund pressed her lips together against the laugh that was trying—with increasing impertinence—to escape.
She would not give it to him. Not here, not in the open, not with three hundred people strolling the paths of Hyde Park and every one of them pretending not to watch the Duke and Duchess of Rathbourne navigate the minefield of public domesticity.
Clara had reached the birdbath and was conducting a negotiation with a pigeon that showed no interest in her terms. She turned back, hands on hips, wind-tossed and imperious.
“You are both too slow! Come here at once!”
“She has your temperament,” Tristan remarked.
“She has her own temperament. It was fully formed before she could walk.”
They followed her across the lawn—not arm in arm, because that would have constituted an intimacy neither had initiated, but close enough that Rosamund could feel the warmth of him through the spring air.
Clara had found the ducks. She crouched at the water’s edge and began distributing crumbs from the biscuit she had smuggled from the nursery with the focused impartiality of a magistrate dispensing justice.
“One for you. One for you. Two for the small one—he is being pushed.”
“She will not tolerate unfairness,” Rosamund said. “Even among waterfowl.”
“A quality I find rather more admirable in her than in most members of Parliament.”
Clara finished her crumbs, declared the ducks adequately provisioned, and spun toward them with the velocity of a child who had located her next objective.
“Race. From this tree to that one. I am the judge.”
“Absolutely not,” Rosamund said.
“You must.”
“I am wearing —”
“I had not realised,” Tristan said, from somewhere to her left, “that the Duchess feared losing.”
She turned. He stood with his arms folded across his chest and his face arranged into something so precisely, devastatingly innocent it constituted a declaration of war.
“I do not fear losing.”
“Then you merely prefer not to compete? A reasonable position. Entirely sensible.”
“I will outrun you to that oak and back before you have drawn your next breath.”
“Bold. Shall we test it?”
“Ready!” Clara positioned herself between the trees with Bess raised like a starter’s flag. “No cheating. No pushing. If you fall down, you get up and keep running. Those are the rules.”
“Brutal rules,” Tristan said.
“Fair rules. Go!”
Rosamund gathered her skirts and ran.
She had not run—truly run, with the full reckless abandon of a body that had temporarily misplaced its dignity—since girlhood.
The ground blurred beneath her boots. The wind tore a strand of hair loose and whipped it across her face.
Behind her, Clara’s shrieks split the afternoon—faster, faster, he is catching you—and closer still, the measured tread of a man who was very obviously not running at full speed and was very obviously pretending otherwise.
She reached the oak. Turned. Pressed her back against the bark and gasped.
Tristan arrived three strides behind her, barely winded, the amusement he was suppressing having broken through every barricade he owned.
“You let me win.”
“I allowed you dignity in front of the child. Do not mistake it for weakness.”
She swatted his arm. The gesture was instinctive—the kind of thing she would have done to Eleanor—and her hand connected with the solid muscle of his forearm before her mind could intervene.
She snatched it back.
His gaze dropped to the place where she had touched him. Stayed there. Then rose, slowly, to her face.
Clara crashed into them before the moment could become something neither was ready to name.
“Rosamund is the champion! Your Grace is very slow and must practise.”
“I shall add it to my schedule,” Tristan said, but his eyes had not left Rosamund’s, and the weight of them followed her as she bent to straighten Clara’s crooked collar.
They found a bench beneath the chestnut trees while Clara investigated an ant colony with the intensity of a natural philosopher conducting field research. She would be occupied for some time. Ants, like ducks and pigeons, required her full administrative attention.
Rosamund sat. Tristan sat beside her. The space between them was correct—six inches, perhaps eight—but the bench was narrow and the warmth of him radiated across the gap with a persistence that no spring breeze could dispel.
“I had forgotten,” she said, and the words escaped before she could weigh them, “what it felt like to enjoy an afternoon without watching for disaster.”
“Then I shall have to provide you many more.”
She turned to respond—some deflection, some careful redirect—and stopped.
He was watching her. Not with the rationed attention he imposed on himself at dinner. Openly, with his guard in ruins, his gaze holding hers with an intensity that made the Serpentine and the swans and the three hundred people scattered across Hyde Park dissolve entirely.
A breeze lifted a loose strand of hair across her cheek.
His hand was there before hers. He tucked it behind her ear—his fingertips grazing the curve of her jaw, lingering one second past the boundary of the gesture. His breath caught on something he had not meant to feel and could not, at this distance, with the sunlight on her face, pretend away.
He withdrew his hand. Set it on his knee.
“You are staring, Your Grace,” she said. Steadier than the rest of her.
“I am married to you.” His voice had dropped to a register the park could not reach. “I should think staring is one of the few privileges afforded me.”
She laughed. Soft, shaken loose, carrying a warmth she had not authorised.
It hung between them in the spring air, and his face did something she had never seen—the severity cracked open and beneath it was something so unguarded, so absurdly pleased by the sound of her laughter, that she had to look away before it finished what the afternoon had started.
Clara returned, trailing complaints about the ants’ refusal to follow her instructions.
Tristan lifted her onto his shoulders for the walk back to the carriage, and Clara gripped his hair with both fists and narrated the landscape from her elevated position with the authority of a queen surveying her realm.
In the carriage, Clara fell asleep against Tristan’s arm. Her face pressed into the wool of his coat. One hand still gripped Bess by a threadbare ear.
Tristan did not move. He held his arm rigid at the angle the sleeping child required, and when Rosamund glanced at him across the dim interior, she found him looking down at Clara’s face with an expression that dismantled every remaining defence she possessed.
She looked away. Laced her fingers together until the knuckles ached.
At Rath House, he carried Clara inside. Up the stairs, through the corridor, into the nursery, where he laid her on the bed with a care that bordered on reverence and drew the coverlet to her chin.
Rosamund watched from the doorway, and the simplicity of the gesture—a tall man bending over a small bed, tucking a blanket around a child who was not his—loosened something behind her ribs that she had no name for.
He straightened. Crossed the nursery. Paused in the doorway beside her, close enough that she could smell the outdoors on his coat—grass and wind and the green, living scent of a spring afternoon that had changed everything and pretended to change nothing.
“Good night, Rosamund.”
“Good night.”
He held her gaze a beat longer than the words required. Then he turned and walked away, his boots steady on the corridor floor, the sound diminishing toward the east wing.
From somewhere below, the long-case clock struck eight. The house settled around her. Clara slept.
Rosamund stood in the nursery doorway and pressed her hand against the place on her jaw where his fingers had been, and understood—with the devastating clarity of a woman who had spent her entire adult life building walls—that the man on the other side of them was no longer someone she wished to keep out.