Chapter 2
“Adisgrace!” Oscar Rowson, the ninth Duke of Scarfield, muttered as he squeezed the bridge of his nose. “How does a duke lose a battle against five-year-olds?”
The day had begun so well. He had finished the quarterly accounts for the eastern tenants before breakfast and dictated a six-page letter to his solicitor before the clock struck eleven.
Even the estate manager’s report on the recent sheep blight, which most men would have found cause for weeping, elicited no more than a dry smile and a note in the margin: “Increase mutton purchases for winter. Sell at a loss if needed. The Duchy must never appear vulnerable.”
It was the sort of thinking that made a Rowson, and he did it better than anyone since his grandfather.
Yet now, three hours after sunset, he found himself barricaded behind his own desk, dreading the next summons from the nursery. It came at nine minutes past.
A tentative rap at the door. Not a child’s fist. Too polite. Probably Mrs. Tullock again.
“Enter,” Oscar said, without looking up.
Mrs. Tullock bustled in, cap askew, expression already pleading. “Your Grace,” she began, “it’s the little ones. They—”
“Still refusing food?” Oscar’s pen hovered over the ledger.
“They won’t touch a bite. Nor let us near them with a bath. Clara threw her bread at the window and says she’ll only eat when her mother returns.” The woman’s hands fidgeted in her apron.
Oscar closed the ledger with a sigh. “That is not physically possible. Mrs. Rowson is—” He stopped, remembering the explicit instructions never to speak of the deceased parent. “She is not returning.”
Mrs. Tullock only nodded, voice thick. “The boy’s not much better. He stares at the fire and won’t answer when spoken to.”
Oscar stood, buttoned his coat, and wondered—again—why anyone expected him to know what to do with children.
He had spent the first ten years of his own childhood as an experiment in discipline.
His own mother, a model of icy gentility, had believed that the word “love” spoiled a boy’s character; his father’s most tender expression was “Don’t disgrace the name.
” The result: Oscar could quote Horace from memory, but he had no idea what to say to a crying child.
“Has the doctor been?” Oscar asked, as he strode past Mrs. Tullock, who scurried to keep pace.
“He says they’re healthy, but—well, grief is its own illness, isn’t it?” The housekeeper wiped her nose. “Might Your Grace wish to speak to them?”
No, he absolutely did not wish. “That seems inevitable.”
The march to the nursery was brief but ceremonial. Servants vanished from the hallways as they approached, as if the house itself was allergic to the idea of children. Oscar allowed Mrs. Tullock to open the door.
Inside, the Rowson twins were enacting a mute tragedy. Clara perched on the window seat, blue eyes hard as marbles, feet kicking the wall. Henry hunched in a threadbare chair by the fire, clutching a battered cloth rabbit. He did not look up.
Oscar examined the scene. “You are both old enough to know that food is necessary for survival.”
Clara’s answer was instant. “We won’t eat it.”
“You must.”
“We won’t,” she repeated, with the air of a girl prepared to die for a cause.
Oscar considered his options. Threat? Bribe? Rational argument? None had worked yesterday or the day before.
“Clara, if you do not eat, you will become weak. Henry will become weak. And then—”
“We’ll die?” she interrupted.
Oscar blinked. “That is one outcome, yes.”
Clara looked at her brother, then back at Oscar. “That’s what happened to Mama and Papa.”
Henry’s eyes flinched but stayed on the rabbit. Oscar fought the urge to look away.
Splendid. Less than two minutes, and already we are at the existential phase.
Oscar approached the window, lowering himself to Clara’s level. “Your parents were ill. You are not. Unless you persist in this nonsense.”
Clara squared her shoulders in the same manner that his brother, Peter, did when they were younger, and it hurt to look at her. “You can’t make us.”
“On the contrary. I have made grown men kneel for less.”
“Are we grown men?” Her smile was small but devastating.
Oscar had no counter for that, so he turned to Henry. “Would you prefer another story tonight? The one with the brave fox, perhaps?”
Henry’s grip on the rabbit tightened. He did not answer.
It has a happy ending, you stubborn child. Unlike every story you actually lived through.
Oscar tried again. “There is a chessboard in the study. If you wish, I can teach you the basics.”
Henry shrank deeper into his chair.
Clara, watching with clinical detachment, said, “We’re not allowed in the study.”
“Under supervision, exceptions can be made.”
She considered this, then said, “You never smiled in any of the paintings downstairs.”
“I was rarely asked to.” Oscar found, to his horror, that he was nearly smiling now.
Henry, emboldened by the change in tone, croaked, “Will you send us away too?”
Oscar froze. “Who told you that?”
Clara shrugged. “That’s what everyone says.”
“I am not sending you away.” Oscar held back a sigh.
Clara did not flinch. “You are always scowling at us.”
Oscar’s dour mood was not directed at them, but he did not know how to make them understand this. He sat on the window ledge, staring at his hands. The memory of his brother—laughing, wild, so full of feeling—knifed through him. He regretted how he had pushed Peter away. Now more than ever.
You, your rules, and your sodding honor.
He pulled himself upright. “I am not sending you anywhere. You will remain here, under my care, until you are old enough to decide for yourselves.”
Clara’s next words landed like stones: “We won’t call you Uncle.”
He tilted his head slightly and studied her. “Why?”
Clara only stared at him, as if challenging him to make her answer his question. It was rebellion, he knew.
“Very well. That is perfectly acceptable.”
She seemed disappointed by this, as if she’d been denied a victory.
Mrs. Tullock, who had been lurking in the hall, bobbed her head in relief. “Will Your Grace have supper now?”
“I will bring it myself,” Oscar said. The children’s heads both jerked in surprise.
In the kitchen, Oscar loaded a tray with bread, cold chicken, and a bracing amount of cherry jam. He had no notion what children liked to eat, but jam seemed universally popular.
When he returned, Clara eyed the tray with suspicion. “Did you poison it?”
“Why would I waste poison on you when you are so determined to starve yourselves?”
This produced a snort from Henry, almost a laugh.
Oscar set the tray between them and waited. For a long time, neither child moved. Then Clara tore off a piece of bread, eyed him the whole time, and ate it. Henry, seeing his sister’s acceptance, reached for the chicken.
Oscar found that he could breathe again.
He sat, silent, as they ate, wondering when it had become so difficult to be in a room with other people.
After the plates were empty, Henry crawled onto the window seat beside Oscar and fell asleep, head slumped on his knee.
Clara followed a minute later, curling around her brother like a watchful cat.
Oscar watched them. Henry’s toy rabbit—Peter’s, once, passed down with sentimental efficiency—had a missing ear. Clara’s hand rested over Henry’s, protective even in sleep.
Oscar closed his eyes, just for a moment, and in that darkness, he saw his brother’s face: the old, infuriating grin, the way Peter had once said, “You think a Rowson cannot love, Oscar, but you are wrong. It is the only thing we do that matters.”
Oscar had not believed him then. He barely believed it now.
He left the twins on the window seat and returned to his study, not trusting himself to linger.
He poured a glass of scotch, and by the time he finished it, Wilks, the butler, appeared in the doorway.
“Your Grace. There is a visitor. Lady Nancy Gallagher.”
Oscar looked up. “At this hour?”
“She says it is urgent. She has come alone.”
Oscar wondered if that was possible. Nancy Gallagher—daughter of the notorious Duke of Neads, Scotland’s last legal menace—had a reputation for impropriety, but even she was not mad enough to call on a bachelor household at ten o’clock, unchaperoned.
“Very well. Bring her to the study.”
Wilks bowed, then paused. “Your Grace—she seems… rather determined.”
Oscar smiled to himself. “That is her defining trait.”
He straightened the papers on his desk, rehearsing the pleasant but immovable speech he would deliver to Lady Nancy. He would be gracious, unyielding, and—above all—unmoved by whatever melodrama she carried with her.