Chapter 9
Henry ran his hands through his hair for the third time in ten minutes. It had been three days since their arrival, and Ian and Lady Charlotte were inseparable.
He was pacing, which was a thing he did not do regularly. He had not paced since he was twenty-two and standing in his father’s study, learning what it meant to inherit everything at once.
The problem was not Ian. The problem was not even London, the deed of guardianship, or the solicitor’s careful, apologetic face.
Those were complications, but they were the kind with solutions.
He was competent at coming up with solutions.
He had been competent at finding solutions his entire adult life, and he did not intend to stop now.
The problem was Lady Charlotte.
He stopped at the fireplace and looked at the banked coals.
She could not go to London as Ian’s governess. That was simply the fact of it for she was the daughter of Lord Ashford. Her father had a search running through the inquiry offices. Redmont had three privately retained men working the post roads northward.
He could leave her in Scotland. That was the sensible answer. Leave her here with Mrs. Wick, allow the situation to stabilize, let the search grow cold. Scotland was remote. The ton did not and would not reach this far north.
But Ian might not accept a replacement. He was certain of that. He had arrived here and had all the evidence to confirm it.
Separating them now would cost the boy something Henry was not able to quantify and did not want to consider.
He was not sentimental. He was not given to overestimating the weight of a single afternoon. But he had watched his cousin’s son on that floor, and he knew what he had seen, and he was not in the business of pretending he had not seen it.
The last three tutors had lasted a fortnight.
He turned from the fire.
She was not trained. She had no formal qualification. She had read trade journals in a library and fixed soldiers with yarn and told a pirate story with a straight face, and none of that was governess training by any standard he had ever applied.
But Ian had chosen her. And that was something. Though Henry had little experience raising children, he understood how they know things about people that adults spend half their lives convincing themselves they do not.
Ian had chosen her in approximately two hours. Because she mended broken soldiers with the aid of a skein of brown yarn.
Henry stood at the desk.
The options arranged themselves in a neat column, which was how he thought about problems that had no satisfactory solution.
He could leave her in Scotland: safe, remote, and entirely removed from the boy she had promised to comfort.
He could bring her to London as a governess: efficient, immediately effective, and a disaster waiting to happen within a fortnight of their arrival.
He could send her somewhere else entirely to her aunt in Surrey, perhaps, though he had no confirmation that this was a viable arrangement, even though she had mentioned her auntie vaguely during their ride north.
He looked at the options.
Then he sat down and reached for the pen.
He wrote quickly. He did not agonize over the wording, because agonizing served no purpose when the argument was already made inside his own head and the words on the page were simply the delivery mechanism.
He folded the note before he could read it again. He sealed it.
He rang the bell.
The footman appeared in less than a minute. Young. Efficient. Henry had noted, approvingly, that this household’s staff moved well despite the chaos of recent weeks.
“Find Lady Charlotte,” Henry said. “Give her this.” He held out the note. “Do not disturb either Lady Charlotte or young Ian if the boy is asleep.”
The footman took it and went.
Henry turned back to the desk. He looked at the papers that had not been moved since supper. He thought about picking one up. He did not.
He sat in the chair that was not Nathan’s chair and stared at the low coals of the fire. He was aware, in the way one is aware of a tooth that has begun to ache, that the conclusion he had arrived at was perfectly logical.
And that logic, on this particular evening, was doing little to settle anything at all.
The book in Charlotte’s hands felt heavy and she perused the lines in it listlessly.
Ian had been asleep for twenty minutes, slumped against Charlotte’s side with his hand still curled around one of the repaired soldiers, and she had been reading the same paragraph about the Spanish coast to the top of his head without taking in a single word.
She turned the page anyway. It seemed respectful.
The fire in the nursery grate was warm and steady, and the room had the particular quiet of a house settling into evening. Charlotte’s ankle had stopped aching. Ian’s breathing was slow and even.
She was not thinking about London.
She was not thinking about it very intently, and with great concentration, and she had been not thinking about it for the better part of two hours.
A soft knock at the door startled her out of her reverie.
She eased out from under Ian’s weight and moved to the door. The footman in the hallway held out a folded note.
She took it and unfolded the parchment:
I request your company in the library at your earliest convenience.
—S
She stood in the hallway for a moment with the note in her hand.
Then she went back in, transferred Ian’s weight to the pillow with care, pulled the blanket up, and looked at the row of repaired soldiers she had set along the windowsill. They stood in a crooked, determined line.
She went to find the library.
The Duke was standing when she arrived. Not seated at the desk, not bent over papers. Standing by the window, hands at his sides, which was, for Sappherton, as close to restless as she had seen him.
He turned when she entered.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
Charlotte took a seat in the armchair near the hearth, keeping her weight off her healing ankle. “Your note was brief, Your Grace, but the solicitor's sudden arrival looked pressing. Has something happened regarding Ian?”
Henry moved away from the window, his expression drawn and serious. "Ian must return to London with me. The deed of guardianship Nathan lodged with Chancery requires it. The residence terms are legally binding, and there is no room for negotiation."
Charlotte looked at the fire.
She had known this was coming—had known it from the moment the solicitor arrived, from the particular quality of the silence afterward—and knowing it had not made any difference at all to the feeling in her chest when the Duke said it plainly.
“I see,” she said.
“The arrangement you proposed…” Henry paused. “You cannot accompany us as his governess.”
“No,” she said. “I imagine not.”
“London is not Scotland. Your father’s inquiry is running through the offices there.
Redmont’s men—you know what they were doing on the post roads.
The moment you stepped into Mayfair under an assumed name, someone would identify you.
I refuse to see you delivered into the hands of a man as unscrupulous and controlling as Vincent Carrington.
Nor will I leave you stranded here when Ian has finally found solace in your care. ”
“I understand the reasoning.” She looked up. “You are quite right. And I am not arguing with you, but you cannot manage his grief alone.”
The Duke opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
“I am not criticizing you. He is a child in difficult circumstances. But you must admit that your approach has certain limitations.”
“I was making progress,” the Duke said.
Charlotte nodded. “He told me the last tutor had cold hands. The one before that smelled of cabbage. You will find the next one in a month’s time, and he will last a fortnight, just as the others did, and Ian will eat meals alone and climb things, and it will be very efficient and very correct and nothing at all like what he needs. ”
The Duke looked at her steadily. Then he said, “I know.”
She had not expected that. She had expected defense. He said it plainly, without qualification, and it landed like the first note of something she had not been anticipating.
“I understand,” he said again. “That is the reason I have arrived at a decision.”
Charlotte waited.
He looked at her. It was the kind of look he gave to a situation he had already resolved in his head and was now watching for the other party’s response before proceeding.
She had seen it applied to correspondence, to a difficult inn landlord, to the timber dispute she had argued with him about on the road.
She had not expected it to apply to her.
The fire crackled.
She waited another three seconds. Then: “Well? What is it?”
“I am proposing,” Sappherton said, “that you marry me.”
He said it the way he might say I am proposing that we stagger the timber deliveries.
Charlotte could not speak.