Chapter 13
“That seat,” Ian announced, pointing at the empty backward bench opposite, “is for luggage.” He said it the way he said most things—with enormous conviction and no expectation of argument—and settled himself between Henry and Charlotte.
Henry opened his document case.
The leather was warm from his hands and the letter inside was half-annotated, the margins already thick with his own shorthand.
He had planned to finish it before the first stop.
He had planned, in fact, to finish three letters, review the timber summary his solicitor had sent up with the last post rider, and begin the draft response that had been waiting since Tuesday.
He pulled out his traveling graphite pencil and poised it over the document in his hand.
The road north of Carlisle had been punishing enough.
This road, one day south of the border, was only marginally better—the springs groaned on the ruts, a low, rhythmic complaint that had been underscoring every mile since dawn.
The carriage smelled of leather and frigid air and, faintly, of the heather that had caught in Ian’s coat somewhere in the last few days and refused to leave.
The afternoon light was thin. It came through the window at a low angle and lay across Henry’s document case in a pale stripe that shifted with every jolt of the road.
“Shaggy coos,” Ian said.
Henry made a note in the margin.
“Lots of them. Like the ones at home.”
He did not look up. “Yes.”
Ian seemed to find this satisfying, and he continued peering out the window.
Henry returned to the letter. The timber dispute had escalated as Charlotte had predicted it would—he had not told her that—and the solicitor was now proposing a compromise that was not, technically, the arrangement she had suggested, but was close enough that he had spent several minutes in the study at Drummond Hall not enjoying the parallel.
He drew a line under the third paragraph and began a note.
“There’s a wall fallen down,” Ian said. “A whole one. Just—all the stones everywhere.”
“Mm.”
“Was it a battle?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it is a field wall, not a fortification.”
Ian considered this. “It could have been a very small battle.”
Henry set his pen down. He looked out the window and then at Charlotte across from him, and she was currently pressing her lips together with an expression of great composure and no sincerity whatsoever.
He picked up his pencil. The carriage hit a rut.
The document case shifted, the graphite ran slightly into the margin, and Henry held the case level with one hand and wrote with the other.
He had done worse in rougher carriages. He had once annotated a shipping contract in a gale off the Northumberland coast, in a vehicle that should not technically have been in motion.
“There’s a farmhouse,” Ian said. “With a blue door.”
Henry made no response. He was mid-sentence, the pen moving, and the sentence was important because it addressed the exclusivity clause, which Charlotte had also been right about, and which he was not going to think about right now.
“Henry.”
“Yes, Ian.”
“The door was blue.”
“I heard you.”
“You didnae say anythin'.”
“I was thinking.”
“About the door?”
“About the letter.”
Ian turned from the window. He studied Henry’s profile with the focused attention of a child who has decided an adult’s silence is a personal affront. “You didnae look at it.”
“No.”
“Then you daenae ken if it was blue.”
Henry looked up. Ian looked back at him, entirely serene.
Charlotte made a small sound beside Ian. It was not a cough. It was the sound a person makes when they are preventing a larger sound and doing so imperfectly.
Henry looked back at the letter. “It was blue,” he said. “I accept this on your authority.”
Ian appeared satisfied and returned to the window.
Charlotte’s shoulder shook, just once, and then she had it under control.
They sat in companionable silence for perhaps three minutes. The springs groaned. The afternoon light moved across the case. Henry had finished his note on the exclusivity clause and was moving to the next paragraph when Ian sat bolt upright.
“A crow!”
The pen stopped.
“On a post. Right there. Just—sittin' on it.”
“Yes,” Henry said.
“It looked at me.”
“Crows do that.”
“It looked at me as though it owned the road.”
Henry set the pen down. He looked at Charlotte. Charlotte was looking at the ceiling of the carriage with an expression of beatific innocence that did not deceive him for a moment.
“Ian,” Henry said, “I am going to say something, and I need you to hear it very seriously.”
Ian turned from the window. “What?”
“I have six letters to finish before we reach the next stop.”
“All right.”
“Six,” Henry said. “That is a specific number. Each one requires sustained thought.”
Ian nodded solemnly.
“So I will need approximately one quarter-hour of quiet.”
“I can do that,” Ian said.
“Thank you.”
Ian looked out the window.
He lasted four minutes. “There’s a man walkin' a very fat dog,” he reported.
Charlotte abandoned all pretense. She turned her face into her hand, her shoulders moving with silent, stifled laughter.
Henry looked at the letter. He looked at Ian. He looked at Charlotte’s hand, which was not doing an adequate job of covering her face.
He closed the document case.
“What kind of dog?” he said.
Ian pressed his nose to the glass again. “Round,” he said. “Very round. Like a barrel with legs.”
“That is a remarkably specific description.”
“It’s very round.”
“So you said.”
Charlotte had lowered her hand. He looked at the case in his lap. The letter was half-annotated and would remain that way until after supper.
The afternoon stop came up faster than he expected. The carriage slowed, the yard sounds filtering in—horses, voices, the crack of a door. The cold came in when the steps were let down, real autumn cold, and Ian descended with enthusiasm.
The innkeeper met them at the door. He was a broad man, cheerful, the sort who assessed a party in approximately four seconds and priced them accordingly.
Charlotte reached him first.
“Three for luncheon,” she said, “myself, my husband, and our ward. We shall require a private room if one is available.”
My husband. She said it with caution and Henry was two feet behind her and had heard every word.
He stepped forward. “We will also require the carriage horses changed. My driver will speak to your ostler.”
He said it to the innkeeper, not to Charlotte, and his voice was entirely even, and the innkeeper heard exactly what he was meant to hear, which was a duke managing a routine stop on a long road south.
The inn yard was mud, several days deep.
Ian took both their hands at the step. He did not ask. He simply reached up and took Charlotte’s on one side and Henry’s on the other and walked between them across the yard with the practical confidence of a child who has decided this is the natural arrangement and sees no reason to discuss it.
Henry looked at his own hand, and then at the distance between himself and Charlotte. Then he glanced at the three sets of boot prints they were leaving across the mud.
Charlotte did not look at him either. They walked.
The market town came an hour later. A busy crossroads, carts and tradespeople.
They had stepped out of the carriage to stretch their legs while the driver tended to the horses at the bustling crossroads.
Ian found a display of wooden spinning tops outside a shop front and was occupied.
Henry had stopped to check the wheel brace on the carriage—the road had been rough, and the left wheel was making a sound he did not trust—when an older gentleman approached. Silver-haired and wearing a good coat.
The gentleman looked at Ian. Then at Henry. Then at Charlotte.
“Fine boy,” he said. “Does he take after you, or his mother?”
Henry opened his mouth.
Charlotte opened her mouth.
“He’s not—” Henry said.
“He is actually—" Charlotte said.
They both stopped.
“He is my ward,” Henry said.
“My husband’s ward,” Charlotte said.
The gentleman blinked pleasantly at both of them, absorbed neither explanation, tipped his hat, and moved on.
Henry looked at Charlotte. Charlotte looked at Henry.
Neither said a word.
“What does London smell like?” Ian appeared at Charlotte’s elbow, top clutched in both hands, entirely unaware that anything had happened.
Charlotte looked at him for one beat. Then she said, “Smoke, mostly. And horses. And the river, which is not always agreeable.”
“Nae agreeable how?”
“Considerably not agreeable. Particularly in summer.”
Ian wrinkled his nose. “Like the drain by the stables?”
“Very much like that. But larger.”
“Much larger?”
“The entire city.”
Ian absorbed this with an expression of profound reconsideration. “Oh,” he said. He turned the top over in his hands. “Are there still trees?”
“There are parks,” Charlotte said. “With excellent trees.”
Ian appeared to decide this balanced the drain. He went back to the top.
Henry turned back to the carriage, and the market town noise closed over the moment and carried it away.
Ian had been asleep for twenty minutes when Charlotte allowed herself to look at Henry properly.
He had not noticed. He had the document case open still; the letter held at an angle. Outside, the road had smoothed. The northern ruts were behind them, and the carriage moved with a steadier rhythm now, the springs quiet for the first time since morning.
Ian’s head was heavy against Charlotte’s arm. His breathing was slow and entirely committed, the way children breathed when they had worn themselves through completely, and one of his boots—she had no idea how—was resting on Henry’s knee.
Charlotte watched him read.
“Have you always done this?” she said.
Henry looked up. “Done what?”
“Traveled like this. Alone. With nothing but letters for company.”
He looked at her the way he looked at questions he considered self-evident. “Yes.”
“Every journey?”
“Every journey of any distance.”
She watched him for a moment. “Do you find it lonely?”
“I find it efficient,” he said.
Charlotte considered that. “I suspect those are not the same answer.”
He held her gaze for one beat. Then he looked back at the letter.
She waited. She had learned, in the past few days, that pressing Henry Kingswell on a thing he was not ready to address was roughly as productive as pressing a stone wall.
The wall did not move. It simply absorbed the effort and stood there, entirely indifferent, and you were left with sore hands and the same wall.
So she did not press.
He read for perhaps another minute. Then, without particular fanfare, he closed the letter. He did not put it in the case. He held it loosely in one hand, his elbow against the carriage wall, and looked out the window instead.
The light was nearly gone. The fields beyond the glass were grey shapes, the hedgerows dark lines, the sky the color of cold ash above them. His jaw was set at the angle it got when something had landed that he had not decided what to do with yet.
His thumb moved once across the edge of the paper. Then he set it on the seat beside him.
Charlotte looked at the letter and at his hand. He had not dismissed the question. He had not deflected to logistics or offered her a subject change. He had simply gone somewhere with it that he was not yet willing to share, and the difference, she thought, was not small.
She was still thinking about that when he said, without looking away from the window, “Did you travel much? Before.”
“Not as I would have liked.”
“Where did you want to go?”
Charlotte considered this. Ian shifted against her arm, his face pressing closer to her shoulder, his other boot twitching once in whatever he was dreaming. “Italy,” she said. “And possibly Greece. I read a great deal about both, which I understand is not the same thing.”
“It is not.”
“Have you been?”
“To Italy. Not Greece.”
“Was it what you expected?”
He looked away from the window then, and his eyes found hers. “I was there for a shipping negotiation,” he said. “I saw very little of it.”
Charlotte stared at him. “You went to Italy and saw almost nothing of it?”
“I had considerable business to conduct,” he said. “And I saw the harbor.”
“What else did you see?”
Henry gave a slight shrug and held her gaze. Then he said, “I had a schedule.”
Charlotte pressed her lips together. She felt the laugh trying to form and held it. “Of course you did.”
“It was a well-organized schedule.”
“I am certain it was. And entirely devoid of anything pleasant.”
“The negotiation went well.”
“I am sure it did.” She shook her head slightly. “Henry. You were in Italy.”
Ian’s boot slid off Henry’s knee in slow stages and came to rest on the seat between them. Henry looked down at it, then back at Charlotte.
“The harbor was quite fine,” he offered.
Charlotte laughed this time. She could not help it. It was the same quality of laugh she had not meant to produce in the Scottish garden, the one that had surprised Ian and, she suspected, surprised Henry considerably more. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and recovered.
Henry watched her. His expression was not the composed, considering look he deployed at coaching stops and legal documents. It was quieter than that. More open.
She looked away before she could count what was in it.
Outside, the last light failed entirely. The carriage lamps were lit at some point when she was not paying attention, and they threw a low, warm light across the interior, across the document case and Henry’s knee and Ian’s sleeping face. The road unreeled behind them, smooth and dark.
Henry picked up the letter. He did not open it. He set it in the case and closed the clasp.
“The next stop is perhaps two hours,” he said.
“All right.”
“If you need to rest—”
“I am not tired.”
He nodded once then turned his attention toward the world outside the window.
Charlotte looked at him.
She was aware, in the way one became aware of things one would rather not think about, that her chest had fluttered in the last several minutes, that she had not authorized it to do. It made her nervous because she was yet to understand it. She was not sure she wished to.
The carriage was warm, and Ian breathed slowly against her arm. Henry was two feet away and neither of them spoke.
Then Henry turned.
This time, he was not looking at her the way he looked at situations that required management, but with what looked like warmth.