Chapter 21
Ian’s question wound around all three of them like a tentacled ghost. Henry went very still for a moment. Then he said, “We do not know that.”
“But they might be.”
Henry crouched down to the boy’s level, his good coat in the mud without a single thought for it. “What I know is this: Men are looking. Good men, Ian, who know those roads. And until they tell me otherwise, I am not prepared to accept it.”
Ian’s chin wobbled once. “But what if they find—”
“They have not found it.” Henry kept his voice level. “So that is where we stand.”
Ian looked at the horse. Then at the ground. His nose was running, his eyes were full, and he was fighting both with the stoic misery of a child who had been trying hard for an exceptionally long time not to fall apart in front of anyone.
Henry looked at Charlotte.
It was the most unguarded she had ever seen him. Not frightened, not helpless—Henry was neither of those things.
Charlotte crossed the yard just as a groom was assisting Ian from his mount.
She did not say anything clever, nor did she offer reassurance she could not support. She simply sat down on the low mounting block at the yard’s edge, put herself at Ian’s height, and said, “Come here.”
Ian came. He pressed himself into her side and she wrapped her arm around him. He was shaking, just slightly, the fine trembling of a child holding something enormous.
“I know,” she said.
That was all. She said it into his hair and held on, and Ian let himself be held.
They sat like that for a long moment. The mare blew through her nose. A groom appeared at the far gate and Henry looked at him and the man quietly withdrew.
After a while, Ian pulled back. He wiped his face on his sleeve. He did not look ashamed of his tears. He looked tired.
“I want to go inside,” he said.
“Yes,” Charlotte said. “Let’s.”
She brought him to the smaller drawing room, the one off the hall that faced the garden, because it was warmer and the light was softer and it had none of the formal grandeur of the rooms upstairs. She settled him on the settee nearest the fire and sat beside him.
“Tell me something good,” she said.
Ian looked at the fire. “What kind of something good?”
“About your father. Something you love to remember.”
He was quiet for a moment. She did not push.
“He took me fishin' once,” Ian said at last. “Just the two of us. He said it was men’s work.” The corner of his mouth moved. “I was five.”
“Five is a perfectly appropriate age for men’s work.”
“That’s what he said.” Ian pulled his knees to his chest. “We went up the burn behind the east field. He gave me me own rod. He said I had to be quiet or we would frighten the fish.” He paused. “I wasnae quiet. I fell in.”
“What happened?”
“Da laughed so hard he scared all the fish himself.” Ian’s voice had gone soft. “He waded in and fished me out and he was still laughin'. He wrung out my coat and said—" He stopped. He swallowed. “He said that was the most impressive fishing he’d ever seen. That I’d caught meself.”
Charlotte held perfectly still.
“We didnae catch any fish,” Ian said. “We went back empty-handed and Mam was waiting at the door and she looked at us—both soaked—and Da said we’d had magnificent sport.” He rubbed his eye with the back of his hand. “She didnae believe us. But she had Mrs. Wick bring us some cocoa anyway.”
The fire crackled. Ian leaned a little into Charlotte’s side.
She heard the quiet step in the hall. Henry. She knew his tread by now, the particular rhythm of it. He appeared in the doorway, looked at the two of them on the settee, and she watched him decide, quietly, not to retreat.
He came in. He sat in the wing chair nearest the fire, not across from them but beside—close enough to be present without making anything of it.
“He sounds like an excellent fisherman,” Charlotte said to Ian.
“He was terrible,” Ian said, with great affection. “He never caught anythin'. He said it was the burn’s fault.”
“It was probably the burn’s fault.”
“Mam said it was the singin’,” Ian said. “Da always sang when he fished.” He glanced at Henry. “Did you know that? That he sang?”
Henry looked at the fire. “Yes,” he said. “He was entirely tuneless.”
Ian sat up slightly. “Ye fished with me da?”
“Once. When we were young. He sang the entire time, and I asked him to stop, but he told me it was a Highland tradition, and I told him he was from Derbyshire.” Henry’s mouth curved slightly at the corner. “He claimed it didn’t matter.”
Ian stared at him. “Ye never said ye kent him like that. Before.”
“No,” Henry said. “I didn’t.”
A pause.
“What else did he do?” Ian said. “When ye were young.”
Henry was quiet for a moment. Charlotte did not look at him directly. She watched the fire.
“He liked to walk,” Henry said. “The mountains. He would go out at first light with nothing but a coat and be gone half the day. He said the high ground cleared his head.” A pause.
“He tried to take me once. We got about halfway up, and I suggested we return and make better use of the time, and he told me I was the most unromantic creature he had ever encountered.”
Ian’s mouth dropped open. “He said that to you?”
“He said that to me.” Something moved in Henry’s voice. “He also said I needed Scotland. He wrote to me every month for six years telling me to come north and visit.” He was quiet for a moment. “I did not.”
The room was very still.
“He hunted too,” Henry said to Ian, and his voice was a shade rougher now. “He was a remarkable shot. Better than anyone I knew. He had a way of going completely still before—he said you had to become part of the landscape.”
“He taught me,” Ian said softly. “He said I’d be as good as him someday.”
“You will be,” Henry said.
Charlotte felt her heart expand.
Ian slid sideways against her arm eventually, his eyelids going heavy.
He did not fall asleep for a little while—he asked two more questions about Nathan, and Henry answered them both while the fire burned lower and the afternoon dimmed at the windows.
Then Ian’s breathing slowed, his weight settled, and he slept.
Henry sat in the wing chair. Charlotte sat with Ian, and neither of them spoke.
The library was quiet. Henry had not planned to stay.
He had come in after dinner to find a letter he had left on the side table before supper, and Charlotte had been there already, seated near the fire with a book she was not reading.
She looked up when he came in. She did not leave.
And Henry, who had retrieved the letter and had no further reason to remain, sat down.
That had been twenty minutes ago.
“Tell me about the search,” Charlotte said, lowering her book. “And forgive me for asking, but why didn’t you mount a full-scale search while we were in Scotland?”
Henry let out a heavy breath, acknowledging the logic of her question.
“I did, but my focus was entirely consumed by securing the guardianship, stabilizing the panicked household, and managing our hasty wedding,” he admitted, his expression tightening with retrospective guilt.
“I needed to ensure you and Ian were safely settled in London before I could turn my full attention outward.”
Charlotte nodded, softening her tone. “And now?”
“Now, I have sent men to cover the northern roads more thoroughly,” Henry continued, picking up his letter. “Passes that weren’t checked the first time. If those produce nothing, I will send a second party to the crofting communities further west.”
Charlotte turned a page. “And if that produces nothing?”
“Then I go myself.”
She looked up.
“To Scotland,” Henry said. “If it comes to it.”
“When?”
“When I determine that no one else can do it as well as I can.” He held her gaze. “Which I have not yet determined. But I will not sit in London indefinitely while men I have hired report back empty-handed.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Do you think they’re alive?”
It was direct. He expected nothing less. He looked at the fire.
“I don’t know,” he said. “No one has recovered their bodies. I know Nathan has survived worse than a Highland winter. He was the sort of man who—” He stopped. “He found his way through things. He always had.”
“Tell me about him,” Charlotte said. “Before Scotland. When you were boys.”
Henry looked at her. She was not asking to fill the silence. She was asking because she wanted to know, and the distinction was the reason he answered.
“He was everything I was not,” he said. “I mean that as a plain fact, not a complaint.” He turned the letter over in his hands.
“He walked into rooms and people smiled. He remembered every name. He could talk to a stable hand and a lord in the same hour and make both feel they were the more interesting of the two.” He paused. “I could not do that. I never could.”
“What could you do?”
“Manage things.” Henry said it without self-pity. “Accounts. Estates. Negotiations. All the things Nathan found tedious.” He looked at the letter. “He told me once that I was the most reliable man he had ever met, and it was the greatest shame in England.” A pause. “He meant it affectionately.”
“It sounds like him,” Charlotte said. “From what Ian has said.”
“It was very like him.” Henry set the letter aside.
“He was the only person, for a very long time, who told me the truth about myself without also wanting something from me for it.” He heaved a sigh.
“Nathan thought I should live differently. He said so frequently. He was not entirely correct, but he also didn’t understand that not everyone finds it simple to choose otherwise.
” He stopped. “I did not particularly want to examine that at the time.”
“And now?”
Henry looked at her. “Now I am somewhat less certain of my conclusions.”
The fire shifted. A log dropped, and the light changed in the room, and the silence between them felt natural.
Henry noticed the shift with a quiet jolt.
Back in Scotland, amid the relentless strain of events, every silence had been charged and defensive.
This stillness, by contrast, carried no armor.
“Tell me about your own fond memories, Charlotte.” He felt himself smile when her eyes widened at his question. “You must have some despite being the daughter of a tyrant.”
She chuckled at that. “I do have many fond memories of my mother. She was the kindest person I have ever known.”
He did not say anything and waited for her to continue.
“Not softly kind.” She looked at the fire.
“She walked into a room and everyone in it felt more settled for it.” She turned a page without reading it.
“She made everything feel possible. The way she moved through the world, through people—it was as though she had found a way to be wholly present that most people never quite manage.” She paused.
“I have spent thirteen years wondering how a woman like that married my father.”
Henry said nothing.
“I don’t mean it as an accusation,” she said.
“I have tried, genuinely, to understand it. Whether she loved him once and it changed. Whether she chose it knowingly and found a way to make peace with it. Whether she thought she could improve him.” A quiet breath.
“I cannot ask her. So I don’t know. I only know that she was extraordinary and that she made me believe the world was larger than it looked.
Then she died when I was ten, and after that no one ever quite inspired the same feelings inside of me. ”
Henry sat with that for a moment. He thought about Ian in the drawing room this afternoon, asking about Nathan, and the look on Charlotte’s face while she held the boy.
“Your father,” Henry said, his voice dropping, “failed to honor the gift he was given in her.”
Charlotte tilted her head at him, surprised by the emotional depth of his observation. “He may carry the memory of her,” Henry continued quietly, “but he allowed his own coldness to overshadow everything she brought into his life. You.”
Charlotte’s lips curved. “That is either the most perceptive thing you have ever said or the kindest.”
“It is simply true.”
“You say that about most things.”
“Most true things, yes.”
She laughed, small and genuine, and it settled into the room like a thing that belonged there.
He saw a curl, deep brown, which had come loose from the arrangement above her ear and fallen forward against her cheek. She had not noticed it.
Henry was now aware of his own hand, resting on the arm of the chair between them. He could move it toward her and feel the silken strands run between his fingers.
He looked at the fire instead and swallowed.
You are in a great deal of trouble, Sappherton.