Chapter 26
“There’s somethin' in the garden,” Ian said.
He was standing at the breakfast room window with his nose nearly on the glass, his porridge untouched behind him.
He had been there for approximately three minutes.
Henry had watched him get there. He had watched the exact moment the boy had noticed that the garden did not look quite like itself this morning.
“There is,” Henry said.
Ian turned. “What kind of somethin'?”
“The kind you find by going to look.” Henry set down his cup. “Eat your porridge first.”
Ian sat. He ate his porridge faster than Henry had ever seen him eat anything, with the focused efficiency of a child who had one goal and one obstacle between himself and it. He did not finish it entirely. Henry decided this was acceptable.
Charlotte was already at the garden door when they reached it, her shawl drawn around her shoulders, and she looked at Ian with an expression Henry recognized as the particular brightness she kept only for him.
“Happy birthday,” she said.
Ian looked at her. Then at the garden. Then at Henry.
“It’s in the garden,” Henry said. “Start near the roses.”
Ian was gone.
* * *
He found the soldiers first. They were tucked behind the rose bed in a small wooden box, painted in careful red and blue, an entire regiment of them. Ian sat down on the path without ceremony and opened the lid and counted them with one moving finger, his lips forming the numbers silently.
“Twelve,” he breathed. He looked up. “There are twelve.”
“There are a few more to find,” Charlotte said.
Ian closed the box with great care and tucked it under one arm. “Where?”
Henry nodded toward the far end of the garden. Ian went.
The atlas was under the elm tree, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string that Ian attacked without patience and had off in under ten seconds. He opened it to the middle and stared down at the spread of the British Isles for a long moment.
“Scotland,” he said. He put his finger on it. Then he moved his finger south. “England.” He looked at the distance between them. Something moved across his face, the small private arithmetic of a child calculating miles. Then he looked up. “This is how far away they are. Me mam and da.”
Henry said, very steadily, “Yes.”
Ian closed the atlas. He did not say anything else. He tucked it under his other arm, alongside the soldiers, and he came back up the path with both of them.
* * *
Tea was in the small dining room, because Charlotte had decided the formal dining room was excessive for a birthday and had informed Henry of this with a tone that meant she had already arranged it and was letting him know as a courtesy. He had not objected.
The cake arrived on a platter. Cook had done the lemon sponge justice. The raspberry jam was visible between the layers, and there were candles, seven of them in a circle.
Ian stared at it.
“Seven?” he said.
“You are turning seven,” Charlotte confirmed.
“I ken.” He kept staring. “I didnae think there would be candles.”
“There are always candles,” Charlotte said. “Your mother would have insisted on them. I insist on them in her absence.”
Ian looked at her. His chin did not wobble this time. He only accepted it, the way he accepted most things Charlotte said to him, with a seriousness that sat very old in a seven-year-old’s face.
Then he blew out every candle on the first try and looked extremely pleased with himself.
He ate two slices and three iced biscuits and asked twice if the soldiers were waterproof, which Charlotte said she did not think they were, and Henry said he would look into it, and Ian accepted this as satisfactory.
“There is one more thing,” Henry said.
Ian put down his biscuit. He had the expression of a child who has decided the day was already sufficient, and anything further would be excess, and was prepared to be politely grateful for it regardless. “More?”
“Come with me.”
Henry led him out through the side hall and across the kitchen garden and around to the stable block. Charlotte fell into step beside Henry.
At the stable door Henry stopped and opened it. Ian walked in.
The pony was in the third stall. He was the familiar gray with the white nose, sturdy and even-tempered, looking with recognition at the small boy now standing in front of him with his mouth open.
Ian said nothing and stood completely still. His mouth was open and he said absolutely nothing for a period of time that Henry began to find slightly concerning.
“Ian,” Charlotte said.
Ian closed his mouth. Then he swallowed. He opened it again. “Tam?”
“Yes,” Henry said.
“He’s here?”
“He is here.”
Ian looked at the pony for another long moment. Then he turned around and looked at Henry with an expression that was entirely stripped of its usual guardedness. It was just joy, plain and open and almost too much to look at directly.
Ian ran forward and threw his arms around the gray neck, burying his face in the thick mane. “Tam,” Ian whispered, a fierce, happy disbelief breaking through his voice.
Henry looked at the ceiling and swallowed. He was fairly certain that he was struggling to maintain his composure. Experiencing intense emotion at Ian’s joy surprise him.
Charlotte touched his arm, and that nearly undid him. “I have never seen him this happy,” she murmured. “Thank you, Henry.”
He smiled at her. “You needn’t thank me.”
Charlotte smiled. Not the bright social smile. The other one, the private one. The one she kept, he had noticed, for moments when she thought he was doing something she found worth keeping.
He looked at Ian, who was now talking to Tam in a low, serious voice, telling him something about Drummond Hall that Henry could not quite hear.
Stepping closer and resting a reassuring hand on Ian’s shoulder, Henry asked, “Do you want to help me brush him down, or would you rather see how he feels from the saddle?”
Ian’s eyes grew wide. “Can I ride him now?”
“Certainly,” Henry replied. “Come here.”
Kneeling slightly, Henry cupped his hands to give the boy a step. Then he hoisted Ian securely onto Tam’s back while Charlotte watched with a soft, swelling smile from the doorway.
Ian grabbed the reins, sitting tall with an instantaneous flash of pride, while Henry kept a firm, grounding hand on the lead rope as they took their first slow loop around the stable yard.
After supper, Henry returned to the stables.
He had not intended to. He had been in the library with the post, and he had put the last letter down and found himself standing in the hallway without a clear account of how he had gotten there, and then he was at the stable door.
It was open an inch, and lamplight shone from inside.
Henry pushed it quietly.
Ian was there. He had dragged a small stool from the far wall and placed it beside Tam’s stall, and he was sitting on it with his arms folded on the top of the stall door and his chin on his arms, talking to her in a muffled voice that the stable swallowed entirely.
The pony had his head over the door. He was listening or doing a very convincing impression of it.
Henry stood in the doorway.
He had known, in the abstract, that he was responsible for Ian. He had known about it since the solicitor’s letter and had organized his life accordingly. Henry had treated this responsibility as a duty with the same thoroughness he brought to all duties. He had told himself it was temporary.
Guardianship until Nathan and Eleanor were found. A practical arrangement. Something that would resolve itself.
Ian shifted on the stool and said something quiet to Tam, and he blew through his nose.
Ian laughed—that short, surprised, completely unguarded laugh that was nothing like his usual composed self.
and Henry stood in the doorway and understood, with the clarity of something arriving too late to be stopped, that he had been wrong.
Not about the duty. That was real. But about the rest of it. He had not meant to care this much.
He had, in fact, taken considerable pains not to.
And now he was standing in a stable doorway watching a seven-year-old boy talk to a gray pony in the lamplight, and the feeling behind his ribs was not duty, and it was not practicality, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with temporary arrangements.
He thought about Charlotte at the breakfast table with her list. Lemon sponge and the route through the garden and the atlas under the elm.
He thought about the way Ian had looked when he found the soldiers, and the way he had counted them, and the way he had placed his finger on Scotland and then on England without saying what he was measuring.
What if this was not temporary?
The thought arrived whole and without warning, the way the difficult ones always did.
Henry stood in the doorway. Ian had not heard him. Tam had not looked up. The lamp threw warm light across the straw and the boy and the horse, and the night was quiet.
What if this is my future?
He did not have an answer, and he was not certain he was ready for one.