Chapter 31
“I’ve been thinking we ought to—”
Henry pushed the drawing room door open still speaking, but then he stopped.
Charlotte was standing on a footstool near the far window with both arms raised and fingers stretching for a tall vase on the upper shelf. Her back was to him. One heel had lifted slightly off the stool, and the whole arrangement looked deeply precarious.
He crossed the room. Her balance wavered, and his hands found her waist. They both went completely still. Then the vase slid from the shelf and hit the carpet with a dull, anticlimactic thud.
Neither of them looked at it.
“I’ve been thinking we ought to host a dinner,” Henry said. His hands were still on her ribs. He could feel her breathing. “For Nathan. We should seem—”
“Happy?” Charlotte supplied. Her voice was entirely even. Which was impressive, given the circumstances.
“Content,” he corrected.
His thumbs pressed in. Just slightly. Then he released her and took a step back, as if the whole thing had been entirely routine.
Charlotte looked down at the vase on the carpet. “Well,” she said. “That is one way to redecorate.”
“The vase is undamaged.”
“You sound almost disappointed.”
He reached down and picked it up. He set it on the side table rather than back on the high shelf because whatever had just happened, there was no reason to invite a repeat. He looked at her. She was still on the stool. She had not descended.
“Why,” he said, stepping closer, “are you standing on a wobbly stool instead of letting the maids handle it?”
She blinked. “Because the upper vase needed filling.”
“Mrs. Ellison manages this household with considerable competence. There are also, to my knowledge, at least three maids whose positions do not require you to risk a broken ankle.”
“I am not going to break my ankle.” She stepped down from the stool, gathering the stems she had set on the side table. “I wanted to do it myself.”
“You wanted to climb household furniture.”
“Is that bewildering?”
“It is unnecessary.”
“Most pleasant things are.” She moved to the mantel and began placing stems with a care that suggested she had done this many times and found it genuinely satisfying.
“It keeps me occupied. There is not—" She paused.
Her hands kept moving, but her shoulders tightened.
“There is not as much to do now that Ian no longer needs me.”
She said it lightly, but she was looking at the flowers when she said it, not at him. Henry watched her.
There was nothing dramatic about the sadness. It sat quietly in the line of her back, in the slight turn of her head.
He had stood in a stable doorway ten days ago and understood, all at once, that he had not meant to care this much. He had been doing something similar ever since.
“He still needs you,” Henry said.
Charlotte set a stem down. She turned to look at him. “He has his parents back,” she said. “He should need them. That was the point.” She smiled, and it was the other smile, the one she deployed when she did not want you to notice the one underneath it. “I am not complaining. I am glad.”
“I know that.”
“Good.”
“Charlotte.”
She looked at him.
“The sadness is allowed,” he said. “It does not contradict the gladness.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“You sound like me,” she said.
“Do I?”
“When you told me guilt borrows from the present.” She turned back to the flowers. “I did not enjoy being on the receiving end of that.”
“No,” Henry agreed. “I suspect not.”
She arranged the last stem and stood back to look at the result. He stood where he was. She had stepped down from the stool, but he had not stepped back, and the distance between them was rather less than was strictly necessary for a conversation about flowers.
He was aware of it. She was almost certainly aware of it. Neither of them addressed it.
“A dinner,” Charlotte said at last. “How many?”
“Tristan and Lavinia. Nathan and Eleanor, of course.” Henry looked at the flowers. They were, he noted, extremely well arranged. “Perhaps Lavinia’s sister, Frances and her husband Alexander, if they can make the journey.”
“Friday would give us enough time to write.”
“Friday, then.”
She nodded. She turned back to the mantel, making some small adjustment to a stem that did not look to him like it required any adjustment at all. “You should host it,” she said. “Formally. Nathan will enjoy being toasted.”
“He will enjoy it entirely too much.”
She laughed, short and real. “Yes. He will.”
He wanted, very much, to take the stem out of her hand and set it down. He wanted to turn her toward him and say something plain and unguarded, the way she said things to him, without the careful architecture of duty and practicality holding it all in place.
He did not.
She did not turn, and he did not reach, and the drawing room stayed exactly as it was: a vase on the side table instead of the high shelf, a faint smell of crushed leaves from where the stems had been trimmed, and two people standing close enough to feel the warmth of each other without touching.
“I will have Mrs. Ellison write up the menus,” Charlotte said.
“Good.”
“And you will write the toast.”
“I will write the toast.”
She gave him a sideways look. “It should be warm.”
“I am capable of warmth.”
“In a toast?”
“Charlotte.”
“I am simply noting,” she said. “For accuracy.”
He looked at her. She looked back. Her chin was lifted the smallest degree, and there was a gleam her eyes that was not quite amusement and not quite challenging.
“Friday,” he said.
“Friday,” she agreed.
He picked up the footstool and set it against the wall where it could not be climbed on by anyone. Charlotte watched him do it with an expression that suggested she found this entirely reasonable and somewhat funny in equal measure. She did not say so.
He left the drawing room.
He did not look back.
* * *
Something small hit Charlotte’s ankle.
She looked under the table. James was sitting on the carpet between her chair and Nathan’s, arranging what appeared to be an especially important row of bread rolls. Ian knelt beside him, directing operations.
“They’re not for eatin’,” Ian told James. “They’re a fort.”
James nodded, solemn, and placed another roll.
Charlotte straightened and reached for her wine. “Your son,” she told Lavinia, “is building fortifications under the dining table.”
“He builds them everywhere,” Lavinia said. “Last week it was the conservatory.”
“Bread will go stale,” Nathan remarked.
“The fortress will hold until pudding,” Tristan said. “I have complete confidence.”
The table laughed. It was that kind of evening—easy and generous, the fire burning well, the food excellent, everyone glad to be in the same room.
Nathan was on his best form, which meant he was currently embroiled in a story about a Highlander, a missing sheep, and a disputed boundary wall that had Lavinia pressing her napkin to her mouth.
Eleanor listened with a smile, as if she had heard this story before and found it funnier every time.
Charlotte was glad about all of it. She was genuinely pleased. She watched Nathan and Eleanor and felt the weight of the last months lift a degree. They were here. They were whole. That was the thing she had wanted, and it had happened.
She was also aware, the way she was always aware lately, of Henry at the head of the table.
He had been very correct all evening. Attentive host, engaged in conversation, generous with the wine. He had asked Eleanor twice about her arm and had spoken to Nathan at some length about the estate. He had been, in every observable way, perfectly fine.
It was the not-quite-fine underneath that Charlotte kept catching.
A fork on his plate, set down without purpose. A pause in conversation he filled with the wrong word. The way he looked at Ian, once, when the boy’s laugh came up from under the table, and then immediately looked away.
She knew that look. She had worn it herself all afternoon.
Nathan was winding down his story. The table had found its rhythm again, that warm back-and-forth of people who have been through something difficult together and arrived on the other side.
Henry pushed back his chair, rose, and lifted his glass. Charlotte’s attention sharpened. “Nathan and Eleanor,” he began. “I am most relieved that you are safe and back with us. I wish you health and prosperity.”
Nathan and Eleanor beamed. Then Henry turned to Charlotte. He meant to be brief but somehow diverted, and she could see it. The set of his shoulders, the slight intake of breath… it was supposed to be the kind of toast that concluded things neatly.
His gaze lingered on her, and she felt heat flood her cheeks. His brows furrowed. She did not know what to make of his expression, but it was not the carefully arranged one he wore for dinner parties.
“To finding your way home,” he said, “even when you didn’t know you were lost.”
The table went quiet.
Charlotte’s hand tightened on her stemware. The crystal was cold. She could feel the trembling start at her fingers and try to travel upward, and she pressed down hard to stop it.
Nathan’s brows had risen. He was looking at Henry, and beside him, Eleanor had gone very still.
Tristan lifted his wine and put it to his lips and did not drink. His shoulders were shaking to the smallest degree.
Lavinia was watching Charlotte.
Charlotte did not look at her. She looked at Henry.
What does that mean? She turned the words over. To finding your way home. Is he saying I have found mine? Is this home? Or is he saying—that he found his way back? To himself. To Nathan. To the life the accident interrupted.
Or is he telling me that I should find my own way home to something that is not this?
The silence stretched. Two seconds. Three.
She lifted her glass.
“To family,” she said.
Too quickly. Too bright. She heard herself say it and knew, even as the words left her mouth, that her tone was wrong. She sounded like she did at Ashford when she was managing her father’s drawing room. Smooth and hollow and slightly too fast.
Henry sat down.