Chapter 9 #2
The double doors with their carved roses stood at the corridor’s end, exactly as she’d seen them before. Dust had gathered in the decorative grooves.
Maribel fitted the key into the lock.
It turned with ease—well-oiled still, despite the years. The mechanism clicked, and she pushed the door open.
The sitting room beyond stole her breath.
Even through the dust, even with Holland covers draped over every piece of furniture, even with curtains drawn against windows that hadn’t admitted sunlight in nearly a decade—it was beautiful.
The ceiling had been painted with clouds and cherubs in the Italian style, the plasterwork picked out in gold that had dulled but not disappeared.
Built-in bookcases lined one wall, their shelves still holding leather-bound volumes arranged by height and colour.
A pianoforte stood in the corner, its surface grey with neglect.
And everywhere—on every table, every shelf, every available surface—small treasures that spoke of the woman who had loved this room.
A porcelain shepherdess. A crystal vase that would catch rainbows when the sun struck it.
Sheet music stacked beside the pianoforte, the top page showing the beginning of a Mozart sonata.
Maribel moved deeper into the room, her fingers trailing across shrouded furniture, leaving tracks in the dust. Through a doorway she glimpsed the bedchamber beyond—a massive four-poster bed draped in ghostly white, its carved posts reaching toward a ceiling painted with morning glories.
At the far end of the sitting room, a door stood slightly ajar.
She crossed to it and pushed it open.
The conservatory.
Glass panels formed the outer wall, looking down over what must have been the garden Julian had mentioned—the garden where the late Duchess had hosted afternoon teas and welcomed tenant children and created the sort of warmth Thaddeus had spent eight years trying to forget.
Through the grimy windows, Maribel could see the bones of it still.
Overgrown paths winding between beds choked with weeds.
Stone benches half-swallowed by ivy. Rose trellises sagging beneath the weight of unpruned canes.
And in the centre, barely visible through the tangle—a fountain.
Stone nymphs pouring water that no longer flowed, their faces green with moss, their graceful forms disappearing into wilderness.
It must have been magnificent once.
It could be magnificent again.
The thought came unbidden, sharp and certain. This room. This garden. All of it abandoned not because it was unwanted but because the wanting had become unbearable.
Maribel turned back to the sitting room and pulled the cover from the nearest chair.
Dust billowed into the air, making her cough, but beneath the grime the fabric was still vibrant—a deep rose damask that must have been the height of fashion when it was new. She ran her hand across it, feeling the quality of the weave, the careful craftsmanship.
This was the room that Thaddeus kept hidden. Gathering dust in a corner was a portrait of a woman, and Maribel approached it slowly.
Though her entire being ached to have the room cleaned, she knew it was not her choice, not her place. It had to happen, that much was certain. But there was no doubt that convincing Thaddeus thereof would be a challenge indeed.
The woman was beautiful. The late duchess, she knew.
She had the same eyes as Thaddeus, though hers seemed lighter. As though she did not carry loads that were too heavy to hold.
Instead, she smiled.
Would Thaddeus have the same smile?
The thought came sudden and unbidden, and she fled from the room quickly. Her hands trembled in the lock as she closed it off to the rest of the house once more.
The following day brought sunshine for the first time in a week.
Oliver was beside himself with pent-up energy, bouncing from nursery to corridor and back again whilst Maribel tried to convince him that yes, the grass would be too wet for play just yet, and no, the frogs would not have forgotten him during the rain.
“But Thomas said—”
“I know what Thomas said, sweetheart. But—”
She didn’t finish. Oliver had already darted to the window, pressed his small nose against the glass, and gone very still.
“He’s there,” Oliver whispered. “Thomas is there. By the garden wall.”
Maribel joined him at the window. Sure enough, the red-haired boy was visible beyond the hedgerow, wielding what appeared to be a small rake with more enthusiasm than skill.
“I could just go say hello,” Oliver said, his voice carefully neutral in the way of children testing boundaries they know are fragile. “Just for a moment. Just to tell him about the rain.”
Every instinct Maribel possessed urged caution. She remembered the footman sent to retrieve Oliver. Remembered Thaddeus’s tight-lipped fury. Remembered the careful negotiations that had yielded precisely nothing.
But she also remembered Julian’s words: Some men need to be taught that love isn’t weakness.
And she remembered the wooden soldier on her dressing table. The reinforced fort. The small, careful gestures of a man who didn’t know how to soften but was trying nonetheless.
“Ten minutes,” she heard herself say. “Stay where I can see you from the window. And do not—under any circumstances—leave the grounds.”
Oliver’s face transformed. Before she could reconsider, he was gone—racing down the corridor with the particular speed of a child escaping before permission can be revoked.
Maribel watched from the nursery window as he appeared below, a small figure in grey wool darting across the wet grass. Thomas spotted him and waved, and within moments the two boys were deep in conversation, heads bent together over something in the garden bed.
They looked happy.
Normal.
Like children, rather than miniature adults performing careful protocols of class and consequence.
Maribel settled into the window seat, prepared to maintain her vigil. Ten minutes, she’d said. Surely no harm could come in ten minutes.
Forty-five minutes later, Oliver still hadn’t returned.
Maribel had watched the minutes tick past on the nursery clock with increasing anxiety, watched as ten minutes became twenty, became thirty, became undeniable evidence that the boys had forgotten time entirely in whatever game they’d invented.
She’d seen them move from the garden bed to the hedge-line, seen them disappear from view entirely around the corner of the groundskeeper’s cottage. She’d told herself she would give them five more minutes—just five—before going to retrieve Oliver herself.
But the decision was taken from her hands by the sound of voices raised in alarm near the kitchen entrance.
Maribel’s heart dropped.
She gathered her skirts and ran.
By the time she reached the side door, a small crowd had assembled. Cook stood wringing her hands. Two footmen hovered uncertainly. And in the centre of it all, covered head to toe in mud so thick he was barely recognizable, stood Oliver.
He was grinning.
Absolutely, radiantly, unapologetically grinning—his face streaked with dirt, his clothes soaked through, his hair standing up in muddy spikes that defied gravity.
He clutched something in his hands, and as Maribel drew closer she saw it was a frog.
A truly enormous frog, exactly as Thomas had promised.
“Maribel!” Oliver’s voice rang with triumph. “Look! We caught him! He was hiding under the old boards by the pond, and Thomas showed me how to sneak up without scaring him, and he’s ever so fat from summer bugs just like Thomas said!”
The frog, unimpressed by its capture, chose that moment to leap from Oliver’s grasp. It landed on Cook’s shoe with a wet plop, causing her to shriek and jump backward into one of the footmen.
Chaos erupted.
Oliver dove after the frog. The footmen attempted to help whilst simultaneously avoiding touching anything remotely muddy. Cook had retreated to what she clearly deemed a safe distance, still clutching her chest.
And through it all, Oliver laughed—that pure, unrestrained sound of childhood joy that Maribel had not heard since before his parents died.
She watched him chase the frog across the flagstones, watched him finally recapture it with Thomas’s shouted encouragement from somewhere outside, watched him hold it aloft like a trophy whilst mud dripped from his elbows.
And she thought: This. This is what a four-year-old should be.
“What is the meaning of this?”
The voice cut through the commotion like a blade through silk.
Thaddeus stood at the corridor entrance, still in his riding clothes, his face carved from ice. He coldly surveyed the scene—the mud, the chaos, the dripping child, the escaped amphibian, his lips pursed.
The servants scattered.
Oliver’s smile faltered, his small hands tightening around the frog. “I—we were just—Thomas showed me—”
“Upstairs.” Thaddeus’s voice allowed no argument. “Now.”
“But I need to return him—the frog—Thomas said—”
“Now, Oliver.”
The boy flinched. The frog, sensing freedom, launched itself from his hands and disappeared into the shrubbery beyond the door. Oliver stared after it with an expression of such profound loss that Maribel felt her own chest constrict.
“I’ll take him up,” she said quietly. “Come, sweetheart.”
She reached for Oliver’s muddy hand, but Thaddeus stepped forward.
“Mrs. Allen will see to his bath.” His jaw was tight enough to crack stone. “You and I, madam, require a conversation. In my study. Immediately.”
It was not a request.
Maribel met his eyes and saw cold fury there—but beneath it, something else. Something that looked almost like fear.
“Oliver,” she said, keeping her voice gentle, “go with Mrs. Allen. I’ll come read to you after your bath.”
“Am I in terrible trouble?” His voice wavered.
“No, sweetheart. You were just being a child. There’s no crime in that.”