Chapter 12 #2
Thaddeus moved deeper into the room, his breath coming shallow, his hands trembling at his sides.
Every surface held evidence of careful tending—books straightened on shelves, ornaments repositioned, even the pianoforte in the corner showed signs of recent cleaning, its keys gleaming white and black beneath their cover.
She had done this.
Maribel had entered rooms he could not bear to open and had restored them with a tenderness that made his throat ache. Had cleaned away years of deliberate neglect. Had let light back into spaces he had condemned to darkness.
Through the conservatory doors, he could see the garden beyond—still wild, still overgrown, but showing signs of recent work. Pathways cleared. Beds weeded. And someone—a figure in a simple dress, her dark hair coming loose from its pins—working amongst the roses with earth-stained hands.
His wife.
Thaddeus watched her through grimy conservatory glass, and his heart sped up ever so slightly.
She moved with quiet purpose, trimming dead wood, clearing space for new growth. There was peace in her movements—a contentment he had never seen her display within the house itself. Here, alone in his mother’s abandoned garden, she had found something he had denied her everywhere else.
Freedom. Purpose. The simple pleasure of nurturing beauty from neglect.
He should go down to her. Should demand explanation for this intrusion into spaces he had expressly forbidden. Should reassert his authority, remind her of the boundaries they had agreed upon.
Instead, he stood frozen, watching her work, and felt the last of his carefully constructed justifications crumble to dust.
Julian was right. About everything.
The realisation should have brought panic. Instead, Thaddeus felt only exhaustion—bone-deep weariness of the sort that comes when a war finally ends and one can lower weapons that have been held ready for far too long.
He was tired of fighting. Tired of walls and distance and the terrible isolation of his own making. Tired of standing in doorways watching life happen beyond his reach whilst he remained locked in rooms of his own sealing.
A sound drew his attention—voices from below, near the stables. High, bright, unmistakably Oliver’s laughter cutting through the afternoon air.
Thaddeus descended without thought, moving toward that sound like a man following a beacon through fog.
The stableyard came into view, and he stopped at its edge.
Through the open stable doors, he could see them—Oliver and the red-haired boy, Thomas, sprawled amongst straw in the tack room, building something from whatever materials they had scavenged. Their voices carried, full of the particular intensity of children engaged in serious imaginary work.
“—and this wall here stops the dragon—”
“But what if he breathes fire? Straw burns—”
“Then we need water. From the trough—”
“Too heavy. We need buckets—”
They problem-solved together with perfect seriousness, their differences in station utterly forgotten in the face of shared purpose.
Thomas said something Thaddeus couldn’t catch, and Oliver threw back his head and laughed—that pure, unrestrained sound Thaddeus had not heard since before Nicholas died.
The boy was happy.
Genuinely, wholly happy in a way he had not been in months. And it was because Maribel had defied Thaddeus’s explicit commands. Had made decisions based on what the child needed rather than what fear dictated.
Had chosen Oliver’s joy over Thaddeus’s comfort.
“Your Grace.”
He turned to find her standing several paces away, her dress muddy at the hem, her hands stained with earth, her hair falling in dark waves around her face.
She looked like a woman who had been working in gardens—utterly inappropriate for a duchess, entirely beautiful in ways that had nothing to do with propriety.
“I permitted them to play,” she said quietly, her eyes meeting his in a fierce, proud gaze. “Oliver has been in the stables for nearly an hour with Thomas. I made the decision. If you wish to punish anyone, then take it out on me.”
Thaddeus looked at her—truly looked—and saw not defiance but determination. Saw a woman who had made a choice she knew would anger him and had made it anyway because she believed it right.
Because she loved the child enough to risk his displeasure.
“You opened the east wing,” he said.
She went very still. “Yes.”
“Without my permission.”
“Yes.” No apology in the word. No retreat. “Someone needed to.”
“And the garden?”
“I am restoring it. Old Brennan has been helping me with advice and supplies. I intend to see it bloom again by spring.” Her voice remained steady despite the colour rising in her cheeks. “You gave me the key, Thaddeus. I assumed—perhaps wrongly—that you wished me to use it.”
He had given her the key. Had placed it where she would find it because some part of him—some desperate, buried part—had known he could not open those doors alone.
“Look at him,” Maribel said softly, nodding toward the stables. “Actually look at him rather than seeing only your own fears reflected.”
Thaddeus turned back toward the open stable doors.
Oliver had climbed onto a hay bale, directing Thomas in the placement of their fortress walls with the particular seriousness of a general planning defence.
His small face glowed with concentration and joy—the sort of uncomplicated happiness that came from being precisely where one wished to be, doing precisely what one wished to do.
With a friend.
The word settled into Thaddeus’s chest, heavy with implications he could no longer avoid. Thomas was Oliver’s friend. Perhaps his only friend. And Thaddeus had been prepared to deny him that—to isolate the boy further—because attachment terrified him more than Oliver’s loneliness.
“He’s happy,” Maribel said, her voice barely above a whisper. “When was the last time you saw him so utterly, completely happy?”
Thaddeus’s throat worked. He could not remember. Could not recall a single moment since Nicholas’s death when Oliver had looked so free.
“You think me cruel,” he said roughly.
“I think you terrified.” Her voice gentled. “I think you have convinced yourself that distance protects when all it does is ensure suffering in isolation. I think—” She stopped. Drew breath. “I think you are capable of so much more than you permit yourself. If you would only try.”
Trying is more than most manage.
Eleanor’s words, spoken to Maribel but somehow reaching him now through the afternoon air. Through the space between them that felt simultaneously vast and vanishingly small.
He was trying. In his own inadequate, halting way. Leaving keys. Watching children play. Standing in gardens his mother had loved whilst grief pressed against his ribs like a physical weight.
“I went to see Julian,” Thaddeus heard himself say. “This morning. In London.”
Maribel turned to face him fully. “And?”
“And he said...” Thaddeus stopped. The words Julian had spoken felt too raw, too revealing. But Maribel waited with that particular patience he had come to recognise—the sort that suggested she would stand here all afternoon if necessary, giving him space to find whatever honesty he could manage.
“He said I cannot protect people by pushing them away,” Thaddeus finished quietly. “That I have tried that approach. That it does not work.”
“No,” Maribel agreed. “It does not.”
“I don’t know how to stop.” The admission cost him. “I don’t know how to lower walls I have spent eight years building. Don’t know how to risk—” He could not finish.
“Then perhaps,” Maribel said softly, “you might begin small. With one decision at a time. One moment of choosing connection over isolation.”
She gestured toward the stables. Toward Oliver and Thomas and their straw fortress and their shared laughter.
“Let them play,” she said. “That is all I ask. Let him have this one friendship. This one source of uncomplicated joy. Can you do that?”
Thaddeus looked at the boys. Looked at his wife with her muddy dress and earth-stained hands and eyes that held no judgment—only patient hope.
Julian’s voice echoed through his memory: You’re trying. The question is whether you’ll let her see it too.
“One hour,” he heard himself say. “They may have one hour. Three times weekly. Supervised.”
Maribel’s face transformed. The smile that broke across it was bright enough to rival the afternoon sun, and Thaddeus felt something shift in his chest—something that had been frozen beginning to thaw.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He could not respond. Could not trust his voice. Instead, he turned back toward the house, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Behind him, Maribel returned to the garden. To her garden. To her quiet restoration of beauty from neglect. And in the stables, Oliver’s laughter rang out again—pure and unrestrained and utterly free.
Thaddeus walked through corridors that felt somehow lighter, past windows that seemed to admit more sun than they had that morning. He climbed toward his study—toward the familiar refuge of ledgers and correspondence and all the careful mechanisms of control.
But he stopped at the threshold.
Turned instead toward the east wing.
The corridor stretched before him, its faded wallpaper somehow less oppressive in afternoon light. At its end, the carved doors stood ajar—no longer sealed, no longer forbidden, simply open.
Waiting.
Thaddeus drew a breath. Then another. His hands trembled as he moved forward, and he did not try to still them.
He crossed the threshold into his mother’s sitting room.
Light fell across furniture his wife had cleaned. Across carpet she had tended. Across surfaces that showed no trace of eight years’ dust because Maribel had entered where he could not and had restored what grief had tried to destroy.
In the corner, on the pianoforte, sat a vase of roses. Fresh-cut. Their scent filled the room—the same roses his mother had planted, now tended by hands he was only beginning to trust.
Thaddeus crossed to the instrument and sat upon its bench.
His fingers found the keys—cold, stiff beneath his touch.
He had not played since before his mother died.
Had not permitted himself the comfort of music because it reminded him too acutely of afternoons spent here whilst she played and he turned pages and they had been happy.
One note. Then another. His hands remembered the patterns even as his mind struggled to accept them. A simple melody—something his mother had loved, something he had not allowed himself to think of for eight years.
The music filled the room, hesitant and imperfect but real.
And Thaddeus sat in his mother’s restored sitting room, playing her pianoforte whilst roses she had planted filled the air with their scent, and felt the first true tears he had shed since she died slide down his face unchecked.
He was trying.
It would have to be enough.