Chapter 13
Edward watched from the terrace for the first hour, arms crossed while leaning against the stone railing.
He had not planned to play. He had planned to observe, to stand at the edge and watch the way he always watched, cataloging exits and threats and the movement of people across a space.
It was what he did. It was all he knew how to do.
But he could not stop watching Valeria. She was a different person.
The careful composure was gone. The measured responses were gone.
She was racing a nine-year-old down a garden path and losing on purpose and laughing about it.
She was spinning Horace in circles until they were both dizzy and fell on the grass.
She was shouting instructions and changing the rules halfway through and arguing with John about whether tripping your own brother counted as cheating—which it absolutely did—and she had done it twice.
She was not the woman he had met in the entrance hall. That woman was controlled and careful and held together with sheer will and fear. This woman was different. This woman was real. The other was the costume, the performance, the face that three years of marriage to Gordon had forced on her.
Then Ruth marched up to him. She stood at the bottom of the terrace steps and looked up at him with the directness of a child who had not yet learned to be afraid of adults.
“You are very tall,” she noted. “Can you reach that branch?”
He looked at the branch. An oak, old and sturdy, with a branch about nine feet up. Then he looked at Ruth. She was barely four feet tall. Her arms were crossed, and she was waiting with the patience of someone who was used to waiting for things and rarely got them.
He looked at Valeria, who was watching from across the lawn with one eyebrow raised and a look on her face that said, I dare you.
“Aye,” he answered.
“There is a bird’s nest. I want to see if there are eggs.”
He came down the steps. He reached up, and his fingers closed around the branch and pulled it down, easy as breathing. He held it down while Ruth stood on her tiptoes and peered into the nest. Her face lit up. It was the first time he had seen her smile.
“Three eggs,” she breathed. “Blue ones.”
“Careful now.” His voice was different. Quieter. The gravel was still there, but the edge was gone. “Don’t touch. The mother will come back.”
“How do you know?”
“Because mothers always come back.”
He released the branch. Ruth watched it spring back into place.
Then she looked up at him with the naked admiration that only children could manage, the kind that had nothing to do with titles or reputations or the things he had done in cellars and alleys, and everything to do with the fact that he was tall enough to reach the branch and kind enough to hold it down for her.
“Thank you,” she said, before running back to the others.
After that, he came down from the terrace. He did not announce it. He did not make a decision. He simply appeared at the edge of the lawn, and the children absorbed him into their games the way children absorbed everything—without ceremony or hesitation or the slightest concern for his reputation.
Thomas asked him to be the monster in a chasing game.
Edward agreed and lumbered after them with his arms out, his knees bent, and a growl that was so exaggerated Horace laughed instead of running and fell on his bottom on the grass and had to be picked up and dusted off and growled at again before he would play.
William challenged him to a race and lost spectacularly, then demanded a rematch and lost again, then demanded another one. Edward let him win the third.
Valeria saw the exact moment he slowed down. His expression did not change, but his stride shortened by half a step.
William darted past him and threw both arms up in the air. “I beat the Hound!”
Edward stopped and put his hands on his knees. “So ye did, lad.”
Valeria was standing ten feet away. She had not been ten feet away a moment ago. She had crossed the lawn without realizing it, drawn toward him the way she was always drawn toward him, by gravity or instinct or the simple fact that he was the only person in the garden she wanted to be close to.
“Ye are very competitive,” Edward remarked, not looking at her.
He was watching the children running. Horace had abandoned David the Caterpillar and was now methodically pulling daisies from the lawn and presenting them to John, who accepted each one with the grave solemnity of a man receiving medals of honor.
John was wearing a crown of them. Caroline was laughing so hard in her chair that she had to hold her belly with both hands.
“I let Ruth win,” Valeria said.
“You let Ruth win the relay race,” Caroline said. You did not let anyone win at blindman’s buff. You caught three children and a footman in under two minutes.”
“The footman was standing still. He does not count.”
“You also tripped John.”
“He was in my way.”
“This is who ye were. Before,” Edward commented quietly.
She looked at him, her laughter fading slightly. “What do you mean?”
“The games. The laughter. The way ye made up that story for the little one without thinking about it.” He was watching the children still. “This is who ye were before Gordon.”
She felt her throat tighten.
The garden was bright around her. The children were running and laughing. John was wearing a daisy crown. Caroline was wiping tears of laughter from her cheeks.
The sun was warm, and the grass was green, and Valeria was standing in a garden she was allowed to be in, playing games she was allowed to play, laughing without looking over her shoulder to check if anyone would punish her for it.
“I had forgotten,” she murmured, “what it feels like to play.”
“Then keep playing,” he said.
She smiled at him. A genuine smile. Not the careful one she wore in company, but the one that reached her eyes and transformed her face and made her look like the girl who stole apples and put frogs in boots and laughed so loud that the horses started.
Edward saw it. She watched him see it. And the look in his eyes when he saw it was worth every game she had played that afternoon.
They stood there for a moment. Sunlight poured across the lawn. Caroline was shouting something about the relay times being inaccurate because Horace had stopped to examine another caterpillar.
He looked at her. She looked back at him. The sun was warm on the lawn, and the children were laughing.
“He needed to win,” Edward said quietly.
“Boys like him, boys who have nothing, need to know that they can beat something, even if it is not real. Even if the man slowed down. Because the feeling of winning, even once, even at a rigged race, stays with them. It is kindling ye can build a fire from later.”
Her eyebrows rose. “You speak from experience.”
“Nathaniel let me win our first game of chess. I was fourteen, and I had never played before. I won in twelve moves, and I did not realize until years later that he had moved his queen into a trap on purpose. But by then, it did not matter. I had spent fourteen years losing everything. Winning one game of chess was enough to make me believe that winning was possible.”
Tears pricked her eyes, but she blinked them away. “You are a good man, Edward.”
“I am not. But I am trying.”
“That is the same thing.”
The children left at four. The matron had gathered them like a shepherd gathering lambs that had been let loose in a very nice field and were reluctant to leave.
Horace cried. He had found a third caterpillar, this one named Margaret, and he did not want to leave her.
The matron scooped him up, and he wailed into her shoulder until Thomas gave him a biscuit from his pocket, slightly crushed and covered in lint.
He ate it and then fell asleep before they reached the gate, with Margaret cradled gently in his other hand.
William shook Edward’s hand. His handshake was fierce, the handshake of a boy who had won a race against the Hound and intended to tell everyone about it for the rest of his life.
“I will beat you again,” he vowed.
“I look forward to it,” Edward said.
Thomas hugged Valeria. He just walked up, wrapped his arms around her waist, pressed his face into her dress, and did not say anything. She put her hand on his head. His hair was warm from the sun, and his shoulders were thin.
She thought about the boy Edward had been, sleeping under a bridge in Edinburgh, and she held Thomas for a moment longer than necessary.
Ruth did not cry. She shook Valeria’s hand like an adult. Her handshake was firm, her jaw was set, and her dark eyes were steady.
“I will come back,” she said.
“I know you will.” Valeria smiled.
“I borrowed three books from your library. I will return them next Tuesday.”
“Keep them for as long as you need.”
Ruth considered that. “I will return them next Tuesday,” she repeated, because she was not the kind of girl who kept things longer than she had promised. Valeria loved her for it.
She walked away with her back very straight and her chin very high and three books under her arm.
Valeria watched her go, then looked at the sky for a moment until the tightness in her throat eased.
Edward stood beside her at the gate. He did not speak. He did not need to. She felt his presence the way she felt the warmth of the sun, constant and close.
“Thank you,” she rasped.
“For what?”
“For playing. For coming down from the terrace. For letting William win, holding down the branch for Ruth, and letting Thomas tackle you. For being a person instead of a reputation.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “It was not difficult. They made it easy.”
“Children always do.”
They stood at the gate until the children were out of sight. Then Valeria turned and walked back to the house.
Edward walked beside her, two feet apart, and it was the most peaceful silence she had experienced since the gazebo.
She did not reach for his hand. She wanted to, but she did not. She walked close enough that their sleeves brushed with every other step, and neither of them moved away.