CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Your Grace, the correspondence from Cornwall has arrived.”
Jenkins, the butler at Rhys’s London townhouse, stood in the doorway of the study with a silver tray bearing a small stack of letters.
His expression was carefully neutral, as it had been for the three weeks since Rhys had returned to London with instructions that any communication from Hartfell was to be brought to him immediately, regardless of the hour or circumstance.
Rhys set aside the parliamentary report he had been reviewing and reached for the letters with an eagerness he did not bother to disguise.
There was no point in pretending indifference; the entire household staff had noticed the transformation in their employer, and Jenkins was far too experienced to be fooled by false composure.
“Thank you, Jenkins. That will be all.”
The butler withdrew with a slight bow, closing the door behind him.
Rhys sorted through the letters quickly, identifying each by handwriting: there was one from Anna, written in the precise, measured script she had developed over months of practice: one from Viola, whose handwriting was still developing but whose letters contained drawings that compensated for any lack of verbal eloquence; one from Thistle, whose correspondence tended toward enthusiastic accounts of her latest scientific discoveries punctuated by creative spelling.
And one from Mel.
He saved hers for last, as he always did. The children’s letters were a joy, but Mel’s were something else entirely: brief, practical communications that nonetheless contained depths he had learned to read between the lines.
Anna’s letter was a detailed report on the household’s functioning in his absence.
She had included a chart documenting various metrics she deemed important: meals served on time, lessons completed satisfactorily and behavioral incidents requiring intervention.
She closed with a formal request for his consideration of several books she wished to add to the schoolroom library, complete with justifications for each selection.
Rhys smiled as he read, imagining her composing this report with the same focused intensity she applied to everything. She would make a formidable estate manager someday, or perhaps a scholar, or perhaps something the world had not yet invented a name for.
Viola’s letter was shorter, consisting primarily of three drawings, one of the garden in autumn, with the dormant roses rendered in careful brown and grey: one of Thistle attempting to teach Brutus to navigate a small obstacle course she had constructed; and one of Mel reading by the fire, her profile captured with surprising accuracy for a six-year-old artist. Beneath the last drawing, Viola had written in careful letters;
“Miss Grace says hello. She misses you but won’t say so.”
Rhys studied the drawing of Mel before answering, tracing the familiar lines with his eyes. Viola had captured something essential about her: the stillness, the attention, the way she held a book as though it contained answers to questions she had been asking her whole life.
He set the drawing aside carefully, adding it to the small collection he was accumulating on his desk.
Thistle’s letter was exactly what he expected, a breathless account of her latest experiments, including a detailed description of a beetle she had discovered that she was convinced represented a new species.
She had included a sketch of the beetle in question, labelled with Latin terminology that was creative if not entirely accurate.
The letter concluded with a request that he bring her “more interesting bugs” from London, as the Cornish variety had become “insufficiently challenging.”
He laughed aloud at this, the sound escaping before he could contain it. Thistle’s particular brand of chaos had become one of the great joys of his life, a constant reminder that the world was far more interesting than he had allowed himself to believe during his years of rakish indifference.
Finally, he opened Mel’s letter.
It was brief, as her letters always were. Three sentences, written in the clean, practical handwriting he had come to recognise as distinctly hers.
The children are well. Anna has reorganised the library by subject rather than author; I have not yet decided whether this represents improvement or merely change. Thistle ate a beetle yesterday to determine whether it was edible.
That was all, there was no sentiment, no declarations and no acknowledgment of the situation between them or the future they had agreed to build. Just three sentences of household news, delivered with the dry precision that characterised everything Mel did.
Rhys stared at the final sentence for a full minute.
Then he began to laugh.
It started as a chuckle, barely audible, but it grew rapidly into something less controlled.
He laughed until tears streamed down his face, until his sides ached, until he had to grip the edge of the desk to keep himself upright.
The image of Thistle, his wild and fearless daughter, consuming a beetle in the name of scientific inquiry, was so perfectly, absurdly right that he could not contain his response.
The door opened, and Jenkins appeared with an expression of carefully concealed alarm.
“Your Grace? Is everything quite all right?”
“Splendid, everything is perfectly all right.”
Rhys managed, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief.
“Everything is fine. Miss Grace has just informed me that my youngest daughter has expanded her scientific methods to include self-experimentation.”
“I… see.” Jenkins’s tone suggested that he did not, in fact, see, but was too professional to pursue the matter.
“Shall I bring tea, Your Grace?”
“Yes. Thank you. And Jenkins?” Rhys looked up, still struggling to contain his mirth.
“Cancel my dinner engagement with Lord Petersham. I find I have letters to write.”
“Very well, Your Grace.”
Jenkins withdrew, and Rhys reached for fresh paper with a sense of purpose that had been absent from his London correspondence for fifteen years.
He wrote to Anna first, approving her library reorganisation and adding three additional book recommendations to her list. He wrote to Viola, thanking her for the drawings and promising to display them prominently in his study.
He wrote to Thistle, congratulating her on her scientific dedication while gently suggesting that future experiments might benefit from observational methods rather than gustatory ones.
And then he wrote to Mel.
This letter took longer as he had drafted it three times before settling on something that felt right: an acknowledgment of her report, a question about the children’s Latin progress, a mention of his upcoming parliamentary sessions, and a single line at the end that said what he could not quite bring himself to elaborate.
I miss you. All of you. But especially you.
It was not poetry. It was not the kind of romantic declaration that the scandal sheets would expect from London’s former rake. But it was honest, and he had learned, over the past months, that Mel valued honesty above eloquence.
The letters went out with the evening post. He returned to his parliamentary report with renewed focus, determined to earn the life he had promised to build.
Benedict visited frequently, checking on his progress like a friend who had seen him fail before.
“You’re doing well,” Benedict observed one evening, settling into his usual chair in Rhys’s study.
“Better than I expected, frankly.”
“Your confidence in me is touching.”
“My confidence in you is realistic. You spent fifteen years being unreliable. A few weeks of responsible behaviour does not erase that history.”
“No. But a few months might make a dent.” Rhys poured two glasses of brandy, handing one to his friend.
“I’m learning that consistency is harder than grand gestures. Anyone can make a promise. Keeping it, day after day, when no one is watching, that’s the real work.”
“That sounds like something Miss Grace would say.”
“It is something Miss Grace said. She’s been quite clear about what she expects.”
“And what does she expect?”
Rhys considered the question. They had exchanged letters every week since his return to London, brief communications that nonetheless built a picture of daily life at Hartfell.
He knew that Anna had completed her French exercises and had moved on to German.
He knew that Viola was working on a series of drawings depicting the changing seasons.
He knew that Thistle had acquired a second toad, whom she had named Caesar in honour of Brutus’s new companion.
But Mel’s letters remained practical, focused on the children rather than on herself or on the future they had discussed.
She asked no questions about his activities in London.
She made no demands about when he would return.
She simply reported the facts and trusted him to do what he had said he would do.
It was, he realised, a form of trust. Not the naive trust of someone who had never been disappointed, but the careful, measured trust of someone who was watching to see whether her faith was justified.
“She expects me to be the man I said I would be,” Rhys said finally.
“Not because she’s watching, but because it’s who I am. She’s giving me the space to prove it.”
“And are you proving it?”
“I am making progress. I attend Parliament. I manage my estates. I write to my daughters every week and receive letters in return that contain more joy than I have felt in years.” He paused, swirling the brandy in his glass.
“I stay clearheaded at social events. I deflect women who are not my future wife. I go home alone and read reports and think about the life I’m building.”
“That sounds remarkably dull.”
“It is remarkably dull. It is also remarkably satisfying.” Rhys met his friend’s eyes.