Chapter 12
“Ah. The dragon has emerged.”
Rosamund stopped in the breakfast room doorway.
A man she had never seen at this hour—or at this table—sat in the chair nearest the sideboard with a plate of toast balanced on one knee and a cup of Tristan’s coffee steaming in his hand.
He wore his coat as though it had been thrown on in the dark, his cravat was tied with a cheerful indifference that would have given Tristan palpitations, and he was smiling at Clara with the easy warmth of a man who had decided, upon entering a room, that the smallest person in it was the most interesting.
Lord Adrian Beaumont. She recognised him from the wedding—the cousin, the witness, the man who had stood beside Tristan at the altar and looked as though he were enjoying himself far too much for the occasion.
He rose the moment he saw her.
“Your Grace. Forgive the intrusion. Your butler made a valiant attempt to announce me, but I have found that the element of surprise improves most breakfasts considerably.” He turned to Clara, who had already climbed into the chair opposite his and was regarding the toast rack with professional interest. “And this must be Miss Clara. I have heard a great deal about you.”
Clara looked up. She had dressed herself this morning—a fact evident in the backwards pinafore and the stocking that had migrated to half-mast—and her hair bore the marks of a negotiation with a hairbrush that had ended in defeat for both parties.
“Who are you?” she asked, bluntly. Rosamund looked down to hide a smile. Clara had not yet learnt the ways of society. In a sense, it was a shame that she would, and so lose her childlike honesty.
“Lord Adrian Beaumont. I am your brother-in-law’s cousin, which makes me your cousin of sorts, though the mathematics are rather tortured.” He settled back into his chair and regarded her with mock gravity. “I am told you are exceedingly fierce.”
Clara’s chin lifted. “I am a dragon.”
“Are you.” Adrian did not blink. “Then I must ask—is it safe for an ordinary mortal to sit beside a dragon at breakfast, or does one require proof of courage first?”
Clara considered this with the seriousness the question deserved. “Proof,” she decided.
Adrian glanced about the table, lifted his butter knife, and presented it across his palm with the solemnity of a knight offering a sword for inspection.
“I present my weapon. It has seen honourable service against scones, crumpets, and at least one very stubborn pat of butter. I trust it will satisfy.”
Clara took the knife, examined it, tested the edge with her thumb—a gesture she had almost certainly learned from watching Tristan handle correspondence—and handed it back.
“You may sit,” she said. “But if you are boring, I shall eat your toast.”
“A fair arrangement.” Adrian slid the toast rack toward her in what appeared to be a pre-emptive sacrifice. “Help yourself. I prefer to live dangerously.”
Rosamund stood in the doorway and felt a knot she had not realised was there loosen in her stomach, until it began to come undone.
The house had been so careful these past days.
Every interaction measured, every silence weighted, every room carrying the faint charge of two people navigating a space neither had chosen to share.
Adrian Beaumont walked through it like a man who had never met a tension he couldn’t puncture, and the relief of his presence was so immediate that she nearly laughed.
She did not laugh. But she sat down, accepted coffee from the footman, and allowed herself to be drawn into a breakfast that felt, for the first time since her arrival, like something a family might do.
Adrian did not ask about the marriage. He did not enquire after her comfort, or her feelings, or the state of affairs between herself and the man whose house she now occupied.
He asked about Clara’s drawings. He listened with genuine attention while Clara described the fairy door beneath the beech tree.
He ate three slices of toast with marmalade, complimented Mrs Alcott’s coffee so extravagantly that the housekeeper’s ears went pink, and conducted himself with the particular grace of a man who understood that the best gift he could offer a woman in Rosamund’s position was the temporary absence of scrutiny.
Then, without transition, without the telltale pause that preceded difficult subjects, he began to talk about Tristan.
Not the duke. Not the man whose name appeared in broadsheets and Parliamentary records and the anxious correspondence of solicitors. The boy.
“He tried to train a barn cat once,” Adrian said, spreading butter with the unhurried precision of a man constructing a foundation.
“At Rath Hall, the summer we were twelve. An orange beast called Sergeant—named, I believe, by the stable master, who considered all cats to be military appointments. Tristan decided the animal could be taught to fetch, because Tristan at twelve had not yet accepted that the universe contained things resistant to his instruction.”
Rosamund wrapped her hands around her cup. The coffee was hot and very good—absurdly good, in the way that everything in this house was absurdly good—and she held it like an anchor.
“He spent an entire afternoon in the stable yard throwing a leather ball for this cat. The cat sat on a fence post and watched him with the expression of a magistrate observing someone make a fool of themselves in court. Tristan threw. Sergeant stared. Tristan threw again. Sergeant cleaned his paw.” Adrian’s mouth twitched.
“By evening, Tristan had not succeeded in teaching the cat anything, but the cat had taught Tristan a considerable amount about the limits of authority. He was furious. He did not speak to the animal for three days, which Sergeant bore with, I must say, remarkable composure.”
Clara giggled. Even Rosamund’s mouth curved, though she caught it before it could become something Adrian might catalogue.
“At thirteen, he argued with our Latin tutor—a man named Cresswell, who had the misfortune of being both pedantic and wrong. Tristan had found an error in Cresswell’s translation of Cicero and corrected it in front of the class.
Cresswell insisted he was right. Tristan produced the original text, annotated the relevant passage in the margin, and slid it across the desk with a politeness so lethal that Cresswell resigned by letter that evening.
” Adrian shook his head. “The Dowager Duchess was appalled. Tristan’s father thought it was the finest thing anyone in the family had done since Agincourt. ”
Rosamund listened. She told herself she was simply being polite—that the stories were entertaining and the morning was pleasant and none of it constituted anything more than the idle reminiscence of a man who liked the sound of his own voice.
But the stories were not idle. They were chosen. Small and specific and aimed precisely.
Adrian lifted his cup, drank, and set it down.
“He used to read to James every night.” The name arrived without fanfare, dropped into the conversation the way one drops a stone into water—quietly, with full knowledge of the ripples it would produce.
“His younger brother. Even after James was old enough to read perfectly well on his own—fourteen, fifteen, tall enough to look Tristan in the eye—he would come to Tristan’s room after supper with a book under his arm and sit at the foot of the bed, and Tristan would read aloud until the boy fell asleep. Every night. Without fail.”
The breakfast room had gone very still. Clara was occupied with toast and paid the shift no mind, but Rosamund heard it—the careful way Adrian held the words.
“James used to say Tristan did different voices for the characters. Badly, of course—Tristan has many gifts, but theatrical range is not among them. But he tried. He did every villain as a sort of strangled growl and every heroine in a falsetto that made James laugh so hard he once fell off the bed.” Adrian paused.
His gaze dropped to his cup and stayed there for a beat too long.
“James told me that once. Years later. He said it was the thing he missed most, after Tristan inherited the title and there was suddenly no time for anything that was not duty.”
He stopped. The sentence closed with the finality of a door pulled.
“Well.” Adrian’s smile returned, though it sat differently on his face now—thinner, handled with care. “That was rather more sentimental than I intended. Clara, have you eaten all my toast?”
“Yes,” Clara said, without remorse.
“Outstanding. I shall tell my cook that I was outmanoeuvred by a dragon and could not be expected to defend my breakfast under such conditions.”
He steered the conversation toward the garden, toward Clara’s fairy door, toward a question about whether Mrs Alcott might be persuaded to produce scones. The moment passed. The name James sank beneath the surface of the morning and was not spoken again.
But Rosamund held it.
She held it the way she had held the image of Tristan on the study floor with wooden blocks in his lap, the way she held the memory of his face breaking open when she smiled.
She added it to the collection of things she had not asked for and could not return—the small, accumulating evidence of a man who had not always been granite.
Who had once read badly to a boy he loved.
Who had tried to teach a cat to fetch because he believed, at twelve, that enough persistence could bend the world into the shape he wanted.
Something had broken it out of him. Adrian had not said what.
He did not need to. The answer lived in the flat, clipped finality with which Tristan had spoken of his brother in the gallery—He died long ago—and in the way Adrian’s hand had tightened on his cup when he said the name James, as though the syllable itself were a thing that could cut.
Tristan entered the breakfast room twenty minutes after Adrian had redirected the conversation toward scone diplomacy. He wore dark wool. His hair was slightly disordered. He looked as though he had been awake for some time.
He stopped when he saw Adrian.
“You are eating my toast.”
“Clara ate your toast. I am merely an accomplice.” Adrian leaned back in his chair with the particular ease of a man who knew precisely how much of an irritant he was and considered it a public service. “Good morning, cousin. You look dreadful. Have you slept at all?”
“Adequately.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“It is what you received.” Tristan crossed to the sideboard, poured coffee, and took the chair at the head of the table—the fourteen-foot distance between himself and Rosamund restored with the mechanical precision of a man repositioning chess pieces.
His gaze passed over her once, quickly, and whatever he saw in her expression made his jaw tighten a fraction before he looked away.
He had seen that she had been listening to Adrian.
He had seen the shift in her—the hairline change in the way she held her cup, the way her eyes tracked him as he moved through the room.
He saw everything. That was one of the things she was learning about the Duke of Rathbourne: he missed nothing, absorbed everything, and gave back only what he chose.
And what he chose, this morning, was distance.
Clara had no interest in distance.
“Your cousin is brave,” she informed Tristan, holding up the butter knife Adrian had surrendered. “He proved it. Can he come to breakfast again?”
Tristan looked at the butter knife, then at Adrian, then at Clara, and the corner of his mouth did the thing—the small, involuntary twitch that was not quite a smile but was closer to one than anything else his face seemed willing to produce.
“That depends entirely on whether he continues to arrive uninvited, which he will, because he has never once in thirty years waited for an invitation to do anything.”
“Accurate,” Adrian confirmed. “And I shall take that as a yes.”
“You will take it as a statement of fact regarding your character, not as an endorsement of it.”
“Noted. Ignored.” Adrian stood, brushed crumbs from his coat, and bent to Clara’s level. “A pleasure, Miss Dragon. I shall return with superior weaponry next time. Perhaps a spoon.”
Clara beamed. Adrian straightened, caught Rosamund’s eye, and inclined his head with a warmth that carried no agenda—simply the acknowledgement of one person to another that the morning had meant something, and that the meaning was hers to keep.
Then he was gone, sauntering down the corridor with the unhurried gait of a man who had accomplished exactly what he came to do and saw no reason to linger over it.
Rosamund sat at the breakfast table and looked at the man at the other end of it—the man who had once read to his brother every night in bad voices, who had argued with tutors and trained cats and carried, somewhere beneath the armour, a tenderness that grief had buried and duty had sealed over.
He was reading his correspondence. He did not look up. The distance between them stretched the length of the mahogany, vast and polished and deliberate.
But for the first time since she had sat at this table, Rosamund did not want it there.