Chapter 16
“You are sitting in the wrong chair.”
Clara stood in the nursery doorway with her hands on her hips. She was addressing the Duke of Rathbourne as though he had committed an offence punishable by banishment.
Tristan looked up from the correspondence he had not been reading. He occupied the armchair near the window—the only adult-sized piece of furniture in the room—and wore the expression of a man who had wandered in by accident and intended to maintain the fiction indefinitely.
“I was not aware the chairs had assignments.”
“That one is for guests. Your chair is there.” She pointed to the miniature wooden seat beside the low table, where chipped porcelain cups stood in formation alongside three biscuits and a velvet rabbit propped upright as though it held a standing invitation.
Rosamund stopped in the corridor. She had come to collect Clara for their walk, and what she found instead rooted her to the floorboards.
“I do not believe I will fit,” Tristan said, with the measured diplomacy he reserved for Parliamentary committees.
“You have to fit. You are the king.”
“I was not informed of my appointment.”
“I am informing you now.”
Clara seized his hand and pulled. The effect was roughly equivalent to a sparrow attempting to relocate a cathedral, but Tristan rose and let himself be led.
The chair groaned beneath him. His knees rose nearly to his chest. The table struck him at the level of his lowest rib.
Clara placed a paper crown on his head.
It was constructed from newsprint and paste, decorated with watercolour renderings of flowers—or possibly turnips; the artistic intent was ambiguous—and it sat on his dark hair with the solemn absurdity of a tiara balanced on a warhorse.
“There. Now you look proper.”
Rosamund laughed before she could catch it. Not the careful sound she had perfected for ballrooms—the real one, pulled from somewhere beneath her ribs, bright and graceless and wholly beyond her control.
Tristan’s head turned. The crown slid sideways. He did not fix it.
He looked at her the way a man looks at a sound he did not know he had been listening for.
She stepped into the room. “I see you have been conscripted.”
“Voluntarily enlisted.” The crown completed its descent to his left ear. He removed it with what remained of his dignity and set it beside the rabbit.
“You looked proper,” Clara said mournfully.
“I looked ridiculous.”
“That is what proper means when you are king. Rosamund, tell him.”
“I think a good king wears whatever crown his people give him.”
“A dangerous philosophy,” Tristan replied. But he put the crown back on.
* * *
The afternoons became a habit before she noticed it happening.
Clara’s routine was law—nursery games after luncheon, walks if the weather held, stories if it did not—and she enforced it with the will of a girl who had learnt early that routine was the scaffolding upon which safety stood. Rosamund understood this. She had built the same scaffolding herself.
What she had not anticipated was the Duke of Rathbourne’s discovery that half past two was an excellent time to review correspondence in the nursery’s vicinity.
The first day, he carried papers. They did not turn at any interval consistent with actual reading. The second day, he arrived without them. Clara welcomed him as though the presence of a duke in her nursery was no more remarkable than sunlight through the window.
“Three pennies,” Clara said, on the third afternoon, selling him invisible ribbons from an imaginary shop she had opened on the carpet.
“The ribbon is worth at least five.”
“Three. And I shall tell everyone your shop is horrid if you charge more.”
“You would resort to threats?”
“I would resort to facts.”
He sold the ribbon for three pennies. Rosamund bent over Clara’s pinafore and the mending she was pretending to concentrate on, and bit the inside of her cheek until the smile became manageable.
On the fifth afternoon, Clara demanded a story. Not from Rosamund. From Tristan. A dragon story. A brave dragon—one that did not eat people, because that was rude.
“Once,” Tristan began, with the careful deliberation of a man walking terrain he had never mapped, “there was a dragon who lived on a mountain.”
“What colour?”
“Grey.”
“Grey is boring.”
“Silver.”
“Better. What was his name?”
A pause. “Thornwick.”
The story was dreadful. A silver dragon guarding a castle for reasons never explained, fighting opponents whose motives remained murky, saving a village by standing in front of things and refusing to move.
Clara adored it.
When her attention finally drifted back to her dolls, Rosamund caught Tristan’s gaze.
“Thornwick,” she said. “A dragon named after a hedgerow.”
“It suited him. He was prickly and misunderstood.”
The words landed before he seemed to mean them to. He shifted then, and she recognised the look on his face. Prideful as he could be, he was self-aware. She couldn’t help but allow a hidden smile to form on her lips.
That evening, she found him in the corridor outside the nursery, pulling on his coat. His hair was disordered in a way that suggested small fingers had been involved.
“Thank you,” she said. “For being kind to her.”
He turned. The corridor was dim, a single sconce burning low, and in that light the severity of his features softened into something merely human.
“The child asks nothing of me but honesty. It is a gift that adults rarely offer.”
She wanted to answer properly—to match the weight of what he had given with something equal. She stood there, for long minutes—just looking at him.
“Good night,” she said at last. The only words that she could manage to get over her lips. A ghost of a smile played on his face. He lifted his hands, as though he would touch her. He did not. Instead, he put both hands behind his back.
“Good night, Rosamund,” he said—and she was certain that there was a softness in his voice.
Then, he was gone—and once she no longer heard his footsteps, she too made her way to her bedchamber.
* * *
Rain arrived on Thursday and settled over London with the permanence of an uninvited relative. Clara had exhausted every indoor occupation the nursery could provide.
“I shall perish if I cannot go outside.”
“You shall not perish. Read your book.”
“I have read it again.”
Rosamund surrendered and left Clara to Parsons, the nursemaid whose tolerance for theatrics bordered on the geological.
She pushed open the library door and stopped.
Tristan stood at the desk—coat discarded, waistcoat unbuttoned, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. Papers covered every surface. His hair fell across his forehead from being raked through, and the set of his shoulders carried a tension she recognised from their earliest days.
He had not heard her enter.
She knocked on the open door. The transformation was immediate—sleeves adjusted, posture corrected, weariness folded behind composure. But it was too late. She had already seen.
“Forgive me. I came for a book.”
“This is your library as much as mine.”
“It is your library. I borrow it.”
“Then borrow it.”
The movement disturbed a paper on the desk, which slid sideways and joined a colony of its fellows on the floor. He caught it. Missed the next. She bent without thinking, retrieved it, held it out.
Their fingers brushed.
“You look tired,” she heard herself say. The sort of observation that belonged between people who cared about each other’s wellbeing. She was not—she had told herself repeatedly, at increasing volume—such a person.
“I am quite well.”
“You are a dreadful liar.”
“I am an excellent liar. You simply pay closer attention than most.”
She rang for tea. Poured it. Handed him the cup, and this time their fingers met deliberately—or at least without effort to avoid it—and the contact lasted one second longer than necessary.
They sat. Rain streaked the windows. The fire spoke. For a while they simply existed in the same room without the excuse of Clara or a meal or a public performance.
“Clara has requested that Thornwick acquire a companion,” Rosamund said. “A smaller dragon. Blue. Named Marigold.”
“A blue dragon named after a flower.”
“She was adamant. And Marigold must be able to sing.”
“Naturally.”
“You will have to provide the singing voice.”
“I do not sing.”
“Then you shall learn. Clara does not accept excuses.”
He held her gaze. The amusement in his face softened the severe planes into something that made the air feel thinner.
“What else did you love?” he asked. Quietly. “Before.”
The word carried the weight of everything that had been taken—the house, the gardens, the parents, the life—and he laid it down between them without flinching from what it meant that he was the one asking.
“Music. My mother played the pianoforte—not well, but every evening after supper. And gardens. We had a walled garden in Hertfordshire. Roses my mother planted the year Clara was born. Lavender along the south wall you could smell from the lane.” She stopped.
The memory arrived whole, vivid, merciless. “I thought it would always be there.”
He did not offer comfort or platitudes. He listened with the full weight of his attention, as though what she told him mattered more than the papers on his desk or the letters awaiting his seal.
“And you?” she asked. “Have you ever wished for a different life?”
“Once. I believed duty would be enough.”
“And now?”
A log settled in the grate.
“Now I am no longer certain.”
A loose page slipped from the edge of the desk. They both reached for it.
Her gloved fingers closed over his bare ones. Warm, solid, there. A heartbeat. His hand tightened—fractionally, involuntarily—before discipline took hold and he pulled away.
He straightened. Turned back to the fire.
“Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive.”
She crossed the room. Reached the door. Her hand rested on the frame.
She did not turn back.
Upstairs, she closed her chamber door and stood with her palm pressed flat against her sternum. The glove was still warm where his hand had been.
She set it on the dressing table beside the small vase of wildflowers that had appeared days ago, that she had still not asked about. Because asking would require an answer. And the answer would require her to do something with the feeling building behind every wall she had left.
He said duty was no longer enough.
From the writing desk she had not yet opened, a cream-coloured card caught the late afternoon light. Lady Willoughby’s invitation, delivered that morning, requesting the Duchess of Rathbourne’s company at luncheon on Thursday next.
A woman of impeccable connections and ruthless curiosity.
Rosamund picked it up. Turned it over. Set it down.
She would go. She would be charming and composed and give them nothing.
But as she changed for dinner that evening and fastened the buttons at her wrist, her fingers found the place on her glove—right hand, third finger—where the warmth of him still lingered like a question she was no longer certain she wanted to refuse.