Chapter 2
Jamie Macalpine had always hated waiting. He had hated it as a captain when weather gathered and the ship could not move, and he hated it then, in his own study, with two children missing and the light fading toward evening.
He crossed from the window to the door and back again. He was aware the motion was entirely useless. He kept doing it because standing still felt worse than doing something pointless.
The estate had never suited him the way the sea had, and several years of inhabiting it had done very little to change that. The rooms were enclosed, the corridors narrow, the walls solid in a way that felt less like shelter than confinement on difficult days.
At sea, there had always been movement, purpose, and the wide-open reliability of the horizon stretching ahead in every direction.
There, there was only the stillness of a house that had not felt like a home in longer than he cared to calculate, and on most days, he could manage the contrast well enough to function.
His jaw tightened as he turned at the door and started back toward the window. The worry had been building in his chest for five hours, and it had long since stopped resembling ordinary concern.
Duncan and Maisie had vanished sometime after breakfast. Nobody had seen them leave, and nobody had thought to ask where they were going, which told him something about the state of the household that he did not particularly wish to examine while he was already this close to losing his composure entirely.
He had men searching every road, field, and back lane within three miles, and half the village besides, and still there was nothing to report.
He crossed to the desk and brought his hand down hard against the edge of it.
The inkstand rattled and jumped. The pain that fired across his left shoulder was immediate, sharp, and deserved, and he hissed through his teeth and rolled the joint with deliberate care, which helped almost nothing, as it never did.
A knock sounded at the study door.
“What?” he said, without turning.
The door opened. He did not need to look to identify the visitor. Only one person in this household knocked on his study door with that particular blend of courtesy and complete indifference to whatever reception waited on the other side.
Mrs. Maggie entered with a basket of folded linens over one arm, which meant she had arranged herself a reason to be passing and intended to use it.
She set the basket on the chair beside the door, folded her arms, and settled into a posture that communicated she had no intention of leaving regardless of what he said on the matter.
She had been doing precisely this since he was six years old, and he had never once found a reliable way to dislodge her once she had made up her mind.
“Have they been found?” she asked.
“No,” Jamie said.
“Any word from the search parties?”
“None.”
She watched him pace for a long moment with the expression she reserved for behavior she found both predictable and unnecessary. “You are going to wear a groove in that carpet,” she said.
“I paid for the carpet,” Jamie said.
“So you did, and it is yours to ruin as you see fit.” She paused with deliberate patience before continuing. “I received word this morning about the governess candidate, the one I mentioned and left you a written reminder about last week.”
Jamie stopped walking and turned to look at her. “You want to discuss a governess.”
“I want to inform you that she has arrived in the village and will present herself tomorrow morning.”
“The children are missing, Mrs. Maggie.”
“I am perfectly aware of that.”
“We have men searching every lane within three miles, and you want to discuss the governess situation.”
“This is not the first time even this month this has happened.”
“And that makes it less worrisome to you?” Jamie ran a hand through his hair. Mrs. Maggie was chronically a calm woman, no matter what the circumstances.
But surely, even she could see that talk of a governess was inappropriate while the children were missing. Even if they were near the very edge of the estate, like they had been the last time they disappeared.
“The governess situation and the missing children are not unrelated,” she said.
She crossed the room until she was standing close enough that continuing to pace would require him to walk around her, which was a technique she had employed since his boyhood with undiminished effectiveness.
“Duncan runs because nobody gives him a reason to stay. That is not a mystery, my lord. That is a grieving boy who has not had a worthwhile challenge or a reason to believe anyone in this house is paying attention to him in months.”
Jamie opened his mouth.
“I am not finished,” she said.
He closed it again. Her years of combined authority and institutional knowledge was not something he had ever argued past successfully, even at his best, and this was not his best day.
“Maisie follows her brother wherever he goes because she would follow that boy anywhere,” Mrs. Maggie continued, “because this house is cold and she has not felt safe inside it since she arrived. That is not the children’s failure, my lord.
It is ours.” Her voice was quiet, direct, and without cruelty.
“If you spent half the energy on those two children that you spend walking circuits in this room, they would not keep finding reasons to leave it.”
He looked toward the window. Rain clouds were building over the distant hills, and the sea lay somewhere invisible beyond them, and he had nothing honest to offer in response that was also comfortable, so he offered nothing.
Mrs. Maggie nodded once, incredibly composed. “I will leave you to it,” she said, collected her basket, and left him to the silence she had just made considerably heavier.
Logan arrived twenty minutes later, still damp from the search and wearing the expression of a man who was about to say something welcome. It was the most useful thing Jamie had seen all afternoon.
He did not knock, because he never did. The habit had formed aboard the Perseverance and had simply never corrected itself once they were on land. Jamie had long since stopped expecting it to.
“They have been found,” Logan said from the doorway.
Jamie turned from the window with deliberate slowness. “Found,” he said.
“Aye. Safe, unharmed, and sitting in the village tavern eating supper as though the afternoon has been entirely unremarkable.”
The relief that moved through him was not dignified. It dissolved the tension that had been sitting in his chest for five hours with a completeness that left him briefly unsteady, and he pressed one hand to the desk until he was certain of his footing again.
“Someone fed them?” he said.
“A young woman,” Logan said. “Nobody at the estate seems to know who she is.” He leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded and the expression he wore when he was in possession of information he intended to deliver at his own pace. “She found them in the village and took them for a meal.”
Jamie thought about Mrs. Maggie’s carefully neutral expression earlier that afternoon. He thought about the governess candidate, already in the village, arriving today. He considered the timing of all of it and felt the pieces arrange themselves into something recognizable.
“We are going to the village,” he said, and reached for his coat.
***
The evening air outside was cool, sharp, and carried the distant promise of rain. Jamie breathed it in with gratitude. Logan fell into step beside him without being asked, the way he had since the first watch they stood together on a ship that neither of them served on anymore.
Logan had been his second aboard the Perseverance for three years before the explosion that ended Jamie’s naval career. He had also been the man who pulled Jamie from the wreckage of the powder magazine, dragging him through smoke, fire, and the sound of men who were not going to survive it.
Jamie had spent the better part of two years afterward trying to find words adequate to that debt before accepting that none existed.
Logan had stayed on at the estate not because he was asked, and not because the wages were remarkable, but because he had decided to, and that was a kind of loyalty that could not be explained in terms of obligation and therefore never was.
“You did not sleep again last night,” Logan said.
“I slept well enough,” Jamie said.
“You were shouting at half past two in the morning.”
“I do not recall that.”
“That is because you were asleep when it was happening.” Logan glanced at him with the expression he reserved for facts he did not expect to be disputed successfully. “The shoulder has been troubling you as well. You rolled it four times at dinner last night.”
“I was not aware you were cataloguing my movements at dinner,” Jamie said.
“You were sitting directly across from me. It required no particular effort to observe.” Logan’s voice carried no accusation, which somehow gave the observation more weight than criticism would have. “When did you last leave this estate for a reason that had nothing to do with estate business?”
Jamie considered this with more care than the question perhaps required. “The eastern tenants. Last month.”
“That was six weeks ago, and you rode there and back without a single stop.” Logan was quiet for a moment before he continued.
“You spent half your life at sea, Jamie. You have not been to the cove since the funeral, you have not been to the village for anything beyond necessity in longer than I can recall, and those children have never once seen you leave this place for a reason that resembles pleasure. They are observant enough to notice that.”
Jamie had no useful answer to that. It was true, they both knew it was true, and adding words to the acknowledgment would change nothing.
The cove was a twenty-minute walk from the house, close enough that he could smell the salt on the wind when the weather turned, and he had not gone near it in over a year.
“There,” Logan said, and pointed ahead.
Three figures were visible on the road from the village, set against the pale gray of the evening sky.
Duncan walked slightly ahead with his shoulders carrying the particular set they had worn since the funeral, the posture of a boy who had decided the world owed him a reckoning and had not yet received one he found satisfactory. Maisie walked a few steps behind him.
She was holding someone’s hand.
Jamie’s steps slowed without any conscious decision to do so. The woman beside Maisie was tall, dark-haired, still carrying the dust of a long journey on her hem, and she moved with a directness that had nothing performative about it.
As the distance between them closed, he watched her take in his working coat, Logan’s plain shirt, and the lack of any visible indication of rank, and he watched her arrive at a conclusion that was entirely legible in the way her posture squared.
She believed they were servants. The correct thing to do was to identify himself immediately and set the record straight. He recognized that clearly. He looked at Logan, who was already watching him with bright, patient interest, and said nothing, and they kept walking.
She reached speaking distance and spoke first, which did not particularly surprise him.
“Thank goodness.” Her gaze moved between him and Logan with the assessing quality of someone accustomed to managing a household and unaccustomed to finding it wanting. “You belong to the estate, I presume?”
Logan’s mouth opened, then closed again with admirable restraint. He looked at Jamie with an expression of complete and transparent anticipation.
“We do,” Jamie said.
“Good. Then perhaps you can explain to me what kind of household allows two children to wander through a village unaccompanied for the better part of a day.” She stopped before them and looked at him directly, without hesitation and without the careful sideways quality most people brought to looking at his face.
“I found this child,” she said, with a brief glance at Maisie, who was watching the exchange with wide, delighted eyes, “crying alone beside a road at the edge of the village because her brother had walked ahead without looking back and she could not keep up. She was frightened, she was hungry, and she had been sitting there for some considerable time before I came along.”
Logan produced a cough of implausible sincerity.
“I beg your pardon?” Jamie said.
“I would like to understand how that situation was allowed to develop,” she said, folded her arms, and waited.
Duncan had gone very still in the way he did when he was uncertain whether a situation was about to improve or deteriorate. Maisie, Jamie noticed with a peculiar tightness in his chest, had not released the woman’s hand at any point since they had come into view.
His niece, who had not sought comfort from a stranger willingly since her parents died, was standing pressed against this woman’s side as though the arrangement were entirely natural.
“We have had the entire estate out searching since midday,” Jamie said. “Half the village as well.”
The forward momentum behind her expression shifted. She glanced at Logan, who confirmed the statement with a single nod, and then she looked back at Jamie.
This time she looked at him without the energy of the lecture propelling her forward, and her gaze moved briefly to the scarring along his jaw and neck before returning to his face, without drama, without the compensatory blankness that most people arranged over their features once they realized they had looked.