Chapter 7
The morning after the shore outing came with an uneasy hush. Eloise noticed it at breakfast, in the servants’ careful steps, in Maisie’s lowered glances, and in Duncan’s stubborn silence. The house seemed to know Jamie had withdrawn before anyone spoke of it.
Jamie did not come to breakfast, which was unsurprising.
However, he did not cross the corridor when she took the children to the schoolroom, nor did he come to check in on their lessons.
By luncheon, his absence had become a plain injury, because the children felt it even if they lacked the words to explain why.
Eloise told herself her irritation belonged to the children. Partly true. Not the whole truth, and she disliked knowing so.
Maisie ate her luncheon quietly, which was unlike her, and kept glancing toward the door. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked, halfway through the meal.
“No,” Eloise said. “You did nothing wrong.”
Duncan was cutting his bread with more force than the bread required. “He does this,” he said, without looking up.
“Does what?” Eloise asked.
“Disappears.” He set the knife down with a flat sound. “He did it before too. When we first arrived.”
Eloise looked at him. “People are sometimes occupied with things we cannot see.”
Duncan gave her the look he reserved for remarks he found transparently inadequate. “He is not occupied. He is hiding.”
Maisie pressed her lips together. She was trying very hard not to look hurt, which made the injury far more visible.
Eloise set down her own fork and decided she had been patient long enough.
She said no more during luncheon. She finished the meal with the children, saw Maisie settled for her rest, and gave Duncan a problem set meant to occupy him for an hour. Then she went to fetch the luncheon tray and found him outside the study.
Duncan.
The boy stood outside the study door with his back to her and a folded paper in his hands. He did not hear her approach until she was near enough to see what he held.
A folded page lay in his hands, covered in tight handwriting. A grid of numbers filled the corner, and a cipher ran along the lower margin. He had made something. For Jamie.
Her breath caught. Duncan heard her and turned sharply. His face changed several times before he found the guarded look he used when he refused to be caught caring.
“It is nothing,” he said.
“I can see that,” Eloise said, in the tone she used when she knew better but intended to say nothing further and meant it.
He looked at her, weighed the odds of escape, and then held the page toward her with the reluctant resignation of a child who had run out of better choices.
She took it and studied the work. The cipher was clever, more complex than anything she had set him. He had built a navigation problem into the margin, and the answer to the number grid unlocked the coded words.
She handed it back. “It is very good.”
His chin lifted. “I know.”
She did not smile, because that would have made him defensive. “Wedge it under the floor, then. So it can be seen but not escape with a draft.”
He looked at the door.
Then he bent and pushed a corner of the page through the gap.
He straightened, put his hands in his pockets, and walked away without looking back.
Eloise remained in the corridor briefly before returning to the children.
***
When Duncan returned during his afternoon break, the puzzle remained outside the study.
He did not speak. He looked at the page, then at the door, and walked away with a face too composed for a child.
Anger would have been easier to bear. Instead, he wore the look of a boy who had offered a gift and was trying not to mind that no hand had reached for it.
Eloise watched him go, and her frustration sharpened.
She understood pride. She understood the instinct to withdraw when the world felt dangerous. She understood wounded men who did not know how to reach toward what they needed.
The children had already lost their parents to death. No fault, no choice, no remedy. To feel cast aside by a living guardian, by a man behind a nearby door who could have opened it and spoken even a single word, was crueler.
Jamie Macalpine was going to hear her say so, whether he found it convenient or not.
He was her employer, that was true. But the children were her responsibility, and her pleasure, to attend to.
To her, their feelings mattered a great deal more to her than those of a grown man. No matter who he was.
***
She could not sleep that night. Her answer to sleeplessness had become familiar: go to the library, choose a book strong enough to crowd out her thoughts, and read until fatigue won. She wrapped herself in her dressing gown, found her slippers, and went downstairs in the dark.
The library door was not fully closed.
She pushed it open and stepped inside, and Jamie was already there.
He stood by the window with a glass of whiskey in one hand, looking out across the dark grounds. He seemed caught in a private argument, and she had a moment to study him before he turned.
He looked tired beyond the late hour. Every wall he had lowered at the shore appeared rebuilt.
He turned. His expression closed even further before recognition softened it into blank reserve.
“You are awake,” he said.
“I came for a book,” she said.
She crossed toward the nearest shelf and ran her fingertips along the spines. She could feel him deciding whether to leave. She spoke before he could.
“Duncan left a puzzle at your study door.”
He said nothing.
She kept her voice even. “He left it outside your door this morning and came back later to see whether you had taken it.”
Again, nothing.
“It was still there when he checked.” She turned toward him. “He made it himself. Navigation, ciphers, a number grid that works backward from the answer. He meant it for you.”
Jamie looked at his glass. “I was not in my study today.”
“I know.”
He raised his eyes.
“I know you did not ignore it on purpose,” she said. “That is not the same as the boy knowing it.”
His jaw tightened. She watched it and continued before the tightening could become a wall.
“He admires you,” she said. “He would deny it under oath, I suspect. Even so, he does. You may not want the responsibility, but refusing to see it will not spare him.”
Jamie turned back toward the window. “He should not.”
The flatness in his voice surprised her. It held no defense, no dismissal. Only bleak certainty.
“Why not?” she asked.
He did not answer. He drank slowly and kept his gaze on the dark grounds until she thought he meant to ignore the question.
Then he said, “I am sorry for how I behaved at the shore.”
That was not what she had expected.
She waited.
“Being watched does not sit easily with me,” he said. “Nor being studied closely.”
Eloise felt the understanding arrive and with it a small, uncomfortable realization. “I did not know you had taken it that way.”
He glanced toward her. “How did you take it?”
She hesitated. “I was trying to understand you. I observe people because it helps me learn what they will not say.” Her face warmed. “Your gaze felt familiar. I was trying to place it.”
He looked at her fully. Color rose in her cheeks before she could prevent it. Spoken aloud, the admission felt far more personal than it had seemed in the safety of her thoughts.
“Familiar,” he repeated.
“I realize that sounds peculiar,” she said.
“It does not.”
She looked at him.
He looked faintly surprised by his own reply. The library held them in a silence neither brittle nor easy, and Eloise understood they had both stepped further into honesty than either had intended.
She pressed on before the moment could close. “I apologize for making you feel exposed. That was not my intention.”
He waited before answering. “I know.”
“I was simply looking.”
“I know that as well.” He turned the glass in his hand. “It is not a common experience.”
Eloise said, carefully, “People not looking?”
“People looking without flinching.”
His even words struck harder than any accusation.
She held his gaze. “Then I am sorry they have not.”
He looked away, not in retreat, but like a man offered a kindness he did not know how to accept.
“What did you conclude?” he asked. “When you observed me.”
The question was not hostile. It was direct and a little wary, asked by a man who wanted an honest answer and was not sure he ought to want it.
Eloise thought about her answer. She thought about the shore, the study, the corridor at night, and the way he watched the children when he believed no one noticed.
“You withdraw before you wound,” she said. “You care for the children more than you allow anyone to see. You judge yourself with a severity no reasonable person would approve.” She paused. “And you are lonely.”
He did not respond immediately. He looked at the window again. His jaw was not angry, and his silence was not dismissal.
After a moment he said, “You are very direct.”
“So I have been told.”
“Do you find that useful?”
“Do you find it unwelcome?”
He looked back at her with dry amusement. “I find it inconvenient.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No,” he said. “It is not.”
The fire had burned low. Old paper and wood smoke scented the room. The silence between them had changed; it no longer pushed her away.
She asked, because the question had been in the back of her mind since the library door, “What did you learn when you watched me? If you did.”
He looked surprised she had turned the question on him. “You see more than you say.”
“That is true.”
“That you are more patient than your directness suggests.”
She tilted her head. “Also true.”
“And,” he said, his voice lowering, “you did not come solely for the position.”
She held his gaze. “No. I did not.”
Neither of them explained further. There was no need to.
“You should ask me about the puzzle,” she said, after a moment.
He blinked. “The puzzle.”
“The puzzle Duncan left you. You asked what kind. I told you about navigation and ciphers. You have asked nothing further.”
He looked at her as though he was not sure whether to be offended. “I was getting to it.”
She raised one eyebrow.
“The cipher,” he said, with some reluctance. “Was it complex?”
“More complex than anything I gave him. He worked backward from the solution and built the grid to match.” She paused. “He incorporated a naval chart. Not one I provided.”
Jamie froze.
“He found it somewhere,” she said. “I do not know where.”
The silence stretched for several seconds. Then, very quietly, he sighed. “My sister gave him a chart when he was small. She brought it from my Edinburgh house. He must have kept it.”
Eloise said nothing.
He looked down at his glass. “I did not know he still had it.”
“He does,” she said. “And he used it to make something for you.”
The room seemed to soften around them. She saw him absorb the meaning of it, and the cost.
At length he said, “I will go to my study in the morning.”
“Good,” she said.
He glanced over with the faint reluctance of a man conceding a point. “You are persistent.”
“I prefer thorough.”
“Thorough, then.” He set his glass aside. “And you are not wrong.”
She thought that might be as close to gratitude as he would manage, and she accepted it as such.
She found a history she had meant to read and tucked it under her arm. He remained by the window, no longer braced for escape.
At the door she paused. “For what it is worth,” she said, “I think your sister chose well. In leaving them with you.”
He looked at her.
She left before he could find a response to that and walked back to her room through the quiet house, and did not think about the look on his face.
She did not think about it for quite some time.
***
The next morning, Eloise escorted the children toward the schoolroom.
Maisie talked about a dream involving an enormous cat and a disputed apple.
Duncan pretended not to listen, though his ears betrayed him.
Eloise listened to them both while watching the floor outside Jamie’s study. The page was gone.
A fresh sheet lay there instead. The handwriting was sharper than Duncan’s, compressed and precise. Beneath it ran a set of cipher problems; each answer was required before the next could begin.
Eloise drew a careful breath. Duncan had not seen it yet. He remained several steps back, pretending indifference to Maisie’s dream. She waited until he reached the study door and let him find it himself.
He stopped. He bent and picked up the page. He turned it over, looked at the front again, and read the note at the top.
The note held two words only: Try this.
Eloise watched his face.
Duncan did not speak. He read the first cipher problem, and his eyes moved through it quickly. Then he read it again, and the expression on his face changed in a way she had not seen before.
The rigid line of his mouth eased. The careful blankness he wore like armor slipped, and for an unguarded instant, a younger hope showed beneath it, nearly undone by a small and ordinary kindness.
He folded the page with care and held it against his side.
He did not look at Eloise. She did not offer him a look to meet.
They continued to the schoolroom.
Duncan sat at the table and placed the page before him. He left his books untouched for several minutes. He read the cipher again, slowly, and began working through it in his head. When he picked up his pencil, his hand trembled.
She said nothing about it. She attended to Maisie’s arithmetic and kept her eyes on her work, while across the table Duncan bent over the cipher with focused, private intensity.
A smile appeared near midmorning, small and private and impossible to command away. It stayed with him through the day.
***
Late that afternoon, Mrs. Maggie came to the schoolroom door. Eloise saw her expression from across the room and excused herself quietly, stepping into the corridor and pulling the door behind her.
“What is it?” she asked.
Mrs. Maggie looked toward the study. “A letter has come for the viscount.”
Eloise frowned. “Is something wrong?”
“He read it.” Mrs. Maggie’s voice was even, but her face was not. “I carried it to him and waited, in case there was a reply to be sent. I saw his face when he opened it.”
Eloise waited.
The housekeeper turned to her with a look Eloise had not seen from her before. Not fear, but near enough to make Eloise uneasy. Mrs. Maggie looked like a woman who had learned to recognize trouble before it crossed the threshold.
“We should expect a visitor,” she said.
“Who?” Eloise asked.
Mrs. Maggie looked toward the study door, and her mouth answered more clearly than any reply could have.
“The way you say that,” Eloise said quietly, “suggests it is not welcome news.”
“It is not,” Mrs. Maggie said, and did not say more.
She walked away down the corridor, and Eloise stood outside the schoolroom door as the afternoon hush changed around her. Whatever peace had taken root in the house would soon be disturbed.