Chapter 8 #2
Those were the reasons he had given himself. He had found them adequate until today, when the thought of telling the children about the visit and not being there to see how they received it seemed like a worse kind of absence than any he had managed so far. He knocked once and entered.
The schoolroom was larger than he had remembered. Maps covered the table. Shells lined the sill. A sketchbook lay open to a page filled with enormous horses, and colored pencils had been arranged with the care of a child who regarded her materials as treasures.
Maisie bent over a letter she was writing, tongue caught between her teeth. Duncan worked through arithmetic with focused hostility. Eloise sat at the side of the table with a book open before her, settled in a space she had made her own.
All three looked up. Maisie’s face lit with a cautious brightness. Duncan went still.
Eloise rose, which he did not require and which told him she was uncertain what the visit meant.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
“Uncle Jamie,” Maisie said, and the tentative warmth in it was enough to make his chest pull uncomfortably.
“Hello, Maisie.” He glanced at the letter in front of her. “Are you writing to someone?”
“Miss Beauchamp’s mother,” she said. “She suggested it. Miss Beauchamp said she writes letters for practice, and I said I should like to write to someone real.”
He blinked. “That is a good idea.”
“I know.” Maisie looked pleased with herself. “I said the estate was very large and had a horse called Hercules.”
“That is accurate.”
“And that the sea is close and sometimes smells of fish.”
“Also accurate.”
Eloise’s mouth moved. He was not looking at her directly, but he could see it from the corner of his eye.
He pulled his attention back to the table and to the reason he had come. He looked at both children, Maisie with her letter and her open face, Duncan with his problem set and his closed one, and said, as steadily as he could manage, “I came to tell you something.”
The change was immediate.
Duncan’s pencil stopped moving. His posture shifted, not dramatically, but enough that the readiness in it was visible, the particular readiness of a child who has learned to brace for information.
Maisie’s brightness dimmed.
Jamie kept his voice even. “A relative of yours is coming to visit. He arrives tomorrow morning.”
There was suddenly complete silence.
He looked at Duncan. “Do you remember your Uncle Lawrence?”
Nothing. The boy’s face had gone entirely unreadable in the way it did when he was working very hard to show nothing.
“Duncan.”
“Yes,” Duncan said, in the flat, controlled tone Jamie recognized as the voice of someone managing a reaction they did not want witnessed.
Jamie turned to Maisie. Her color had drained away. She had moved without any visible decision until her shoulder pressed against Eloise’s arm. The governess had not drawn her closer, but she had not moved away. That steadiness seemed to be enough.
“Maisie,” Jamie said gently. “Do you remember him?”
The child looked at the table. Her fingers were twisted together in her lap.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you want to tell me about him?”
There was a long pause.
Then she whispered, “I do not like him.”
Jamie held himself very still. “Can you tell me why?”
Maisie considered with grave seriousness.
“He has cold hands,” she said.
The room fell silent.
He looked at her. The certainty in her small face, her discomfort, and the way her shoulder pressed harder against Eloise’s arm sank into him like a warning he had half expected.
He crouched down until he was level with her. The movement surprised her. It surprised him as well. He had not done it before, not in the months since they had arrived.
He had kept the standing distance that felt safer than the alternative, and as he crouched on the schoolroom floor with Maisie’s wide eyes fixed on his face, he recognized that restraint for cowardice.
“Maisie,” he said. “You do not have to be alone with anyone you do not wish to be alone with. Not in this house. Not ever.”
She stared at him.
“Truly?”
Jamie winced. The question was perfectly innocent and reasonable. But the fact that she had felt she had to ask and the doubt in her voice when she asked wounded him in a way he had not allowed himself to feel before. He nodded, swallowing before a lump could firmly plant itself in his throat.
“If you are ever uncomfortable, you may tell Mrs. Maggie, or Miss Beauchamp, or me. Do you understand?”
A very slow nod.
“I mean that,” he said.
Another nod, fractionally faster.
He held her gaze long enough to be certain she had taken it in, then stood.
He looked at Duncan.
The boy watched him with an expression Jamie had not seen before. It was not his recognizable blankness, indifference, or guarded hostility. If Duncan had been less determined not to need anyone, Jamie might have called it relief.
Jamie nodded once at him. Duncan looked away first.
He became aware, then, that Eloise was watching him.
Not with the assessing attention she sometimes gave him, and not with the concern she kept for the children. Her gaze had changed. He could not look at her directly without letting her know he had noticed, so he did not. Still, he felt seen without being judged for what she found.
He had felt it once before. On the beach, for one brief and accidental moment, before he had ruined it.
He straightened and moved toward the door before the feeling could settle into anything he would have to account for later.
“Miss Beauchamp,” he said.
“My lord.”
“I would be grateful if you remained with the children tomorrow.”
“Of course.”