Chapter 20
Jamie had expected anger to make him reckless.
But it made him very calm. Even as he pulled the information regarding Lawrence’s petition from the pile of papers on his desk, it felt as though his anger was a separate entity from himself, watching him read the papers from the corner of the room silently.
“Would it not seem suspicious that he is suddenly petitioning for custody of the children mere days after his arrival?”
He forced himself to speak plainly. “The petition was filed weeks ago.”
Eloise’s mouth fell open, but she did not interrupt.
“It was filed before he ever came here.” He turned one of the pages with a hand that annoyed him by shaking only slightly. “His visit was not a family reunion. It was reconnaissance.”
Her gaze sharpened. “He came here to look at the household. At the children. At you.”
“Yes.” Jamie looked down at the papers, then back at her. “He had already begun building a case before he arrived. The petition is not a surprise. It is an escalation.”
He folded his hands behind his back, then unfolded them again because he could feel the tension in his fingers. “He is building the argument carefully. A scarred recluse. A widower’s household with no wife. Children left unsupervised in a village. A governess of questionable background.”
Eloise went still. He heard himself continue, harsher than he intended. “A court that will care very much about appearances.”
Her face had become very quiet. Careful. There was no point pretending the facts were anything other than the facts.
“Every charming question we almost fell for,” she said, when he had finished.
“Yes.”
“Every concern.”
“Yes.”
“Every smile.”
He looked at her. “Yes. Everything.”
That settled between them and stayed there.
Jamie looked away first. He was furious again, but not only at Lawrence.
He was also angry with himself, for not figuring it out sooner, for allowing the man to walk the grounds and ask his questions and speak to the household and to Eloise as though his interest were genuine.
“The solicitor thinks the petition can be resisted,” he said. “But only if we give the court no room to question the household.”
Eloise nodded once with practical steadiness. She understood what was at stake. That made him feel less alone. He did not say so. He thought perhaps he did not need to.
“We think,” she said at last. “We plan. And we do not give Lawrence anything more he can use.”
“Exactly.”
The agreement felt good, too good, and he recognized that feeling immediately and distrusted it. “You will keep him occupied,” he said. “I will ride to the solicitor in town this afternoon. I want the guardianship documents and the trust reviewed in full.”
“Can that be done today?”
“Most of it.”
She nodded. “Very well.”
He looked at her, no refusal, no complaint, only the quickness of a mind already moving ahead. He should have been relieved, and he was. But he was also worried. While he understood he needed Eloise’s help, he could not help his concern. Nor could he voice it.
He kept his eyes on her. The same tension he had felt on the boat returned for a moment, quiet but unmistakable. He became aware all at once that he still liked the sound of her voice when it was not angry. That was a dangerous thought. He did not follow it.
She turned to leave. At the door she reached for the handle, and then he said her name.
“Eloise.”
She looked back at once. She looked surprised at his use of her Christian name but not displeased. For just a moment, he thought her cheeks turned pink. But the color was gone as soon as he thought it had appeared.
He kept his voice low. “Be careful with Lawrence.” The warning came out softer this time. He had not meant it as an order. He had meant it as concern, and that was the part he did not say because he was not certain how to speak it without sounding more exposed than he already did.
“I will,” she said with a gentle, complicated expression.
She left, and the quiet settled back into the room long after the door had closed.
***
After another sleepless night and restless morning, Jamie found Eloise in the garden the following afternoon.
Duncan was already on the grass nearby with one of Jamie’s old nautical logs open beside him, sketching the coastline from the descriptions Jamie had given him earlier in the week. He had been careful with the chart lines. Very careful.
Jamie crouched beside him. Duncan looked up, wary.
“Your scale is off,” Jamie said.
The boy frowned at once. “It is not.”
“It is.”
He took the pencil and made one correction, then another. “Here.”
Duncan leaned in and watched with his usual focused concentration. Jamie felt a slow, uncomfortable warmth settle in him. The child was not merely enduring the instruction. He was actually listening.
Duncan took the pencil back and copied the correction with fierce attention. Jamie looked at the page. “Better.”
The boy made a noncommittal sound that would have been unconvincing to anyone else. Jamie recognized it immediately.
Maisie arrived at that moment carrying her ragdoll and a stick she had declared to be a horse, though it resembled only marginally a horse and mostly an argument with gravity. She stood in front of them, feet planted. “You both must watch.”
Jamie looked up. “Must we?”
“Yes.”
Eloise had come out into the garden a moment before and was settling herself a little distance away.
Maisie pointed at her. “You too.”
Jamie sat on the grass beside Eloise, still with the faint smell of paper and ink on his hands from Duncan’s chart and let Maisie position her ragdoll as though it were a grand and capable heroine.
The child climbed into the role at once. “There was a princess,” Maisie announced, standing on one knee beside the doll, “and the princess saw a ship captain on the sea.”
Duncan sighed. Jamie glanced at him. The boy was rolling his eyes, but he had not left, and that was victory enough.
Maisie continued without pause. “The ship captain was trapped by a sea monster.”
Jamie looked at Eloise. She was smiling faintly. “That is unfortunate,” he said.
Maisie nodded with grave seriousness. “The princess knew what to do.”
“Did she?”
“She made friends with the monster.”
Duncan looked up sharply. “That is not how it works.”
Maisie turned on him at once. “It is my play.”
“I know, but monsters are not friends.”
“They can be if they want to.”
Jamie heard Eloise give the smallest laugh.
Maisie took the objection as encouragement and continued.
The princess was very brave. The ship captain was very gruff.
The sea monster had a lonely heart. The ragdoll, inexplicably, was the only one with proper manners.
At some point Maisie announced that the princess and the captain would become friends, and delivered this with enough firmness to provoke a groan from Duncan.
Jamie looked at Eloise and saw her expression change. It was not merely amusement. It was deeper, a kind of longing that seemed to come from nowhere and settle in her face before she had a chance to hide it.
He turned toward her more fully. She noticed, and for a second, she did not say anything. “This is what I always wanted,” she said in a low voice.
Jamie frowned slightly. “What is?”
She looked at the children without turning her head. “Noise. And children. A house with both.”
He watched her profile. Her expression had gone gentler than he had seen it in days.
“There was a time when I knew I would need to marry well,” she continued quietly.
“It was expected. A baron’s daughter does not grow up with many other options.
I made peace with it.” A pause. “But all I ever truly wanted was this. A home with noise in it. Children who feel safe. A room that is never quite quiet.” Her mouth shifted.
The expression was not sad. Only thoughtful.
“My prospects disappeared with my father’s name, and I understood that.
I made peace with that too. But some things are harder to stop wanting than others. ”
That was perhaps the most dangerous sentence she had spoken.
Not because it was dramatic, but because it was true.
Jamie watched her profile and felt, with a slow and uncomfortable certainty, the weight of what he could not offer in the proper sense.
Not a home she had described, not without consequences.
For her more so than for him. And yet, he wished he could.
Eloise finally glanced at him, and their eyes met. He did not understand what it was, but it felt as though they both understood something that neither of them had spoken. He also felt sure it was deep and intimate, and possibly dangerous. He did not know what to say. So he said nothing.
Maisie solved the problem by ending the play. “The princess and the captain are friends,” she declared, very firmly. “That is a better ending than kissing.”
Duncan groaned aloud.
Jamie laughed before he could stop himself. The sound surprised even him. Maisie looked delighted. Eloise smiled fully then, the expression opening her face in a way that made him forget, for a brief and alarming second, everything else in the garden.
Maisie ran over and squeezed herself between them on the grass, leaning heavily against Jamie’s arm with easy trust, as if she had simply decided that she would not allow Jamie to push her away.
He stiffened only for a second before relaxing. Duncan drifted closer as well, looking like a boy who had simply wandered there by accident and was now too committed to the performance to retreat. He sat nearby, knees bent, pretending indifference while remaining within reach.
The four of them formed a small, oddly shaped circle on the grass, and Jamie could see it at once from the outside. The way it would look to anyone passing by. It looked like what a person might call family if they gave their party a glance. He knew Lawrence could see it too. That was the problem.
The trust Lawrence was after was not just a sum of money. It was the arrangement, the household. Lawrence would look at what appeared to be them pretending to be a family and see vulnerability. Opportunity.
He looked toward the lake’s edge and spotted Logan there with Clara beside him. Logan was standing too close. Clara had not moved away. She was shading her eyes and looking toward the children, though Jamie could not tell whether she was watching Maisie or pretending not to watch Logan.
The sight might have amused him under other circumstances. Instead, it fixed something more troubling in his mind. Everyone in this garden, in one way or another, looked as though they were being drawn into something larger than the moment. He could feel it. He suspected Lawrence could, too.
***
That night, Logan came to the study without being summoned. Jamie was standing by the window with a glass in hand and not drinking from it when the knock came.
“Enter.”
Logan did not bother with ceremony. He came in, set a second glass on the desk in front of Jamie, and took the chair opposite without waiting for permission.
Jamie looked at him. “You are making yourself very comfortable.”
Logan shrugged. “I have earned it.”
After a silence that Jamie knew was not accidental, Logan sniffed. “I have known you for fifteen years.”
Jamie’s jaw tightened. That did not sound promising.
“Half of those at sea,” Logan added. He waited. Jamie said nothing. Logan’s expression remained unusually even. “I am going to speak plainly.”
“You rarely do anything else.”
Logan ignored the remark. He folded his arms and looked at Jamie as though preparing to say something that had been waiting a long time.
“I have seen the way you look at Miss Beauchamp. I believe everyone in this house does. What I cannot understand is why you have not acted on the feelings that practically shout from your eyes when you look at her.”
Jamie went still.
Logan held his gaze. “You know, her being your governess is immaterial now. She might be working now, but we all know her true family lineage. And we all know what it means.”
Jamie’s jaw tightened further. The room seemed to narrow. Logan took his glass but did not drink yet.
The words struck him strangely. “What are you talking about?” he asked carefully. Logan was right about everything, of course. But he had said one thing that Jamie had not considered until that moment. Eloise was not, in fact, a governess by natural station. She was of noble birth.
Logan looked at him for a long second and Jamie waited for him to speak again. Then, Logan said one word.
“Catriona.”
Jamie blinked once. His face must have shown something, because Logan’s mouth twitched with amused pity. He drank from the glass in one long pull, set it down, and stood.
Jamie frowned. “What about her?”
Logan was already at the door when he paused and glanced back. “Catriona,” he said again, and this time the name sounded less like an answer than a warning.
Then, he left.
Jamie stood alone in the study with the untouched whisky in front of him and the peculiar, unsatisfactory certainty that he had just been given a warning he did not yet understand.