Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Aweek had passed, and.
Malcolm was in the gardens before the sun had fully cleared the tree line. Not even a four-mile run had dampened his relentless energy. He was currently working with a weighted bar near the stone wall, his breath coming in steady, rhythmic huffs that clouded in the cool morning air.
Hector, usually a shadow at his master’s heels, was prowling the perimeter of the hedgerow. Suddenly, the dog froze, his ears twitching toward a dense patch of laurel. A single sharp bark echoed off the stone.
“Hector, heel,” Malcolm commanded, not breaking his stride.
The dog didn’t move. Instead, he let out a low whine and disappeared into the brush with a frantic wag of his tail. Malcolm swore under his breath and set the bar down with a heavy thud. He strode toward the bushes, expecting a hare or perhaps a stray fox.
Instead, he found a pair of small, mud-caked boots.
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
Malcolm looked at his dog first.
Hector was sitting in a gap in the hedge. Nicholas stood behind him, his chin tilted at a defiant angle.
“You’re on my property,” Malcolm said.
“Only barely.” Nicholas glanced at his feet, then back up, his honey-brown eyes clear and unblinking. “I’m hardly past the hedge at all. My heels are still on the lane side.”
“Your heels are in the dirt. You’re past it.”
“Hector came to me. I was just standing here.” He looked down at the dog, who wagged his tail once against the boy’s shin with great contentment. “He ran through himself. I couldn’t very well ignore him, could I? It would be rude.”
“Hector.” Malcolm kept his eyes on the boy. “Heel.”
The dog looked at Malcolm. He looked at Nicholas. Then, with a deliberate lack of respect, he sat down on Nicholas’s left shoe and closed his eyes.
Malcolm wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. He had been out here since five, trying to work his body until the thinking stopped. He used the weights and the drills to keep the memory of a certain garden kiss manageable. Work the muscles until they burned, and the mind would follow.
It had been working tolerably well until three minutes ago.
He crossed his arms, the sweat-dampened linen of his shirt clinging to his shoulders. “Go home, Nicholas.”
Nicholas’s face set. “I only want to stay for a little while! I won’t bother you at all, and I will stay right here in this corner and keep Hector company, and you shall not even know that I am here.” He paused, his gaze flickering to the weighted bar. “But I will be quiet.”
“And yet you are not being quiet now.”
“After this.” He grinned toothily. “Twenty minutes. Then I shall go without any argument, I promise.”
Malcolm looked at the boy. Nicholas looked back. Hector opened one eye, looking entirely too pleased with the situation.
“Your mother does not know that you are here,” Malcolm said, his voice dropping an octave.
Nicholas’s expression shifted, a tiny flinch of the jaw. “She is at the Athena Society discussing poetry.”
“That is not what I asked, Nicholas.” Malcolm sighed, worried and weary.
“No,” Nicholas said quietly. “She does not know.”
He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t offer a lie about a forgotten book or a stray ball. He just stood his ground and waited.
Malcolm uncrossed his arms. He looked at the long stretch of the garden, at the morning light caught in the dew, and at the boy who seemed to have more iron in his spine than half the men he’d served with in the Navy. He looked at Hector, who was now lying completely across Nicholas’s feet.
“Twenty minutes,” Malcolm affirmed. “In that corner. You do not follow me. You do not interrupt me, and when I say that it is time to go, then you will leave. Do you understand?”
Nicholas’ face transformed, a beam of pure radiance breaking through. “Yes, Your Grace.”
After a quick pause to assess if Nicholas truly would listen to him, Malcolm nodded curtly and turned back to his weights.
He settled into his stance and gripped the bar.
The familiar pull, the resistance of the iron, the burn in his deltoids.
He focused on it all, trying to drown out the presence behind him.
Thud.
A small leather ball hit the garden wall. Hector scrambled after it, his claws skittering on the stone path. Nicholas’ voice followed, low and instructional, telling the dog to stay.
“Do you like exercising?”
Malcolm lifted the bar, his muscles straining. “Yes.”
“Did they make you do it in the Navy?”
“Yes.”
“All the men? Even the ones who did not want to?”
“Especially those.”
A beat of silence passed. The ball hit the wall again.
“Were you good at it? Or did you have to practice?”
Malcolm lowered the bar. Raised it. “I had to practice.”
“At everything?”
“At most things. Strength is not a gift but a habit.”
“What were you good at straightaway?”
Malcolm stopped. He thought about it, which was irritating. “Shooting,” he finally said. “And patience.”
“Patience?” Nicholas sounded genuinely surprised. “You do not seem very patient, Your Grace. You seem… fast. Like you are always about to go somewhere.”
Malcolm set the bar down with a controlled clang. He turned to find Nicholas sitting cross-legged in the grass, Hector’s heavy head resting on the boy’s knee. The child was looking up with an open, forensic curiosity, as if Malcolm were a map he was trying to memorize.
“I am patient,” Malcolm said slowly, “when it matters.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I choose when to use it. It was like when we were on Lord Hillsborough’s hunt. If you move too early, you lose the prey. If you move too late, you starve. Patience is the gap between the two.”
Nicholas’ face screwed up as he thought on Malcolm’s words. “Like with the pheasant! You were very patient before you fired. You did not even breathe.”
“Yes.”
“Can you teach me how to do that?”
Malcolm picked the bar back up. “I can try one day.” He pointedly went back to his exercising.
Nicholas was quiet for nearly thirty seconds, which appeared to be his absolute limit for silence. “What was the worst thing about the Navy?”
Malcolm paused at the top of the lift, holding the iron steady. The memories of the Channel, the salt-rot, the smell of blood and wet wool, flickered behind his eyes. He lowered the bar slowly.
“The waiting,” he said.
“But you just said you were good at patience.”
“There’s a difference between choosing to wait for a shot and being made to wait for a command that never comes. Being patient is a discipline. Being forced to wait is a prison.” He set the bar against the wall and turned around. “Do you see the difference?”
Nicholas considered this with a serious, unhurried expression. “Like when Mama makes me wait to go outside until I have finished my Latin. That is being kept waiting.”
“No,” Malcolm said. “Not quite, but now is not the time to explain. You promised not to interrupt me, remember?”
Nicholas nodded dutifully and turned back to his ball, tossing it up before catching it in his palm once more. He scratched Hector’s ears, content to simply sit there again.
Twenty-three minutes passed.
Malcolm noticed when he checked his pocket watch. He had intended to dismiss the boy at exactly twenty. He stood looking at the watch-face, the ticking of the seconds feeling louder than usual.
Twenty-three.
He slid the watch back into his waistcoat. “Time,” he said.
Nicholas looked at Hector. The dog gave a slow, mournful wag of his tail. Nicholas ran his hand along the dog’s ears, then reached up and scratched that specific, sensitive spot behind the left ear. A spot Malcolm had never told him about, yet the boy had found it anyway.
He stood and brushed the grass from his trousers. He straightened his small jacket with both hands.
“Thank you, Your Grace.” he said.
It wasn’t a plea for more time. It wasn’t a lure for a return invitation. It was simple gratitude. He put his hand on Hector’s head one last time, turned, and disappeared into the woodlands at the back of the garden.
Malcolm stood up, the sweat cooling on his skin. Hector sat at his feet and stared at the tree line, too.
Twenty-three minutes.