Chapter 3 #3
He went inside, and Annabelle followed him in without being invited. He noted this and chose not to address it because the rattle was coming from the east corridor, and he already knew what he would find there.
James stood at the locked music room door with both hands on the handle, his forehead pressed to the wood. He was pulling in one direction and then the other, his breath coming in short bursts, not crying yet but close.
“James.” Dominic came to the end of the corridor. “Step away from the door.”
James shook his head without looking up.
“James, that is enough. Go up to your room. Now.”
“I want to play.” The words were muffled against the wood. He rattled the handle again.
There was that statement again. “I know what you want.” His voice came out harder than he intended. “And you are not going to get it by pulling the handle off my door. Up to your room.”
James turned around, and his face was blotched and furious and wet at the corners.
“I hate you,” he said with considerably more spite than he’d said it the first time, and the silence in the room was interrupted by a lone sharp inhale.
But Dominic could only focus on his nephew, who’d slid down the wall and sat on the floor with his arms around his knees, and looked at the locked door, and did not move.
He stood over the boy, considering.
Every approach he had available came up short.
He could issue the order again, and James would ignore it or cry harder or both.
He could lift him off the floor and carry him up the stairs and deposit him with Miss Hartley, and James would be back at the door before an hour had passed.
He had been a guardian for one month, and the sum total of his methods had produced this: a small boy on a corridor floor at midnight who hated him.
“James,” Lady Annabelle said quietly, from behind him.
Dominic stepped back.
She came down the corridor and crouched at James’s level. She did not touch him. She said his name once, and waited.
James did not look up.
“I know it feels very unfair,” she said, in the same tone she might have used to discuss the weather. “When the thing you want is right behind a door and someone says no.”
James said nothing.
“Your uncle is quite cross right now,” she said. “But being cross doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the door today. You slipped out without telling anyone. You gave him quite a scare.”
James looked up at that. “He wasn’t worried.”
“He was,” Annabelle said simply. “He was in the street looking for you when I came out. That is what worried looks like, on men who won’t say so.”
A long pause. James looked at the door. He looked at Annabelle.
“You promised to show me more,” he said.
“I did.” She nodded. “And I keep my promises. I’ll speak to your uncle. I’ll sort out the lesson.”
James looked at her face. His brow was level, his mouth flat. He held her gaze for a long moment, then climbed to his feet. He looked at the locked door for one more moment, then went with Miss Hartley without argument.
Dominic waited until their footsteps had gone quiet on the stairs. He let the corridor return to silence.
Then he turned.
Lady Annabelle stood a few feet away, watching him. She did not soften her expression, and she did not look away first.
“You didn’t have to be so hard on him,” she said. “The second time was worse than the first.”
The resentment came before the sense did.
It was brief, and it was irrational, and it pointed, with considerable conviction, directly at her: standing in his corridor at half past midnight with her arms at her sides and her chin at its usual elevation, delivering her entirely correct assessment of his conduct as though she had a right to it.
He opened his mouth.
He closed it.
In the interval, he realized that Lady Annabelle had done nothing to earn his resentment beyond being herself.
He found this embarrassing. He was thirty-two years old.
He had navigated some of the more difficult men in the Lords and several of the more difficult women in Europe, and here he stood, directing private grievances at a woman whose only offense was that she was rather better with his ward than he was.
He pressed one hand briefly to the back of his neck, breathing out. “You’re right,” he said, at last. “I was short with him.”
“You were.”
He looked at her. He had looked at her four times tonight, in two different houses, and each time she had been as direct as the time before, which was more direct than almost anyone he knew.
Then a dry, almost reluctant logic presented itself: if she could meddle, so could he.
An idea came to him and, as he rolled it about inside his head, he studied her for a moment. “I have an offer to make you.”
She looked at him with visible caution. “An offer?”
“You want a husband this season,” he said. “My nephew wants to learn the piano. He won’t take to a new teacher; he is reserved about people, and he has taken to you.” He watched her expression. “I am suggesting an arrangement. You teach James piano. In exchange, I will help you find a husband.”