Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Newton ate the biscuit,” James said. “Charlotte’s biscuit. He came from the window seat and ate it off the rug.”
Charlotte turned her head at the sound of her name.
She was standing at the low table near the window, both hands pressing flat against the wood for balance, and at some seventeen months, the standing still required a degree of concentration.
She found Newton on the window seat, found the empty space on the rug, and looked at both things in turn without distress.
Newton cleaned his ear with studied composure.
“That is,” Elinor said, reaching forward to collect a scattered wooden toy from the floor, “an entirely predictable outcome of leaving a biscuit within his reach.”
James turned to Newton. “That biscuit was Charlotte’s.”
Newton moved on to his left paw.
“He understands,” Annabelle said from her low chair beside the settee. “He simply doesn’t repent.”
James appeared to accept this as the known defect it was, and returned to watching Charlotte, who had lifted both hands from the table and taken one swaying step forward before catching herself.
She made a sound. She found James across the rug, and in the way of children who have not yet been taught to ask permission, started toward him, putting her feet down with the front-weighted determination of someone who still trusts the act considerably more than the physics.
She reached him and grabbed his sleeve.
“She’s holding my jacket,” James said.
“I see that,” Annabelle said.
“Is she going to let go?”
“Probably not.”
Charlotte looked up at James. James looked down at Charlotte. His free hand came up and then changed its mind and went back to his side. Charlotte, apparently finding this arrangement satisfactory, turned her attention back to Newton and maintained her grip.
From the armchair beside the fire, Dominic watched the two of them.
James stood very still with Charlotte attached to his sleeve, not pulling away, his eyes moving between her and the cat with the close attention of someone monitoring a situation for which no prior protocol existed.
Eventually, he sat down on the edge of the rug, which brought him to Charlotte’s height.
She sat too, still holding his sleeve, and pointed at Newton.
“He knows,” James told her.
Charlotte pointed again.
“He is unrepentant,” James said.
Lucien had said, “I’ve some correspondence to see to,” and glanced at Dominic, and Dominic had understood the shape of the offer and followed him to the library.
He had been tracking Lucien’s movements since their arrival, the way he tracked anyone who might, on sufficient provocation, ask him to meet at dawn.
Not openly. He had spent years learning how Lucien Stanton moved through a room when he was managing something versus when he was genuinely at ease, and he had spent the past two months distinguishing between those two states on a near-daily basis.
Lucien, in his own library, poured two glasses and handed one across. His jaw was easy. His gaze came to Dominic straight.
That was a different matter altogether.
“The Whitmore boundary dispute,” Lucien said, taking the chair by the window. “Went to arbitration?”
“Last month. Settled for Whitmore.” Dominic sat. “He’s changed solicitors.”
“I heard. Pemberton’s firm?” Lucien swirled his glass. “They’d have caught it in the documentation phase. Aldworth always ran long.”
“Three years past due, that case.” Dominic turned his glass in his hand and watched Lucien’s face, the line of his shoulders. Not wire-tight. Not holding anything back. “Who handles the Fairmont northern boundary now?”
“Pemberton, since last year.” A brief pause. “I’d consider Graves for the Wiltshire matter if he’s still with you.”
“Twelve years,” Dominic said. “He’ll see the problem in a week.”
Lucien looked at the fire. The coals had built to a good heat, and neither of them needed to tend it, and the quiet between them was the quiet of a library with nothing unresolved in it, which was the first time in two months that had been true, and Dominic noted it and said nothing about it.
“She is good with James,” Lucien said, after a stretch.
He did not clarify which one. “She was always good with children who needed room to come forward on their own terms. There was a boy at the Felby estate when we were small, the same age, who couldn’t speak.
She would sit with him for hours.” He turned his glass once. “She knows how to wait.”
“I know,” Dominic said.
Lucien looked at the fire.
“She always has,” he said, and that was the end of it.
He came back to the drawing room to find it rearranged.
James was cross-legged on the rug with Newton across his knees, paging through a book with the authority of someone conducting a second inspection. Charlotte was in Annabelle’s arms.
She was asleep, one fist locked in the front of Annabelle’s dress, cheek pressed against her shoulder.
Annabelle stood at the window with her back partly turned, her hand moving in slow circles at Charlotte’s back, the motion even and continuous and requiring nothing from her.
Her chin rested on top of Charlotte’s head.
Dominic stood in the doorway, watching her.
He saw the way Annabelle’s hand stilled for one breath before resuming again…
almost reverently…wistfully, even. She was turned very slightly toward the window, the afternoon light a thin grey wash across her profile, and then she pressed her lips to Charlotte’s hair without making a sound.
Dominic’s eyes widened at the gesture, and he immediately looked away.
“What are you doing?” he wanted to shout, but the words couldn’t find their way past his windpipe. If he made any noise now, he would only insert himself into a situation he most definitely did not want to confront. Not now…and not ever.
But he couldn’t look away from her and, when his gaze strayed back, he found that her hand resumed its circles on the child’s back. Charlotte’s eyes were fully closed.
Teeth clenching, he finally moved away from his spot and said, “We…should start heading back, Annabelle.”
When she looked up at him, he wished he could not understand the…longing in her eyes. He wished the vision of her holding the sleeping child did not make him imagine, for just a brief moment, what it would feel like to see her holding their—
No. He turned away before he could finish the thought. And he made sure not to look back at her until he knew she had dropped the child. Instead, he turned his attention to his nephew.
James had Charlotte’s wooden horse in his hands at the door.
He had been holding it since the drawing room, when Charlotte had pressed it into his grip with the absolute certainty of a child distributing her holdings. He’d tried twice to return it, but she had declined both offers vehemently.
“She means for you to have it,” Annabelle said now, her voice coming from behind him as she passed.
Dominic did not know where to look, but luckily, she was not looking at him at all. She squatted down in front of James now and, though he could not see her face, Dominic could hear the gentleness in her voice when she said, “It would seem she has taken a great liking to you, James.”
And, even though James did not seem as though he understood her words, he seemed to accept the seriousness of the transaction past, wrapping both hands around it.
He was still holding it when Lucien bent to Charlotte, who was now back in Elinor’s arms and no longer asleep, and kissed her forehead and let her grab his ear with both hands. He straightened.
He looked at James. “You’re welcome whenever you like. Elinor means that.”
James considered this. “Thank you,” he said. He turned toward the pavement. Then stopped, and looked back. “Newton is a good cat. Even when he steals.”
“I’ll tell him,” Lucien said, and James, appearing satisfied, started down the steps.
Lucien and Dominic stood in the threshold. The street was darkening, the first lamps being lit across the way, the sounds of early evening carrying from the square.
Dominic watched his face, but only from the habit of it, and from the fact that Lucien had looked at him twice today without the shuttered quality he had brought to every exchange since the morning he had put his fist through Dominic’s cheekbone in his own study.
He looked at Dominic now the way a man looks at someone he has not finished deciding about.
“Thursday is her day,” Lucien said. “I want you to know that’s not conditional.”
“I understand.”
“Good,” Lucien said and stepped back.
James fell asleep in the carriage before they cleared the square, head dropping sideways against the door, the wooden horse still held loosely in both hands.
Dominic sat across from him and watched the city go past through the window, the lamps, the coats, the late-afternoon motion of a London street, and when their own house came into view, he found he was not looking at it.
He looked at it.
The carriage stopped. James’s eyes opened. He looked at his hands, registered the horse, and looked at the window.
“Are we home?” he said.
“Yes.”
James turned the horse over, examining the underside with some attention. “Charlotte will want it back.”
“She gave it to you.”
“She is one year old.” He looked up. “She doesn’t understand what giving is yet.”
“She held it out to you four times,” Dominic said. “I counted.”
James considered this. He looked at the horse again. “I’ll keep it,” he said, in the way he resolved all matters, he had given sufficient thought. “But I’ll bring it when we go back.”
Dominic said nothing to that.
The footman opened the door and let down the step, and James climbed out with the horse held against his side. Mrs. Howell was at the top of the entrance steps; she took one look at him and said nothing about the horse and asked only whether he wanted supper now or in twenty minutes.
“Now,” James said, and went inside.