Chapter 25 #2
James had eaten and gone up directly, the horse on the table beside his plate, until Miss Hartley collected it and tucked it into his jacket pocket, and they went upstairs together.
The house stilled around nine, and now Dominic sat at the study desk with the accounts open and the candle burned to its lower third.
The door opened, breaking his concentration.
Annabelle came in without knocking, which she had not done since the second week.
She had changed; her hair half down where it had come loose from its pins.
She didn’t sit, standing a little inside the door and looking at his desk, or at the wall behind it, and said nothing for long enough that he set his pen down.
Somehow, he had a feeling he wouldn’t like whatever it was she had come to say.
“Charlotte kept looking at you, you know,” she said. “This afternoon. When you came back to the drawing room.”
“She was looking at James.”
“Both of you.” She moved to the chair across the desk and sat. “From the moment you walked in. She tracked you to the fireplace and watched you the whole time.”
He said nothing.
Annabelle looked at her hands in her lap. “Elinor says she does that with people she feels settled near.” She looked up. “She doesn’t do it with everyone.”
The fire had gone low at his back, and the room had cooled at the edges, and the accounts sat open on the desk between them with their two neat figures.
“We could have children,” she said. “One day.”
Dominic set down his pen, already feeling a tiredness creeping into his bones. Of course, he should have known. After seeing her watching the children today, he knew she’d been…wishing for that. And yet…
“I have told you where I stand on that,” he said.
“You’ve stated a position. You have not explained it.” Her voice was even, the tone she used when she had already decided she would not be moved by whatever came next. “Not honestly.”
“I have been honest.”
“Dominic.” She took two steps forward. “I saw you today. The way you sat with James and Charlotte in that room. You are not a man without the capacity for fatherhood, and I am not going to pretend you are.”
He pushed back from the desk and stood. The room was too small with both of them standing, and he went to the window, which at least put some distance between them. The street below was quiet. A lamp three doors down, a passing carriage, the sounds of evening proceeding without interest.
“I barely manage with James,” he said, to the window.
“And I mean that without sentiment. There are days I do not know what he needs, or how to reach him, or what to say when he shuts down and turns away from me. Annabelle, I am learning the most elementary possible version of this, and I do it badly more often than I do it well.”
“You do it,” she said. “That is not the same thing.”
“It is not good enough for a child of my own.”
“He is—”
“James is in this house because there was no one else.” He turned around.
“I am not proud of how plainly I can say that, but it is the truth. His parents died and I was the nearest relative and the alternative was unconscionable. I would not have chosen this. I do not think I can be a good father to a child I chose, when I cannot reliably manage the one fate handed me. Do you understand?”
Her chin came up. “A good father tries. That is the whole of what it requires.”
“I am not good by nature.”
“That is not true.”
“Then you have not been watching.”
“I have been watching since April,” she said quietly. “And I disagree.”
He turned back to the window because there was nothing useful he could say to that. His hands were on the sill, and the glass was cold, and the street below showed him a lamp and a passing figure and the ordinary end of an ordinary London evening, and none of it was any help at all.
“You sat with James today,” she said, behind him.
“In Lucien’s library. You answered every question he brought you about the ship book and the Trafalgar fleet and Nelson’s signal at the mast. You did not rush him.
You did not end the conversation when it became uncomfortable.
You sat, and you answered, and you stayed.
” A pause. “That is not the behavior of a man incapable of fatherhood.”
He turned around.
“That,” he said, “is the behavior of a man who does not know how to walk away from a boy who has no one else.”
The fire behind him had gone low, and the room was cooling at the edges.
Her hands were at her sides, and her jaw was set, and she stood in the dying firelight and looked at him with the straight regard that had disarmed him from the night she first walked through his door, and he looked back at her, and none of it helped.
“I believed,” she said, and her voice went quieter still, “that I could show you something. That if you saw me here, and saw that I was staying…that I wanted to stay—” She stopped.
Her hands came together in front of her.
“I thought that would be enough. That I could make you see I care for you. That caring was sufficient to…” She pressed her mouth shut briefly.
“Annabelle—”
“You don’t want to try.” She said it flatly, without much emotion. It sounded very much like the verbal equivalent of a door gently clicked shut. “Do you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s for the best.”
She looked at him for a long count. The line of her mouth changed: a compression, held, then gone.
“Fine,” she said. “Then we continue as we are. As…as carers for James. Since we can be nothing beyond that…I won’t pretend otherwise.” She uncrossed her arms and let them fall. “And I won’t ask again.”
She turned and crossed the room, her skirts brushing the corner of the desk as she passed, and pulled the door open without looking back. The latch caught behind her.
Dominic stood at the window for such a long time that he was not sure how much time had passed. He crossed to the door and opened it. The corridor lay dark past the lamp’s reach. He stood in the threshold and listened. No footstep. The house was entirely still.
He went up the stairs, stopping at her door. The landing was unlit, the quiet around it absolute. He raised his hand to the wood, knuckles an inch from the door.
Then it came: a single sound from inside, brief and low, cut off immediately. Dominic stood in the dark with his hand raised. But he did not knock.