Chapter 15
Sappherton House was very tall. That was Charlotte’s first thought—not elegant, not imposing, not any of the words she had been composing herself to think during the last hour of the journey.
Just tall. The black iron railings gleamed, the brass knocker caught the grey afternoon light, and before the carriage had fully stopped, the front door was already open.
“The staff has been notified of our arrival,” Henry said, stepping down first and offering his hand. “There is no need to be nervous.”
“I am not,” Charlotte said.
She was extremely nervous.
She took his hand, descended the step, and stood on the pavement of Grosvenor Square for the first time as its Duchess, which was a sentence she had not previously had cause to think.
The staff had assembled with quiet efficiency—two neat rows just inside the entrance hall. The indoor servants were in order of rank, their faces arranged into expressions of welcome that only wobbled slightly when Henry said, “Allow me to present my wife, Charlotte, the Duchess of Sappherton.”
The housekeeper—a compact woman of perhaps fifty, with iron-grey hair and a face that had clearly not received advance notice—did not move. She stood very still.
“Your Grace,” Mrs. Ellison said at last. “We are most honored.”
The butler beside her, Mr. Gedge, managed the introduction with rather more composure, though his gaze moved once to Henry and back.
Charlotte curtsied, which felt faintly absurd given that it was her house, and then remembered that she was the Duchess and that curtseying was for other people now and straightened.
You have managed a journey from Scotland. You have climbed a tree at midnight. You can manage a household. She was not entirely certain she believed it.
“Mrs. Ellison,” Henry said, already moving, “we will require the blue guest rooms made up for Master Ian. Charlotte’s chambers are in order, I trust.”
“Of course, Your Grace. Everything is prepared.”
“Good. Gedge, there are dispatches waiting, I imagine?”
“On your desk, Your Grace. Considerable accumulation.”
“I’ll see to them within the hour.” Henry turned toward the staircase, paused, and looked back. “The kitchens are to be advised we have a child in residence. He eats adequately when given things he recognizes. Mrs. Ellison will coordinate with Cook.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
It went on. Each instruction was delivered cleanly, each one met with immediate, unquestioning agreement. No one hesitated. No one asked for clarification. When Henry said a thing, the house simply moved.
Charlotte watched a footman take his coat before Henry had fully finished removing it.
She watched a maid appear with towels for Ian before Ian had reached the first landing.
She watched every person in that entrance hall orient, slightly, toward Henry the way compass needles orient north—not fearfully, but with the absolute, trained certainty that the north was there and dependable.
She had known he was a duke. She had traveled with him across most of Britain and knew exactly how he managed a coaching yard and a difficult solicitor and a grieving child.
But this was different. This was his house.
The authority here was not performed. It was structural, and it had been structural for years, and Charlotte, standing in the middle of it, felt the full weight of what she had agreed to become.
Ian had been quiet since reaching London.
She had noticed it in the carriage—he’d stopped looking out the window somewhere around Hyde Park and had sat with his soldier in both hands, not turning it.
She had not pressed him. Now, standing in the entrance hall, she reached for him and found only air.
She looked.
He was not beside her. He was not on the stairs. The footmen were carrying trunks past, and a housemaid was directing someone toward the kitchens, and Ian was simply not present.
Henry was speaking with Mr. Gedge. Charlotte turned toward a young footman near the door. “Have you seen Master Ian? Just now, in the last few minutes?”
“He went up the stairs, Your Grace. The nursery on the third floor, I think. He didn’t stop.”
Charlotte went up.
She checked the room they had designated for him; it was empty, the bed freshly made and everything arranged with the neat blankness of a room that had never held a child. She tried two more doors. A sitting room. A linen store. At the third door at the end of the hall, she stopped and listened.
Nothing. But the door was not fully closed.
She pushed it open.
It was a small room, clearly used for extra furnishings—chairs stacked against the wall, a rolled carpet, and a covered mirror. Ian was sitting in the corner, on the floor with his knees pulled to his chest. He had his soldier. He was not doing anything with it. He was just holding it.
Charlotte came in and sat down beside him. The rolled carpet was not a comfortable surface, but she had sat on worse.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
“It smells different,” Ian said.
“London does,” Charlotte said. “We discussed this. The drain.”
“It’s nae the drain.” He turned the soldier over. “It just—doesnae smell like anythin' I know.”
Charlotte looked at the covered mirror across from them.
“Tam will come,” she said. “When the stable is ready for him.”
“That’s nae—I ken that.”
“I know you know.”
Ian pressed his thumbnail into the soldier’s painted coat. “Mrs. Wick put shortbread in my bag,” he said. “There are only two pieces left.”
“That was thoughtful of her.”
“I didnae want to eat them because then they’d be gone.” He looked at the floor. “That’s stupid.”
“It isn’t,” Charlotte said. “It’s perfectly sensible.”
“Henry thinks I just need time,” Ian said. “I heard him say it to the butler on the stairs.”
Charlotte did not answer that directly. “Do you?”
There was a long pause. “Maybe.” His shoulder dropped slightly. “It doesnae look like the pictures I had in my head.”
“Of London?”
“Yes—” He stopped. “I thought it would be like an adventure.”
“And it doesn’t feel like one now?”
“No.”
“It’s a massive change,” Charlotte conceded softly, sitting down beside him. “And it’s completely fine if it feels scary rather than exciting right now.” She looked at the covered mirror, the stacked chairs, all the things that hadn’t been put somewhere useful yet. “This room is dreadful.”
Ian looked at it. “Too dreadful.”
“We are going to have to do something about it.”
“What kind of somethin'?”
“I haven’t decided yet. I’m open to suggestions.”
Ian considered this before looking at the stacked chairs, then the covered mirror. “Could we take the cover off that?”
“Absolutely,” Charlotte said.
She stood. She crossed the room and pulled the dust sheet from the mirror, and the two of them looked at themselves—Charlotte slightly rumpled from the journey, Ian with his soldier and his serious face and one slightly unlaced boot.
“Better,” Ian said.
“Much better.” She held out her hand. “Come. There’s supper.”
He took it. He did not let go until they were on the landing, and even then, it was only to put the soldier back in his pocket, and Charlotte pretended not to notice when he reached for her hand again on the stairs.
Henry was crossing the entrance hall below. He looked up and saw them descending.
“There you are,” he said to Ian. “Gedge was about to mount a search.”
“I was with Charlotte,” Ian said.
Henry looked at Charlotte just for a moment.
“Mrs. Ellison will show you the household accounts tomorrow,” he said. “When you are ready.”
“Of course,” Charlotte said.
He turned back toward the study.
Charlotte watched him go, and Ian tugged her hand, saying, “I saw the dinin’ room earlier. It is grand.” She let herself be pulled toward wherever supper was.
The dining room at Sappherton House seated twenty. There were three of them.
Ian sat on his cushion—Henry had produced one without comment, exactly as he had at Evermere, and Charlotte had decided not to remark on it—and applied himself to a bowl of soup.
He had managed through the introductions and the unpacking and the long echoing silence of a house that did not yet know them. He was managing still.
Until he wasn’t.
It happened between the soup and the second course.
Charlotte was asking Henry something about the garden—she had seen it from her window before she dressed for dinner, and it was formal and quite well-kept, and she had wanted something neutral to say—when she heard the small sound.
Not a sob. Just the particular silence that followed one.
Ian was looking at his plate. His hands were in his lap. His chin was doing the thing she knew by now, the small, controlled shake that preceded the rest of it.
Henry noticed first.
He set down his fork. He did not look at Charlotte. He did not call anyone. He turned toward Ian and said, very quietly, “Tell me about Tam’s stable.”
Ian looked up. His eyes were wet.
“At Drummond Hall,” Henry said. “Describe it. The whole of it.”
A pause. Ian’s chin wobbled again. “Why?”
“Because I want to know what kind of stable I need to build here before Tam arrives.”
The corners of Ian’s turned downward. He swallowed once. “It needs a window on the north side,” he said, a little hoarsely. “He doesnae like too much sun in the mornin'. It makes him grumpy.”
“Noted,” Henry said. “What else?”
“The hay needs to be —Mrs. Wick says he’s been ruined for ordinary hay. Ye have to get the good kind.”
“I will speak to the groom.” Henry picked up his fork again, as though this was a perfectly ordinary dinner conversation. “What kind is considered the good kind?”
“I daenae ken,” Ian said. “I just ken it has to smell right. He buries his nose in it first.”
“I will have the groom investigate,” Henry said, with complete seriousness. “We cannot have Tam objecting to the hay.”
Ian picked up his own fork. He ate three bites. He did not cry again.
Charlotte looked at Henry.
He was already reading the wine label, turning the bottle to look at the back, apparently indifferent to the fact that he had just quietly prevented a small disaster with nothing but patience and a question about a pony’s stable. He did not look up.
She looked away. Her chest gave a tender little squeeze, but she quickly recomposed herself and refused to examine it.
After dinner, Henry said, “As the mistress of the house, you should become familiar with its layout.” He said it the way he said most things—as a statement, not a question. “Allow me to give you a tour of the estate.”
Ian was installed on a sofa in the small sitting room off the hall, a housemaid reading to him from a book of illustrated fables with more willingness than talent. He was already leaning against the armrest, heavy-eyed, the soldier tucked in his palm.
Charlotte followed Henry.
The house was large, and he showed it methodically—the library, two drawing rooms, a morning room she suspected had not been opened in some time, a long gallery hung with portraits that stared down at them with ancestral self-possession.
He told her the rooms’ functions, which staff managed which floors, where the household accounts were kept. She asked questions. He answered them.
They came into the gallery, and he stopped near the center, gesturing toward a landscape on the far wall, something about the estate in the country.
Charlotte was not entirely listening because they were, she had just realized, entirely alone.
No housemaids visible. No footmen in the hallway.
Just the portraits and the candlelight and her husband.
“You know,” Charlotte said, “most husbands, I am given to understand, spend at least some part of their first day in their marital home attending to their new bride.”
Henry turned to look at her.
“I am not criticizing,” she said. “I am merely observing. It is, I think, customary.”
“I was attending to the estate.”
“You were attending to the estate,” she agreed. “The dispatch from your solicitor. The letter to the shipping concern. The discussion with Mr. Gedge about the correspondence. All extremely important.” She clasped her hands behind her. “None of it involving your wife.”
Henry looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled.
It was the real one. The rare one. The one that had appeared briefly in the Scottish garden and then retreated as though it had surprised him as much as anyone.
“There it is,” Charlotte said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That.” She gestured at his face. “You should do that more often.”
“Neglect my wife?”
“Smile.” She said it simply. “It suits you.”
Henry looked at her steadily. Then the smile deepened, just slightly, and Charlotte’s breath caught while her cheeks grew warmer.
She looked away.
She found a great deal to appreciate about the portrait to her left.
Henry said, to the portrait, “Shall we continue?”
“Yes,” Charlotte said to the portrait. “Let’s.”
They finished the gallery.
He walked her back through the upper hall to the door of her chambers, which sat at the opposite end of the hallway from his. A respectable distance. Their own agreed terms, put plainly in the contract and observed without comment.
He stopped at her door.
“Good night,” Henry said.
“Good night,” Charlotte said, deciding she must go up to the nursery to bid Ian good night before she retired.
He did not move.
The candle he was carrying threw a low light up across his face, and the hallway was noticeably quiet.
“I hope,” Henry said, “that you will find some measure of happiness here.” He said it plainly, without embellishment. “That is—what I hope for you.”
Charlotte looked at him. “I hope the same,” she said. “For both of us.”
And then, because her mouth had always operated at a slight delay from her better judgment, she said, “I hope they find Nathan and Eleanor.”
The change in Henry’s face was immediate.
It was not dramatic. He did not move. His expression did not collapse. It simply went still, in the way it went still when something required controlling, and the warmth that had been there a moment ago receded entirely.
“Henry.” She straightened. “The note. At Evermere. That was about them.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I received word,” he said. “Before we left Evermere.” A pause. “It is very bleak. No one has seen any sign of them. Not since the accident. No trace.”
The words landed one by one.
Charlotte stood in the hallway with the door to her chambers at her back and thought about Ian on the floor of a Scottish playroom, turning a soldier over and over in his hands. They’re coming back. Said flat and certain, the way a child says a thing they have decided to believe.
She thought about it, and her chest broke open, quite quietly, and she could not say a single word.
Henry looked at her, his own grief carefully held.