Chapter 20
“Did you enjoy it?” Henry asked, and when Charlotte looked up from the toast she was buttering. Her expression was puzzled, so he added, “The ball.”
He was seated across from her at the breakfast table with the morning post at his elbow and the expression of a man who was asking casually but meant nothing of the sort.
“Enormously,” she said. “The dancing was lovely. The champagne was excellent. The supper was rather better than I expected.” She set down her cup. “Redmont was not.”
Henry put down his fork.
“You asked,” Charlotte said.
“I did.” He picked the fork back up. Set it down again. “He had no business approaching you in that corridor.”
“He had no business and no welcome, and I told him so. Rather clearly, I thought.”
“He should not have been there at all.”
“He was there, and I managed it, and the evening ended pleasantly.” She reached for the toast rack. “You, however, spent the last half of the quadrille looking as though you wished to challenge someone to a duel.”
“I was keeping a general awareness of the room.”
“You were keeping a very specific awareness of one particular corner of the room.” She buttered her toast with great composure. “For a man who married out of practicality, you looked remarkably jealous.”
Henry looked at her.
“I was not jealous.”
“Your jaw was jealous.”
“My jaw was—" He stopped. “That is not a sentence.”
“It is an accurate one.” She took a bite of her toast. “You went quite rigid every time he moved.”
“I was watching for trouble.”
“You were watching him look at me and you did not enjoy it in the slightest.” She tilted her head at him. “Which is entirely understandable. He is unpleasant. But you were not protecting me from a threat. You were simply— put out.”
“I was not put out.”
“You were considerably put out.”
“Charlotte.” He said her name with the particular weight of a man who has decided to end a line of inquiry by sheer authority. “I was ensuring the evening proceeded without incident.”
“By scowling at the Marquess of Redmont from across the room for forty minutes.”
“I was not—” He picked up his coffee then put it down. “It was twenty minutes.”
Charlotte looked at him. He stared at his coffee.
“Henry.”
“What.”
“You were jealous,” she teased, holding back her smile.
“I was protective of my wife, which is an entirely different thing.” He looked up. His eyes were very direct. “And I would thank you not to conflate the two.”
“They seem rather closely related.”
“They are not.”
He held her gaze for one long moment, and Charlotte had the distinct impression that he was selecting a response with some care. Then: “The jam is at your elbow.”
She laughed. She could not help it. “That is not a counterargument.”
“I have decided the conversation is concluded.”
“By offering me jam.”
“The strawberry, I believe. Unless you prefer the other.”
She was still laughing when she heard the sound.
It was exceedingly small. A slight scuff of a boot sole on the threshold and then silence. Charlotte turned.
Ian was in the doorway. He was still in his night clothes, which meant he had come down before the nursery maid had gotten to him, and he was holding his wooden toy horse by the neck with both hands.
He was not looking at either of them. He was looking at a spot approximately six inches to the left of Charlotte’s shoulder.
“Ian.” Charlotte pushed her chair back slightly and turned to face him fully. “Come in.”
He came, but slowly, the way he moved when something was sitting heavy on him. He came to stand beside her chair, and she did not rush him. After a moment, he lifted the toy horse and held it out toward her.
Charlotte took it. She turned it over once in her hands. The painted coat was worn at the nose from many years of being carried just this way.
“Ian,” she said gently. “What is it?”
“We left Tam.”
Charlotte kept her voice even. “Yes. He will come when the stable is ready.”
“But he’s not here.” Ian looked at the toy horse in her hands. “I keep dreaming about him. About feeding him sugar and—" He stopped. “I just wish we’d brought him. That’s all.”
Henry was already on his feet.
Charlotte looked up, startled. He had not said a word. He had simply stood, set his napkin on the table, and was already at the door. Then he was through it. His footsteps went quickly down the hall.
Charlotte sat very still for a moment.
Ian watched the door.
“Did I do somethin' wrong?” His voice was careful, the way it got when he was worried and trying not to show it.
“No.” Charlotte turned back to him. “Absolutely not.” She held out her arm, and he stepped into it without ceremony, leaning against her side. “Henry is not displeased with you. Not even a little.”
“He left very quickly.”
“He did.” She tucked her hand around his shoulder. “But that is not because of anything you said.”
Ian took the toy horse back when she offered it. “He was more pleased yesterday than today,” Ian said.
“That,” Charlotte said, “is a very astute observation, but I assure you that he is not displeased with you.”
“What does astute mean?”
“Clever. Perceptive.” She smoothed his hair. “It means you are paying attention.”
Ian considered this as though it were a satisfactory conclusion. He had stopped pressing his thumbnail into the wooden flank of the horse. Charlotte could feel the slight release of tension in his shoulder under her hand.
She was about to suggest he go up and let the nurserymaid see to his clothes when she heard Henry’s boot on the floor of the hall. Quick. Direct. The particular rhythm of a man who had gone somewhere with a purpose and completed it.
He appeared in the doorway.
“I have a horse for you,” he said.
Ian’s head came up.
Henry looked at the boy with an entirely level expression. “In the mews. She has been here two days, in fact, but I was waiting to see whether—” He stopped, and his brows softened while the corners of his mouth curved. “She is yours for as long as you are in London.”
Ian stared at him.
Then he was off Charlotte’s arm and across the room in four running steps. “Where?” He grabbed the doorframe as he flew through it. “Where in the mews? Which door? Henry—”
“The groom will show you.” Henry turned sideways so Ian could pass. “Ian. Walk in the mews, not run. The horses—”
But Ian was already in the hall, his voice coming back faintly as he went: “Which groom? The tall one?”
“Ian!” Charlotte called. “You should change out of your nightclothes first!”
Her words likely flew past the boy’s ears. Nothing could challenge his excitement at this moment.
Henry stood at the door and looked at the empty hall. Then he looked at Charlotte, and she grinned.
“Sit back,” Henry said. “You are leaning forward over her neck and she can feel it. She will think you want to go faster.”
“What if I do want to go faster?” Ian said.
“You do not want to go faster. You have been on her for four minutes.”
“I rode Tam for an hour on my first day.”
Charlotte stood at the edge of the mews yard with her arms folded and watched her husband walking patient circles around a gray mare.
Henry had not removed his coat. He had not rolled up his sleeves or adopted any posture of informality.
He was simply beside Ian with one hand hovering near the mare's bridle when needed, and back a step when not, entirely absorbed in the work of teaching a six-year-old boy not to pitch himself headfirst over a horse’s ears.
This was a man who had told her, with complete sincerity, somewhere north of Carlisle, that he had no talent with children.
She watched him steady the horse with one quiet word and adjust Ian’s grip on the reins without taking them, and she decided that Henry Kingswell had a very strange relationship with the truth about himself.
“Keep your heels down,” Henry said.
“They are down.”
“They are not down. They are entirely level, which is not the same thing.”
Ian pushed his heels down with visible effort. “Now?”
“Better.” Henry stepped back. “Now turn her. Left. Use your left leg, not just the rein.”
Ian’s tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth, which Charlotte had come to recognize as his expression of maximum concentration. The horse turned, and Ian grinned triumphantly.
“I did it.”
“You did,” Henry agreed. “Do it again.”
Ian did it again. And again. He was gaining confidence with each pass, sitting a little taller, and Charlotte was just thinking that the lesson was going very well when the mare stepped sideways on a loose stone, Ian lurched, and then he was off.
It was not a bad fall. The drop was short and the ground was soft. But Ian hit sideways and lay still for one terrible second. Then the breath came out of him in a gasp and he started to cry, not the quiet kind but the panicked kind, the kind that came from fright rather than injury.
Henry was already beside him.
He went down on one knee in the mud without any hesitation at all. His hands went to Ian’s shoulders first, checking, and then to his face, tilting it up, his voice low and even.
“Look at me. Ian. Look at me.”
Ian looked at him, gasping.
“You are all right. You had the breath knocked out. It comes back. Just breathe.”
“It hurts—”
“I know. It will stop.” Henry’s hand moved to Ian’s back, steady between his shoulder blades. “There. Feel that? Breathe into my hand.”
Ian breathed. Once, and then again, and the gasping slowed.
“Good.” Henry did not move his hand. “Are you hurt anywhere? Show me.”
Ian lifted one elbow, reddened from the ground. Henry examined it without comment and then looked at Ian’s face, waiting.
“That’s all,” Ian said, in a smaller voice.
“That’s all.” Henry helped him sit up. “Falling is part of it. Every rider falls. You know that.”
“Tam never dropped me like that.”
“Tam has had six years to learn you. She has had twenty minutes.” Henry looked at the horse, who was standing at the end of its lead with a very innocent expression. “She did not do it on purpose.”
Ian looked at the horse. Then back at Henry. His chin had stopped doing the thing. “Will you make me get back on?”
“Yes.”
Ian wiped his nose on his sleeve. “All right,” he said, and stood up.
Charlotte let out a breath she had been holding since the fall.
Henry got to his feet and glanced across the yard at her.
Just for a moment. She looked back. His expression was entirely composed, but his hand was still resting at his side in exactly the shape it had held against Ian’s back, and Charlotte thought about the man who was reluctant to show his feelings, and then she thought about that hand.
Her heart stuttered, then tenderness followed, unfurling like a summer bloom. She was, she thought, in a very great deal of trouble feeling the way she did.
Ian remounted with some assistance and considerably more dignity than the preceding two minutes had warranted. Henry resumed his place at the mare’s shoulder. The lesson went on.
A footman appeared at the gate.
He came across the yard with the careful gait of a servant delivering something he had been told was important and offered the folded note to Henry on a small salver. Henry took it and read it.
His face did nothing. That was the problem.
Charlotte crossed the yard toward him.
“Is it about Nathan?” she said.
Henry folded the note. “Yes.”
She waited.
“A second search party.” He looked at Ian, who had slowed the horse to a walk and was listening with his head tilted. Then he looked back at Charlotte. “No positive signs. Same as the first.”
Ian pulled the horse to a stop. “What search party?”
Charlotte looked at Henry. Henry looked at Ian.
“Men I have sent to look for your father and mother,” Henry said. “To find out where they are.”
Ian’s grip tightened on the reins. “How many men?”
“Several.”
“Are they lookin’ in the right place?”
“We believe so.”
“Did they look at the road?” Ian’s brow was furrowed in the particular way it got when he was working through something with great seriousness. “Where the carriage went off? Da told me once about a road in the hills that goes close to the edge.”
“They have looked at the road,” Henry said.
“Did they look below the road?” Ian pressed. “If the carriage went off the edge, they would have to look down, not on the road.”
“They looked below it as well.”
Ian was quiet for a moment. Then: “Did they ask the people who live near there? There are farmers. Crofters.” He said the word with authority, the Highland brogue coming through on it. “Crofters ken everythin' that happens on the roads.”
“They spoke to everyone nearby,” Henry said. “Everyone who might have seen anything.”
Ian looked at the mare's mane. He ran one hand down her neck, slowly. “I think about them every day,” he said. It came out very flat, not dramatic. He simply stated a fact. “I daenae say it. But I think it.”
Charlotte held perfectly still.
“Every mornin' when I wake up,” Ian continued. “And when I see other people’s mas. And when I’m on the horse.” He looked up then, directly at Henry, with the clear, unblinking gaze that cut through everything.
“Are me mam and da dead?”