Chapter 25
“And the fairy held out her hand,” Charlotte read, “and in her palm sat the most perfect gift the elf had ever seen.”
Ian shifted under the blanket. His eyes were at half-mast, the wooden horse tucked under one arm, and he had the slow, heavy look of a child fighting sleep on principle rather than any genuine wakefulness.
“Me da gives me a new toy,” he murmured. “Every birthday.”
Charlotte kept her finger on the page. “Does he?”
“Aye.” Ian’s eyes drifted further closed. “Every year. Somethin' different. Last year it was a soldier. The year before it was a painted boat.” He yawned. “He hides it somewhere and I have to find it.”
Charlotte set the book down on her knee. “When is your birthday, Ian?”
He was quiet long enough that she thought he had fallen asleep. Then: “In three days.”
She kept her voice even. “Three days.”
“Mm.” He turned his face toward the pillow. “I daenae want to celebrate.”
She looked at him. “Why not?”
“Because.” His brow creased slightly, not with distress exactly, just with the effort of explaining something he had already decided. “Birthdays are for with yer parents. Da makes it special. Mam makes the cake.” He was quiet again. “It willnae be the same.”
Charlotte sat very still.
Ian’s breathing slowed. The wooden horse had slipped a little in his arm. Outside the window the evening had gone properly dark, and the nursery fire was the only light worth having.
“I daenae mind,” Ian added, muffled now, almost already gone. “It’s just a day.”
He was asleep before she could answer.
She sat with him for a minute. Maybe two.
She looked at the line of his shoulder under the blanket, the slight curl of his hand around the horse’s neck, and she did not move until she was certain the sound of her getting up would not wake him.
Then she closed the book and set it on the bedside table and left the room without making a noise.
Henry was in the library. He had been in the library most evenings since they had returned from Scotland. She had stopped finding it surprising.
He looked up when she came in. He was sitting with a letter he had not been reading—she could tell by the way it sat open across his knee without his eyes on it. He had that look. The one she had learned to read. Where his body was in one place and his mind was somewhere on the western road.
“Ian’s birthday is in three days,” she said.
Henry looked at her.
She sat in the chair across from him, the one she had claimed without discussion over the past week. “He told me just now. I was reading to him.”
“I did not—” Henry stopped. He set the letter on the side table. “Three days.”
“He does not want a celebration.” Charlotte folded her hands. “He said birthdays are for being with his parents. That it won’t feel the same.”
Henry was quiet.
“He said it very matter-of-factly,” she said. “As though he had thought it through and arrived at a position.” She looked at the fire. “That almost made it worse.”
A beat of silence.
“I did not know his birthday,” Henry said. It was not an excuse. It was flat, just a fact, and the fact seemed to cost him.
He looked at his hands. “I knew the year. I knew he would be seven. I did not know—” He stopped again.
Charlotte felt sorry for Henry. He had come into this guardianship the way he came into everything: capable, dutiful, and almost entirely unprepared for the parts that could not be managed with accounts and instructions.
“Well,” she said. “Now you do.”
“He truly said he does not want a celebration?”
“He said that.” Charlotte tilted her head. “He also said his father hides the gift, and he has to find it. He said his mother makes the cake.” She kept her gaze on the fire. “He was telling me what birthdays mean to him. He was not telling me to do something.”
Henry looked at her.
“He is six years old,” Charlotte said. “He has had the worst six weeks of his life, and he is trying to be very sensible about all of it. He should not have to be sensible about his birthday as well.” She pressed her hands flat on her knees.
“I am going to plan something. Small. Not a production. Just—enough.”
Henry said nothing for a moment.
“He may not thank you for it,” he said at last.
“He does not need to thank me for it.” She stood. “He needs to have it.”
Henry looked at her with an expression she could not fully catalogue. It was neither disagreement nor approval.
“I will need your help,” she said.
“You are asking me.”
“You are his guardian. Yes.”
He picked up the letter again. He did not look at it. “Tell me what you need.”
She moved toward the door. At the threshold she stopped and looked back.
“To start,” she said, “I need to know what his favorite thing to eat is.”
Henry said, without any hesitation whatsoever: “Anything with jam.”
Charlotte looked at him. He looked at the letter.
He does know some things, she thought. Just not the date.
“Good,” she said. “That’s a start.”
She left him at the library and went to find paper.
“The shortbread is essential,” Charlotte said. “And I want a sponge cake. Something with jam in the middle.”
Mrs. Ellison had her hands folded and her expression of careful attentiveness, which Charlotte had come to recognize as the one she wore when she thought the request was unusual but had decided not to say so. Cook, who had warmed considerably since the first week, was already nodding.
“I can manage that easily enough,” Cook said. “Raspberry jam. And the shortbread. Will there be many for tea, Your Grace?”
“Just the household. And a few trivial things for Ian to find in the garden beforehand—nothing elaborate. I thought perhaps some of those little iced biscuits if you can manage them. The ones with the colored sugar.”
“Those I can do.” Cook was already mentally somewhere in the kitchen. “Shall I—”
“What,” said Henry from the doorway, “is happening to my drawing room?”
Charlotte looked up. He had come in without ceremony, jacket on, letter in hand as usual, and he was looking at the two servants and the notepad and Charlotte’s expression of perfectly composed innocence.
“I am having a conversation with Mrs. Ellison and Cook,” Charlotte said. “Thank you both. I’ll come down shortly.”
Mrs. Ellison and Cook withdrew with commendable speed.
Henry looked at the notepad. “You have a list.”
“I frequently have lists.”
“This one mentions iced biscuits and raspberry jam.” He came further into the room. “In rather large quantities.”
“Ian has a birthday in two days.”
“I am aware of that now.” He set the letter on the mantelpiece. “You told me last night.”
“Then you know why I am planning.”
“Ian said he did not want a fuss.”
“He said he didn’t want to celebrate,” Charlotte said. “That is slightly different.”
Henry gave her a look. “I fail to see the distinction.”
“The distinction is that he is six years old and grieving and has decided, very nobly, to require nothing from anyone. That is not the same as genuinely not wanting something nice on his birthday.”
Henry sat down. Not across from her. In the chair beside her, which put them both facing the list, which she thought was probably intentional even if he did not realize it. “He may find it painful.”
“He may,” Charlotte agreed. “He may also find it wonderful and go to sleep that night feeling that someone made an effort for him.” She turned the parchment, so it faced both of them. “His parents are not here. We are. We cannot replace them. But we can do what they would have done.”
Henry was quiet.
She waited. She had learned to wait. He processed things differently than she did, turned them over until the edges were smooth, and she had found that interrupting that process did nothing useful.
“All right,” he said at last.
“All right?”
“All right, we plan.” He looked at the list. Then he said, “The sponge should have lemon.”
Charlotte blinked. “Cook suggested raspberry jam.”
“For the jam. Both. Lemon sponge, raspberry jam.” He picked up the pencil from beside the list and held it. “It is a better cake.”
She stared at him. “You told me last night you didn’t care about the details.”
“I said Ian should have something nice. I did not say I was indifferent to what the cake tasted like.”
“Those are effectively the same statement.”
“They are not.” He wrote lemon sponge in the margin with the methodical precision of a man annotating a legal document. “If we are doing this, we do it properly.”
Charlotte watched him. “You are being particular.”
“I am being thorough.”
“You are being—” She pressed her lips together. “What else? While we’re being thorough?”
He looked at the list. “The gift hunt. Whose idea was that?”
“Mine.”
“And the gifts are to be hidden in the garden?”
“Yes. Scattered about for him to find.”
“Organized in a route, or random?”
Charlotte turned to look at him fully. “It is a treasure hunt for a six-year-old, not a military campaign.”
“A route would be more satisfying,” Henry said. “Random is frustrating. He finds two things quickly and then spends half an hour looking for the third and the enjoyment is lost.”
She opened her mouth. She closed it. “That is,” she said slowly, “actually quite sensible.”
“I am frequently sensible.”
“You are frequently sensible about things that have nothing to do with feelings, yes.”
He gave her a look. “A gift hunt has nothing to do with feelings. It is logistics.”
“It is a birthday gift hunt for a grieving child.”
“Which requires good logistics.”
Charlotte picked up the pencil and wrote route—Henry’s idea-- in the margin beneath lemon sponge. He noticed and looked at it but said nothing, which she took as a victory.
“What are the gifts?” she asked.
Henry grinned. “I believe I ought to keep that to myself.”