Chapter 3
The middle of February. Only weeks from now.
Dominic set the letter upon his desk with a precision that belied the upheaval beneath his ribs. He aligned it with the edge of the blotter. Smoothed the creases. Placed the brass paperweight—a lion, absurdly cheerful—upon its corner.
Then he sat, lowered his face into his hands, and attempted to remember how to breathe.
The middle of February.
Then Thomas would be gone. Claimed by grandparents he had never met, carried across an ocean to a country he had never seen, raised by strangers who shared his blood but not his life.
The boy who painted kestrels and named wooden horses after dead fathers and slept with a brass compass at his bedside would be placed into a carriage and driven away from Rovewood Hall—and Dominic would stand in the doorway and watch him go, powerless to intervene.
Because he had no legal claim. No moral authority. No right—save a dead man’s trust and the belated, insufficient love of a guardian who had already wasted too much of the time he had been given.”
And Lorraine.
Lorraine.
His mind recoiled from the thought—the same instinct that had once made him flinch from cannon fire, the reflex to shutter itself before the damage could fully land.
Because when she left—and she would leave, she must leave, for a governess without a charge was a governess without a position—the silence that would settle over Rovewood Hall would not be the quiet of peace.
It would be the quiet that kills.
Not swiftly. Slowly. The way frost kills—seeping inward, crystallising, rendering everything brittle until the slightest pressure reduces it to ruin.
This is what you do, whispered the voice he knew best—the cold one, the one that had kept him alive through four years of frozen grief.
You let them in. You let them matter. And then the world takes them, and you’re left standing in the wreckage wondering why you thought this time would be different.
He opened his desk drawer, took out the bottle of brandy he kept for emergencies, poured two fingers, and drank it in one swallow.
Then he poured two more and drank those as well.
***
She did not come to him that night—because he had ensured that she would not.
The note had been brief. Civil. Written in the careful, impersonal hand of the Duke of Ravenswood rather than the man who had held her the night before. A request that she not attend him. No explanation offered. None invited.
He told himself it was for the best—that he had drunk too much, that his temper was dark, that she deserved better than a man who would draw her close only to cling as though to wreckage. He told himself it was consideration.
He knew it for what it was.
Retreat.
The ice was forming again. He could feel it—the slow, insidious cold spreading through his chest, just as it had after Badajoz.
The numbness that passed for peace. The merciful anaesthesia of feeling nothing at all.
And some part of him—the part that had endured by choosing distance over connection, solitude over risk, ice over fire—welcomed it.
This is safer, that part said. This is how you survive.
This is how you were surviving before she came, answered another voice—quieter, newer. And it was killing you.
He dismissed them both.
He remained in his study until the fire sank to embers, then climbed the stairs to his bed—empty now, save for the faint trace of her upon the sheets. He lay there, staring into the darkness, and did not sleep until dawn.
***
The second day was worse.
He kept to his study. Took his meals at his desk.
Instructed Graves that he was not to be disturbed—which was the coward’s way of saying do not admit Miss Weston, because if she crossed that threshold, he would either tell her everything or nothing at all, and he did not know which would prove the greater injury.
At half past three, a knock.
“I said I was not to be disturbed, Graves.”
“It is not Graves.”
Lorraine’s voice—cool, composed—carried through the oak. Dominic’s hand tightened around his pen until the nib scored the paper.
“I am occupied, Miss Weston.”
A pause. He could see her in his mind: chin lifted, arms at her sides, that particular stillness she adopted when deciding whether to press or withdraw.
“Thomas is asking for you. He wishes to show you the kestrel he has finished.”
The guilt struck sharp and immediate—a physical thing, hot and unwelcome.
“Tell him I shall see it tomorrow.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Will you?”
Two words. Courteous on the surface. Beneath them—a blade. Will you truly come tomorrow? Or is this the beginning of your retreat? Are you the man who knelt upon a nursery floor and made a promise—or the man who locks his door and pretends not to hear?
“Tomorrow,” he repeated.
He heard her breath—a short, controlled exhale that might have been frustration, or hurt, or both. Her footsteps retreated down the corridor. He remained motionless until the sound faded, then set down his pen and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
You told her you loved her. You stood in the gallery and said the words out loud and meant them more than you have ever meant anything, and now you are hiding behind a locked door because a letter arrived and the world is doing exactly what the world always does.
Coward.
The accusation was hers, though she had not spoken it. He heard it all the same—in the voice he carried within him. The version of her that was braver, sharper, truer than he had ever been.
And, more often than not, right.
***
On the third day, Thomas came himself.
Dominic heard the footsteps—too light for an adult, too deliberate for a servant—and then a knock so soft it was nearly lost against the wood.
“Your Grace?”
He closed his eyes.
“Your Grace, it is Thomas. I have my painting. May I show you?”
The voice was small and careful. The voice of a child who had learned, through painful repetition, that the people he loved had a tendency to disappear and not return.
Dominic rose from his desk, crossed the room, and opened the door.
Thomas stood in the corridor, holding a sheet of watercolour paper in both hands.
The painting showed two kestrels—male and female—perched upon a low stone wall, the sweep of the moors behind them.
The female was larger, as Dominic had taught him.
The detail in the wing feathers was remarkable for a boy of seven.
The colours were somewhat overbold—too much crimson at the breast, too much gold in the eye—but the proportions were sound, the birds unmistakable.
In the lower corner, in Thomas’s careful hand: For His Grace.
“I made it for you,” Thomas said. “Because you said you like kestrels too. And Miss Weston said—she said you might like something for your study. Because it is very bare in here.”
Dominic looked at the painting. Then, at the boy holding it—William’s eyes, William’s earnest expression, the compass hanging from a ribbon about his neck, because he had taken to wearing it everywhere, even to bed.
The middle of February. You have but a few more weeks with this child, and you are spending them behind a locked door.
He knelt. The motion came more easily now—his body remembering what his pride had once resisted, learning that lowering himself was not weakness but a different form of strength.
“It is excellent, Thomas. The proportions are very good.”
Thomas’s face lit at once. “Do you truly think so? Miss Weston said the beak was too large, but I told her kestrels have strong beaks for tearing—”
“The beak is perfect. She is mistaken.”
A grin—wide, gap-toothed, radiant. “May I hang it in your study?”
“You may hang it wherever you please.”
Thomas slipped past him into the study with the quiet certainty of a child who had decided the room belonged, at least in part, to him. He surveyed the walls, selected a place beside the window—“So you can see the real ones and mine at the same time”—and looked back expectantly.
“We shall require a nail,” Dominic said. “And a hammer. Do you know where the toolroom is?”
“No.”
“Then I shall show you.”
They went together—the Duke and the boy—down the corridor and through the servants’ passage to the toolroom behind the kitchens, where they selected a nail and a small hammer and carried them back with the solemnity of soldiers bearing ammunition.
Thomas held the painting against the wall while Dominic drove the nail—slightly crooked—and together they stepped back to inspect the result.
“There,” Thomas said, with satisfaction. “Now your study is not bare.”
Dominic looked at the garish, lopsided, entirely magnificent painting—and felt the ice crack.
Not shatter. Not melt. Simply—crack. A single fissure through the surface he had spent three days rebuilding, admitting a narrow shaft of light that fell directly upon the part of him that had been trying, very quietly, to die.
“No,” he said softly. “It is not.”
Thomas reached up and took his hand. The gesture was unthinking—the easy intimacy of a child who had, for the moment, forgotten caution—and the small, warm weight of those fingers against Dominic’s scarred ones sent a tremor through him.
“Miss Weston says you have been very busy,” Thomas said, in a tone that suggested he did not entirely credit the explanation but was willing to accept it. “She says important men have important things to think about.”
“She is being generous.”
“She also said—” Thomas hesitated. “She said that sometimes people need time to be quiet. Even people who love you. She said it does not mean they have stopped caring.”
She is managing me, Dominic thought. Through a seven-year-old. Conducting diplomacy by means of a child with a paintbrush—and succeeding.
“Miss Weston is very wise,” he said.
“She is.” Thomas squeezed his hand. “Are you finished being quiet now?”
The question was devastating in its simplicity. Not will you stop, not please stop, not I need you—only the calm, practical inquiry of a child accustomed to absence, asking whether this one had reached its end.
“Yes,” Dominic said. “I believe I am.”
***
He found her that evening in the library.
Not in her chair—she stood at the window, looking out into the darkened garden, her arms folded about herself in the posture he had come to recognise as armour.
She did not turn when he entered.
“The Hardings are coming,” he said. No preamble. She deserved none. “Mid-February.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “How long have you known?”
“Three days.”
“Three days.” A slight nod. Still not turning. “That explains the locked door.”
“Lorraine—”
“I am not angry.” She turned then, and her expression confirmed it.
Not anger. Something more dangerous. Resignation.
The look of a woman who had seen this pattern before and found no surprise in it.
“I knew this would happen. The moment you read that letter, you went straight back behind the ice. I could feel it, even through the door.”
“I was trying to protect—”
“Do not.” The word was quiet, but absolute.
“Do not tell me you were protecting me. Or Thomas. You were protecting yourself. That is what you do, and I understand it—I truly do—but you promised. You looked me in the eye and told me we would face whatever came next. And some days later, you placed a door between us.”
He absorbed the blow. He had earned it.
“You are right,” he said.
Something in her posture shifted—surprise, perhaps, at the absence of resistance.
“The letter frightened me,” he continued. “Not the Hardings. Not the logistics. The ending. I could see it—Thomas leaving, you leaving, this house returning to its former silence—and instead of telling you, I—”
“Froze.”
“Yes.”
She crossed the room and stopped a pace from him. Close enough that he could see the faint shadows beneath her eyes—three nights had marked her too—and the determined set of her jaw that meant her mind was made.
“Mid-February,” she said.
“Mid-February.”
“Then we have the weeks till then to find a way. Together. Not you alone in your study with a bottle of brandy, deciding what I may or may not bear.” Her chin lifted.
“I am not fragile, Dominic. I survived the scandal. I survived my father’s death.
I survived three years of being no one, belonging nowhere, mattering to no one.
I can endure a ticking clock. What I cannot endure is being shut out by you. ”
He reached for her—slowly, allowing her the choice—and when she did not refuse, he drew her against him and held her with fierce, unguarded relief.
“I am sorry,” he said into her hair. “I am sorry. It will not happen again.”
“It will,” she replied, her voice muffled against his coat. “You are who you are. But next time, I shall pick the lock.”
A breath of laughter broke from him—rough, unsteady, more relief than mirth—and he pressed his lips to the crown of her head.
Mid-February. The clock had begun its count. The ship was already at sea. The ending was coming, as certain as winter.
But Lorraine stood within his arms, and the crooked painting upon his study wall burned with impossible colour, and somewhere above them a boy slept soundly, trusting in promises that had yet to be tested.
He had mere weeks to keep that promise. To find a way. To prove himself worthy of the faith two people had placed in him despite every reason not to.
He meant to use every hour.