Chapter Twenty-Three #2
Lorraine answered with professional precision, framing everything as observation rather than the intimate, hard-won knowledge it truly was.
“He responds well to routine and affection. He is exceptionally bright—his reading is advanced for his age, and he has a genuine talent for drawing. He paints most mornings.”
“And the nightmares?” James asked. “His mother wrote, before she… She mentioned them.”
“Less frequent now. Once a fortnight, perhaps, where they were nightly when he first arrived.” Lorraine paused. “He sleeps with the compass His Grace gave him. He says it steadies him.”
James inclined his head slowly. “The Duke. He has been—how shall I phrase it—involved?”
The question was carefully chosen. Lorraine heard the truth beneath it: Has this man done right by my grandson?
“Very much so,” she said. “Thomas paints with him. Walks with him. Learns about birds from him. His Grace has been—” She paused, searching for a word that was honest without betraying too much. “He has been devoted.”
James absorbed this in silence, the thoughtful recalibration of a man accustomed to revising his judgments. “That surprises me, I confess. I had expected a rather more… severe gentleman. A brilliant officer, certainly—but remote. Difficult to know.”
Something passed between them—a quiet recognition beyond words.
James Harding was not a man easily misled.
He had spent a lifetime observing, interpreting, understanding what was spoken and what was withheld.
He looked at Lorraine’s composure, and she had the uneasy certainty that he saw straight through it.
“Miss Weston,” he said gently, “you care for this child very deeply.”
“I do.”
“And for this household.”
A beat. “Yes.”
He did not pursue it. He was too experienced for blunt inquiry—too practised in learning more from silence than from speech. He merely inclined his head, thanked her, and withdrew to join his wife.
Lorraine remained alone in the drawing room as the winter light faded, listening to the old house settle around her, and tried—futilely—to reckon how many evenings remained to her.
***
She found Dominic in the corridor outside his study, pacing.
Not the measured stride of a man with purpose, but the tight, repetitive circuit of something contained—four steps, turn, four steps, turn—his hands clenched at his sides, his jaw set hard.
He stopped when he saw her.
For a moment, they simply looked at one another across the dim corridor—two people who had spent the day inhabiting versions of themselves that bore little resemblance to the truth.
“They are kind,” Lorraine said.
“Yes.” His voice was even. Controlled.
“Margaret loved William. James is intelligent—perceptive. Thomas showed them the compass. Told them about kestrels. Held my hand. He was braver than either of us.”
“I know. I was there.”
“You were in the room,” she said quietly. “That is not the same as being there.”
His jaw tightened. She saw it—the shift, the instinct to withdraw, to retreat into distance and formality, to place a title between them like a wall.
She braced for it.
Instead, he said, “I do not know how to do this, Lorraine.”
Her name—strained, unguarded—unsettled her more than any withdrawal could have.
“I know,” she said. “Neither do I.”
“They are good people. They will love him.”
“Yes.”
“And the law—”
“We have discussed the law.” She stepped closer—not touching, not here, but near enough that the space between them felt deliberate. “The law is not the only path. We agreed—we would speak to them. Show them what Thomas needs.”
“What Thomas needs,” Dominic said—and his voice fractured, barely perceptibly, on the boy’s name, “is a family. A real one. Not a duke who cannot look at him without seeing his dead father, and a governess who—”
He broke off.
The silence that followed was deafening.
“A governess who what?” Lorraine asked softly.
He shook his head. Pressed his fingers briefly to his eyes. When he lowered his hand, his expression had settled into something closed—not fully frozen, but perilously close.
“I need time,” he said. “To think.”
“Dominic—”
“Please.”
The word cost him. She saw it—in the tension in his shoulders, the rigid line of his hands, the swallow that worked in his throat. This was not retreat—not entirely. This was a man asking for the space to unravel where she could not see him do it.
She understood.
She did not like it—but she understood.
“Tomorrow,” she said. Not a plea. A promise. “We speak properly tomorrow. No distance. No titles. Only truth.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he inclined his head once and turned into his study. The door closed behind him with a quiet, decisive click.
Lorraine remained where she stood, her arms folded tightly about herself, listening to the silence settle.
Hold on, she thought—to him, to herself, to the fragile, impossible thing they had built in a cold house on the Yorkshire moors. Just hold on. We are not finished yet.
From the nursery above came the faint, tinkling melody of a small music box—something Mrs Potter must have found among the house’s forgotten things.
Thomas was winding it again and again, the fragile tune drifting through the floorboards, offered up to the carved elephant now stationed beside Captain on the windowsill.
Lorraine leaned back against the wall, closed her eyes, and let the thin, wavering music carry her through the longest night of her life.