Chapter Twenty-Five
“Will I have to learn the language? The Indian one?”
The question floated up from beneath the dining table, where Thomas had established a secondary headquarters for the carved elephant and Captain the wooden horse. Margaret Harding, who was midway through a slice of toast, set down her knife with careful surprise.
“Well—perhaps a little, my dear. Though you would manage perfectly well in English in Calcutta, and—”
“When I go to India. With you.” Thomas’s voice was matter-of-fact. Precise. The voice of a child who had assembled a conclusion from fragments and was presenting it for verification. “That’s why you’ve come. To take me to India.”
The silence that followed had the brittle quality of glass—clear, fragile, on the verge of shattering.
Lorraine sat at the far end of the table, her tea cooling untouched in her hands.
She had not slept. Her eyes were raw, her chest hollow.
She had come to breakfast because Thomas expected her there, and failing Thomas was the one thing she refused to add to the wreckage of the past twenty-four hours.
Margaret looked at James. James looked at Lorraine. Lorraine fixed her gaze on the tablecloth and wished—with a fervour she had not felt since the scandal—that the floor might open and swallow her whole.
Dominic’s chair stood empty.
“Thomas,” James said gently, “we have come to meet you. To spend time with you. We have not yet made any decisions about—”
“But that is the plan.” Thomas emerged from beneath the table, the elephant in one hand and Captain in the other. His brown eyes—William’s eyes—were steady. “I heard Grandmama speaking to you last night. She said, ‘when we take him home.’ Home means India.”
Margaret pressed her fingers to her lips. “Oh, Thomas, darling, I did not mean—”
“Is His Grace sending me away?”
The question detonated in the breakfast room with the force of a cannon shot.
Lorraine’s teacup met its saucer too sharply. Margaret gave a soft, broken cry. James went utterly still.
“No one is sending you away,” Lorraine said, and was faintly astonished at the steadiness of her own voice. “Thomas, your grandparents love you. They wish only what is best for you.”
“What is best for me is here.” He said it without defiance—without anger or petulance.
As a simple fact. The way one might say that winter follows autumn.
“I want to stay at Rovewood. With you. And His Grace. And Jenny and Mrs Potter and Graves. And the kestrels.” He clutched Captain tighter; the compass swung against his chest. “This is my home. Papa’s compass points here. ”
Lorraine opened her mouth—to reassure, to comfort, to attempt the impossible balance of honesty and kindness—but Thomas was already moving. He set Captain carefully upon the table, tucked the elephant into his pocket, and walked from the room without another word.
His footsteps receded down the corridor. The front door opened. Closed.
Lorraine was on her feet before the latch fell.
“Thomas—”
She reached the entrance hall in time to see him vanish around the east wing, moving with the determined purpose of a child who knew precisely where he was going and did not intend to be stopped.
She ran.
***
He heard the disturbance from his study—the raised voices, the scrape of chairs, Lorraine’s sharp call—and was already moving before his mind fully caught up.
The corridor. The entrance hall. Graves emerging from the pantry, alarm breaking through his usual composure. Mrs Potter at the kitchen door, flour still on her hands.
“Thomas is gone.” Lorraine stood just inside the open door, breathless, her colour high, her hair loosening from its pins. “He ran—I followed him as far as the east path, but I lost sight of him by the lower gardens. I did not see which way he turned.”
Behind her, Margaret Harding was weeping again. James had his arm around her, his own face drawn.
“Which direction?” Dominic asked. His voice had already shifted—precise, controlled, the voice of a man accustomed to command.
“East. Toward the moors. I think.” She shook her head, frustration cutting through the fear. “He was too quick.”
That was enough.
He knew.
Before she finished speaking, before thought could intervene—he knew.
The folly.
The old stone tower on the eastern ridge, where kestrels nested in spring and circled in winter. Where he had gone as a boy, lying in the grass with the sky above him and nothing yet to fear. Where he had taken Thomas on his birthday, the boy perched on his shoulders, pointing skyward.
“Stay here,” Dominic said. “All of you.”
“I am coming with—”
“Lorraine.” He turned to her. Their eyes met for the first time since she had called him a coward, and the impact was immediate—sharp, unguarded. “Please. Let me do this.”
Something flickered across her face—a struggle between protest and understanding. Then she pressed her lips together and nodded once.
He went.
***
The folly lay beyond the house, past the winter-bare gardens and across the lower meadow to the rising ridge. Dominic took the ground at a punishing pace, his stride devouring the frozen earth, his breath sharp in the February air.
He found Thomas exactly where he expected.
The boy sat upon the stone bench within the crumbling archway, knees drawn close, the compass open in his palm. He was not crying. He stared at the needle with fierce concentration, as though willing it to answer a question no adult would.
Dominic paused at the threshold. Braced a hand against the cold stone. Forced his breathing to steady—not from exertion, but from the sight before him.
“The needle is stuck,” Thomas said without looking up. “It keeps pointing north. But north is not home.”
Dominic crossed to him and sat beside him on the bench. The cold bit through his clothes. He did not notice.
“Compasses always point north,” he said. “That is their purpose. Home is something else.”
“I already found it.” Thomas snapped the compass shut. “It is here. And everyone keeps trying to take me away from it.”
Dominic said nothing.
“Why don’t you want me?”
The question was quiet. Stripped bare.
“Thomas—”
“Grandmama wants me. She cries because I look like Papa. Grandpapa wants me. He brings me things and asks about my paintings.” Thomas turned the compass over in his hands.
“But you—you went away. You locked your study and Miss Weston has been upset and you told me you’d never leave and then you left. ”
Each word struck clean and true.
“You promised,” Thomas said. “On my birthday.”
Dominic closed his eyes.
Behind them rose everything—the painting, the compass, Lorraine’s voice, William’s memory, the boy beside him, waiting.
You are a coward, Dominic Vane.
He opened his eyes.
“Thomas,” he said, and his voice was rough now, unsteady in a way it had not been for years. “I owe you an apology.”
Thomas looked at him. Watching.
“I went away because I was afraid. Not of you—never of you. Of losing you.” He drew a breath.
“Your grandparents have a claim. The law says they may take you. And when I learned that, I did what I have done every time something has frightened me since Spain. I froze. I hid. I told myself I was protecting everyone, when in truth I was only protecting myself.”
Thomas listened, wholly still.
“Miss Weston called me a coward,” Dominic said. “She was right.”
Thomas considered this.
“Miss Weston does not say things she does not mean.”
“No. She does not.” Despite everything—the cold, the fear, the shattering weight of what he was about to do—Dominic almost smiled. “She is the most honest person I have ever known. And the bravest. Considerably braver than I am.”
“She said you were sad sometimes. That people who’ve lost things get afraid of losing more.” Thomas glanced at him sideways—the keen, measuring look of a child who understood loss far too well. “Are you afraid of losing me?”
“Terrified.”
The admission cost him nothing. That was the revelation—after weeks of rehearsed arguments and careful restraint, the truth required no effort at all. It was the pretending that had been exhausting. The silence. The ice.
“Then don’t let them take me.” Thomas’s voice was small, but resolute. “Fight for me. The way Papa would have.”
The words broke something open.
Not the slow thaw of recent weeks, not the small fractures of late-night confessions and tentative hope—but everything at once.
The ice giving way. The flood rushing in.
The feeling he had held back since a ravine in Spain, where he had frozen and twenty-one men had died, and he had decided—quietly, irrevocably—that he did not deserve to feel anything ever again.
Thomas was watching him. William’s eyes. William’s trust, offered once more in the form of a child who still believed.
Dominic reached out and drew him close. Thomas came without hesitation, fitting against his side as though he had always belonged there. Dominic held him tightly—no longer mistaking distance for protection, no longer confusing restraint with strength.
“I will fight for you,” he said. His voice broke, and he let it. “I will speak to your grandparents. I will tell them what you need. I will tell them that Rovewood is your home. That I am—that I wish to be—”
He faltered.
The word stood before him—immense, irrevocable.
Thomas looked up at him, hope written plainly across his face.
“I want to be your father,” Dominic said. “Not merely your guardian. Not your caretaker. Your father—if you will have me.”
Thomas’s face crumpled—not in sorrow, but in the sudden, overwhelming release of a child who had been holding his breath for far too long.
He flung his arms around Dominic’s neck, clinging with surprising strength. Dominic held him just as tightly. Between them, the compass swung, its needle pointing steadily north while everything else in the world shifted into place.
“I’ll have you,” Thomas whispered. “I chose you ages ago. You just took a very long time to notice.”
Dominic laughed—a rough, startled sound, so unfamiliar it seemed to belong to someone else. He pressed his face into Thomas’s hair and let the tears come, unhidden and unrestrained.
He was finished with hiding. Finished with freezing. Finished with mistaking armour for survival.
“We should go back,” he said at last, when the moment loosened its hold and the cold began to press through their coats. “Miss Weston will be frantic.”
“She’ll be furious.”
“Also that.”
Thomas pulled back and studied him with an expression that was, under the circumstances, entirely too pleased.
“Are you going to tell her you’re sorry?”
“Profusely.”
“And that you love her?”
The directness of children—brutal and perfect.
“Yes,” Dominic said. “That as well.”
Thomas nodded, satisfied, slid from the bench, and held out his hand—small, cold, steady. Dominic took it.
They walked down the hill together, the folly receding behind them, the grey shape of Rovewood rising ahead, and the compass swinging lightly against Thomas’s chest, pointing—at last—home.