Chapter Twenty-Six
“We need to talk about Thomas.”
James Harding looked up from the writing desk in the blue guest room, where he had been composing a letter. His expression, as it settled on Dominic, was measured—the quiet appraisal of a man long accustomed to reading others and adjusting himself accordingly.
“Yes,” James said. “I believe we do.”
Margaret sat by the window, her embroidery lying idle in her lap, her eyes still red.
She had been weeping since Thomas’s return from the folly—not the restrained tears of their first meeting, but the unguarded grief of a grandmother who had watched her grandson come back holding the Duke’s hand, his small face set with a fierce, luminous resolve that was somehow more difficult to bear than his flight.
Because resolve meant the boy had chosen.
And he had not chosen them.
Dominic remained for a moment in the doorway, acutely aware that he had never, in all his adult life, willingly entered a conversation he knew would cause him pain.
Such moments had always been imposed upon him—by commanding officers, by solicitors, by a governess who wielded truth like a blade and refused him the comfort of retreat.
Until now.
“May I sit?” he asked.
James gestured to the chair opposite. Dominic complied. The chair, elegant and slight, creaked faintly beneath his weight, and he was dimly aware of the absurdity: a former rifle officer perched upon gilt furniture, about to plead for the right to raise a child he had once avoided.
“I owe you both an explanation,” he said. “And an apology.”
Margaret lowered her hoop. James set aside his pen.
“When you arrived,” Dominic began, “you might have had the impression that I was Thomas’s custodian. That his care had been an arrangement—a duty undertaken in William’s memory. That was not the truth.”
He paused. The word settled in the room like a stone dropped into still water, disturbing the careful surface of courtesy that had governed every interaction between them.
“Not an entirely unreasonable one,” he continued.
“I might once have believed it myself. I had spent so long persuading myself that Thomas was an obligation—that keeping him fed and housed and educated was sufficient, that proximity without attachment was acceptable—that I had come to accept it as fact.” He looked at his hands—those revealing, traitorous hands—and deliberately unclenched them. “It was never true.”
“Your Grace—” Margaret began.
“Pray let me finish. I may not have the courage to say it twice.”
She fell silent. James’s attention sharpened.
“Thomas came to this house a few months ago, and I failed him. Thoroughly. Repeatedly. Without excuse. I could not look at him without seeing his father. I could not touch him without feeling the weight of what I owed and could never repay. I shut myself away, left his care to a governess who had known him less than a day, and told myself it was acceptable, because I was broken—and broken things ought not to be trusted with the living.”
The silence that followed was complete. Outside, a winter bird sang—bright and incongruous against the gravity of the moment.
“Miss Weston changed that.” His voice roughened slightly on her name.
“She entered this house and refused to accept the man I had become. She taught Thomas to laugh again, to trust again—and, in doing so, she taught me that stillness is not the same as survival. She brought that boy back to life, and she brought me with him.”
He drew another breath.
“And somewhere in the midst of it, we became a family. Not in law. Not in form. But in truth. The kind that reads together by the fire, that hangs a child’s painting on the wall, that walks out to watch kestrels in the cold.
The kind in which a child feels safe enough to weep—and a man safe enough to hold him. ”
Margaret’s tears fell again, but differently now. Recognition, not grief.
“I consulted a barrister,” Dominic continued.
“Before your arrival. He informed me that your claim is unassailable. That the law will support you, that I have no standing, and that any attempt to contest the matter would be long and damaging—most of all to Thomas.” He met James’s gaze.
“He was correct about the law. He was wrong about the conclusion.”
James leaned forward slightly. “Go on.”
“I will not contest you in court. I will not subject Thomas to a dispute between barristers. That is neither what William would have wished, nor what Thomas deserves.”
“Then what do you propose?”
“I ask that you listen. Not to me—I have no claim—but to Thomas.”
Dominic rose and crossed to the window. The eastern ridge lay beyond, the folly faint against the winter sky.
“Thomas does not wish to go to India,” he said. “He told me so. He speaks plainly, without artifice, and he has told us all in the only way he knows how: with certainty.”
“Children do not always know what is best for them,” Margaret said softly.
“No. But they know where they feel safe. And Thomas feels safe here.” Dominic turned back.
“Because of Miss Weston, who has been mother to him in all but name. Because of the household that has gathered around him. And—” he steadied himself, “—because of me. Not because I am equal to the task, but because I have made him promises, and I intend to keep them.”
A knock sounded.
“Come in,” James said.
Lorraine entered.
She was composed—outwardly Miss Weston, the capable governess—but Dominic saw the strain beneath it: the sleeplessness, the hope she held with such care.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I know this is a private matter. But Thomas asked me to come.”
“He did?” Margaret asked.
“He is in the nursery. He asked me to tell you—” She paused, steadying herself. “—that he loves you both. That Grandmother’s hugs are ‘tight in a good way,’ and that Grandfather asks better questions than anyone, save Miss Weston.”
Margaret let out a broken laugh.
“He also asked me to say,” Lorraine continued, her composure faltering, “that he does not wish to choose. He does not wish to lose anyone else. He has lost enough.”
Silence settled again—different now.
Lorraine looked at Dominic. The glance lasted no more than a second, but it carried everything—the gallery, the library, the narrow bed, the word coward, the word love, the three months of patient, ferocious, transformative grace that had made this moment possible.
Fight, her eyes said. You’re doing it. Keep going.
He turned back to the Hardings.
“I ask that Thomas remain at Rovewood,” Dominic said. “Not as a rejection of you. Never that. You are his family. His history. But this is his home. And I—”
He stopped. Then, steadily:
“I love him. He is my son. Not by blood, nor by law, but by every measure that matters. I have failed him, apologised, and tried again. I wish to go on trying. I wish to raise him.”
The silence that followed was full.
James looked to Margaret. She looked to him. Something passed between them—long familiarity, shared loss, and understanding.
“Your Grace,” James said, “may I ask one question?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Weston. What is she to you?”
The question was not hostile. It was the question of a man who had been watching, as he had watched everything, with the quiet perceptiveness that had made him one of the most effective diplomats in the East India Company’s service.
Dominic looked at Lorraine.
She looked back at him. Steady. Unflinching.
“She is everything,” he said. “And I intend to marry her—if she will have me.”
Lorraine’s composure broke—not into tears, but into a smile so bright it seemed to alter the light in the room.
Margaret watched her. Watched him. And something in her expression gentled.
“William,” she said softly. “William would have liked her.”
“Yes,” James agreed. “He would.”
He turned to Dominic with an expression that was neither surrender nor defeat but something harder to name—the acknowledgement of a man who had come to claim a grandson and found, instead, a family that had already formed around the child like a living thing, organic and imperfect and real. “We have conditions.”
“Name them.”
“We wish to see him. Regularly. Not letters sent across an ocean—visits. We shall take a house in York. Near enough for birthdays and Christmases, and all the ordinary days in between.”
“Agreed.”
“He will know us. He will know his parents’ stories—their childhood, their favourite songs. He will know where he comes from.”
“He should. He deserves every part of them you can give him.”
“And when he is older—twelve, perhaps, or thirteen—if he wishes to visit India, to see where his father lived, you will not stand in his way.”
“I will encourage it.”
James studied him for a long moment. Then he extended his hand—not the formal courtesy of their first meeting, but the firm, personal clasp of a man concluding an agreement of far greater consequence than any he had brokered in his professional life.
Dominic took it.
Margaret rose from her chair, crossed the room, and did something Dominic did not expect. She put her arms around him. The embrace was brief, fierce, and not without strength—the embrace of a grandmother who had prepared herself for a battle and had instead found a man she could trust.
“Take care of him,” she whispered.
“I will.”
She released him, dabbed at her eyes, and turned to Lorraine, who stood by the door with tears upon her cheeks and a smile so radiant it seemed to alter the very light in the room.
“Come here, my dear,” Margaret said, opening her arms.
Lorraine went to her.
Dominic stood in the blue guest room, watching the two women embrace and felt, for the first time since a ravine in Spain, the full weight of being alive. Not the muted, frozen half-life he had endured for four years, but the real thing—messy, painful, overwhelming, magnificent.
He was going to marry Lorraine Weston. He was going to raise William’s son. He was going to fill Rovewood Hall with paint-stained fingers, crooked kestrels, and laughter that reached into every corner of the house.
He was going to live.
The thought was terrifying.
It was also, he found, the only one worth having.