Chapter 6
Harper had been gone since before breakfast.
Temperance knew this because she had come downstairs at five minutes to nine, as she was not going to give him the satisfaction of being late twice, and found only Joseph at the table.
He had looked up when she entered, and there had been a brief, conspiratorial flicker of something between them before he returned to his Latin. That boy she had met earlier seemed like an entirely different person.
Though, she had respected this completely.
Harper, apparently, had meetings with the estate’s solicitors and then with the land steward. He had left instructions for the day and had departed before the house was fully awake.
The instructions had been read, set aside, and not consulted again.
The morning had gone well. The corridor incident had somehow loosened something between her and Joseph, and afterward he had appeared in the doorway of the sitting room where she was reading and stood there for a moment.
She had looked up and said, “The dogs are in the garden if you want to take them out.”
“I was simply passing.”
“The garden door is at the end of the corridor.”
He had gone to the garden. Ten minutes later, through the sitting room window, she had watched him throw a stick for Midge.
She had not expected to like him.
Joseph, that was. When she had found him in the garden that first night, covered in mud and holding her cat with the careful gravity of a child who had decided the cat was his responsibility now, she had not thought beyond returning Soot to the house and sorting out whomever this boy belonged to.
She had not anticipated the dress incident. She had not anticipated the running, or the threats about the green dye, or the moment when his composure had cracked entirely and he had laughed with the startled, helpless quality of someone who had forgotten they were capable of it.
She had not anticipated caring about any of it.
Through the sitting room window, she watched him throw the stick again.
Midge brought it back immediately, dropped it at his feet, and looked up at him with the focused intensity she brought to things she considered important.
Joseph picked it up and threw it again, and this time he watched her go with something on his face that was entirely unguarded, the look of a child simply enjoying a thing without any scaffolding around it.
She turned back to her book.
She had been in enough institutional settings to recognize what Joseph was.
Not spoiled, not unkind, not any of the things she might have expected from a duke’s son who had been raised to be a duke’s son.
Just careful. The kind of careful that came from years of understanding, however unconsciously, that the wrong behavior had consequences and that it was safer to want things quietly and justify them practically.
She knew that kind of careful from the inside.
It was one of the things the nunnery had given her, along with the pleasant expression that gave nothing away and the ability to read a room before anyone in it had said a word.
She had not chosen to develop these qualities.
They had simply arrived, the way things arrived when survival required them.
She did not think Joseph had chosen his either.
Outside, Midge had abandoned the stick entirely and was now running circles around Joseph for no apparent reason, and Joseph was standing in the middle of it with his arms slightly out, turning to watch her, and he was laughing again.
It was a good laugh. She had noticed this about it the first time it appeared, the way it arrived without warning, nothing managed about it, just the genuine unguarded sound of a child finding something funny.
She suspected it did not come out very often.
She suspected, from various things she had observed over the past several days, that Joseph’s life at Sedgewick was a very orderly one, full of Latin primers and correspondence practice and the kind of careful daily structure that produced capable, composed young men and left very little room for running down corridors or laughing at dogs.
She thought about what it would mean to grow up like that. To be ten years old and already so practiced at being correct.
She knew, in her own way, exactly what it meant.
Midge had finally worn herself out and collapsed at Joseph’s feet, and he crouched down beside her and said something to her that Temperance could not hear through the glass, and whatever it was Midge’s tail moved in response, and Joseph looked pleased about this in the contained, careful way he looked pleased about things he did not want to appear too pleased about.
Temperance looked back at her book.
She turned a page she had not read and told herself that it was not her concern, that the boy had a father and a tutor and a perfectly adequate life, and that the specific quality of his laugh was not something she needed to think about.
She was not especially successful at any of this.
The books had been knocked down somewhere around three o’clock. This had been Biscuit’s doing, and then later muddied footsteps had been dragged in through the door. Midge, that time, and the result of the garden visit.
Temperance had meant to have someone clean them up. She had noticed them, registered them as a thing that needed doing, and then become absorbed in her book again and let the afternoon move on around her without addressing it.
She would address it later, she had told herself.
What was the hurry, anyway?
Later, it turned out, was now.
Harper was not a happy man looking at the state of the house. His gaze moved across the corridor.
The muddy footprints along the left side of the runner and the three books still on the floor. Joseph, who had stopped running the moment his father appeared and was now standing very still halfway down the corridor.
“Joseph,” Harper said.
Joseph’s posture, which had already been straight, became a different kind of straight.
“Father,” he said.
“Come here.”
Joseph walked down the corridor toward his father with the measured steps and stopped in front of Harper and stood correctly.
Harper looked at his son for a long moment.
“What have you been doing?” Harper said.
“I was, well,” Joseph stopped. He began again. “Miss Hosmer and I were...”
“I can see what you were doing.” Harper’s voice did not change. “I am asking you to tell me.”
“We were running,” Joseph said, in the flat, direct tone of a child who had decided that honesty was, at minimum, more defensible than an inadequate alternative.
“In the house?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You were running in the house,” Harper said, “after I have told you, repeatedly and clearly, what the standards of behavior in this household are. You knocked books from the table.”
“Oh, that was not him. That was Biscuit,” Temperance said.
Harper looked at her and his expression did not invite the interjection.
“You allowed the dog inside with muddy feet.”
“That was also…” Temperance began in defense.
“Miss Hosmer, I will speak to you in a moment.”
She closed her mouth.
Joseph had not moved. He was looking at a point somewhere past his father’s left shoulder.
“You are ten years old,” Harper said to his son.
“You are not a child of five. You know what is expected of you. You know how a young gentleman conducts himself, and you know why it matters. I should not have to explain it to you again. Go upstairs and change your clothes. Tell Watkins I want to see your Latin exercises before dinner.”
“Yes, sir,” Joseph said.
“And you will apologize to Mrs. Peel for the state of the floor.”
“Yes, sir.”
Harper stepped to the side. Joseph moved past him toward the stairs without looking up, and he was almost past Temperance when she caught his eye. She gave him the smallest possible look, which he held her gaze for a fraction of a second.
Then he went up the stairs, and Temperance watched him go.
Harper had turned to face her fully now, and he had not moved from the spot.
“The books,” she said, because she had decided she was going to say it whether he welcomed it or not, “were knocked down by Biscuit. The footprints were Midge’s. I should have had them seen to earlier and I did not, and I will, and I’m sorry for that. But the running was, well.”
“The running,” Harper said, “was a grown woman chasing a child down a corridor in a house that is not a playground, conducting herself in a manner that I would not expect from someone of her age and position, and setting an example for my son that I would have thought she had more sense than to set.”
He stopped and looked at her with those dark blue eyes, and the control in them was absolute and also, she thought, somewhat expensive.
“You are not a child, Miss Hosmer. You should have known better.”
“I know perfectly well that I am not a child,” she said. Her voice was even. She was holding the even tone with both hands. “And I know perfectly well what I was doing. Your son stepped on my dress this afternoon and…”
“Joseph stepped on your dress?”
“He did. And instead of..” She stopped, as she had not intended to tell him the whole of it, but the telling of it had a momentum of its own once started.
“Instead of a formal complaint about it, which I could have made, we ran around the corridor and made threats about green dye and it was entirely harmless and it made him laugh. He has a very good laugh. Did you know that? It comes out startled, like he isn’t expecting it. Like he doesn’t do it very often.”
Something moved across Harper’s face. It was there and gone so quickly she almost missed it.
“My son’s laugh,” he said, “is not the subject of this conversation.”
“Perhaps it ought to be.”
“Miss Hosmer.”
“He is ten years old.” She said, “And he should be running down corridors. or getting grass stains on his shoes and laughing at things that aren’t particularly funny and making a mess occasionally. That is what being ten is for. Before it is too late to do it.”