Chapter 8
Three days was, Temperance had decided, the appropriate length of time to go without Harper.
Though, it was not as easy to avoid him as she had expected. He seemed to turn up in the most unexpected of locations. She was in the library when he found her, buried deep in the pages of a book.
“Miss Hosmer,” he said.
“Your Grace,” she said to her book. She heard him move further into the room.
“I need to speak with you about the Caldwell dinner,” he said. “It is on Thursday and we have been invited as a party, which means we must…”
“What time?” she interrupted him midway, which seemed to surprise and irk him both.
“Eight o’clock.”
“I’ll be ready.” She turned a page.
“There will be several guests whose acquaintance it would be useful for you to make. I have been told that Lord Fenwick will be attending, and he is most suitable.”
“I’m sure he’s very suitable,” she said pleasantly. “Thank you for telling me.”
She felt, rather than saw, the pause that followed this. And then eyebrows knitted together.
“You have no questions?” he said.
“About Lord Fenwick?” She considered this with the air of someone giving it genuine thought. “No, I’m sure you’ll tell me what I need to know when the time comes. You’re very thorough about these things.”
She turned another page. She had not absorbed a word of the last paragraph, but the turning of pages was its own kind of communication and she was communicating it clearly. She wanted to give him the impression that she could be the least bothered by anything that he was saying.
In a twisted way, it felt the only way that she could establish somewhat of an upper hand.
Harper moved around, but did not leave the room. Meanwhile, she kept pretending to be engrossing in her book.
“The household accounts for March have a discrepancy,” he said. “In the column for incidental expenses and I wanted to ask you about it.”
“Mrs. Peel will know,” Temperance said. “She manages the household ledger, and I can ask her to speak with you directly if you’d like.”
“I would have expected you to have some knowledge of running the household.”
“I’m sure you would.” She turned a page. “Mrs. Peel is very capable, and you’ll find everything is accounted for.”
And there was silence again, and she could almost hear him struggling to fill it. Which was not something that was rather typical of him.
At least she was having somewhat of a reaction on him.
“The east lawn,” he said. “I’ve asked the groundskeeper to begin work on the drainage issue near the back wall. I wanted you to know in case the noise is unbearable.”
“That’s very considerate,” she said. “Thank you.”
“It might disturb the dogs.”
Huh. That part surprised her the most out of everything. Since when was he concerned about the well-being of her dogs?
“They don’t mind noise,” she said. “Biscuit will sleep through anything and Midge minds her own business when she’s in the garden. Peabody dislikes sudden loud things but if there’s warning he adjusts.”
She had said more words in that sentence than in the entire preceding conversation, and she said them to the book, in the same even tone she had been using for everything, and she felt with a quiet certainty that she could not have justified that the man on the other side of the room was finding this considerably more aggravating than he would have found her at her most combative.
Good, she thought.
“Miss Hosmer.” His voice had changed. “Are you going to look at me at some point during this conversation?”
“I’m reading,” she said.
“It is rather rude to be so engrossed in a book when you have company present,” he said, and his tone was offended.
Finally, she looked up.
He was standing beside the desk with his arms at his sides and he looked at her steadily. She looked back at him with the pleasant, unrevealing expression she had been using for three days.
“Thursday at eight,” she said. “Lord Fenwick, and the repairs that are happening. Is there anything else?”
“You’re angry,” he said.
“No, I would not assume that. I’m simply reading,” she said, “which is a beloved past time of mine, and you are cutting into it.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
“No,” she agreed. “But only one of them is happening.”
She looked back at her book, her eyes glazing over the text and registering nothing. She could feel him looking at her with the focused, assessing attention he brought to problems he had not yet solved, and she kept her eyes on the page and her face composed and let him look.
“What I said,” he began.
“Was perfectly clear,” she said. “I understood you perfectly, and there is nothing to revisit.”
“I may have been….”
“Your Grace.” She kept her voice even, pleasant, and entirely closed. “There is genuinely nothing to discuss. You told me what you thought. I heard you, and now we can move on.”
“I don’t think we have moved on,” he said. “I think you are sitting in that chair being extremely agreeable and that it is the least agreeable you have ever been.”
She almost smiled but suppressed it with considerable effort and turned a page.
“Thursday at eight,” she said. “I’ll be ready.”
Harper opened his mouth but before any words could come out, the library door burst open.
Joseph came through, pulling up short when he saw his father, and then looked at Temperance.
“Miss Hosmer,” he said, slightly out of breath, “Biscuit has found something in the garden. I think it might be a hedgehog. I thought you might want to,” he stopped as he looked between his father and then a look of realization appeared on his face, “Am I interrupting?”
“No,” Temperance said, but at the same moment Harper said, “Yes.”
Joseph looked between the two of them, confused.
Temperance set her book down and looked at Joseph with a smile that was genuine, “I’m not in the mood for the garden today, I’m afraid.”
Joseph’s face showed he was absorbing a disappointment and trying not to show it, which he was not quite as good at as he believed. “Oh,” he said. “All right.”
“Another time,” she said. “I promise, and Thursday, Your Grace.”
She stood, smoothed her skirt, and walked out of the library.
The library was very quiet when Temperance walked away. Harper stood beside the desk, in the same position he had been in, and looked at the door. Then he looked at his son, who was looking at the door with a confused expression.
“Was she upset?” Joseph said.
“She was perfectly fine,” Harper said, dismissively. “It is not something that you need to think about.”
“She was upset,” Joseph said again, “What did you do?”
Harper raised an eyebrow at Joseph, but the expression on his sons’ face did not flicker even once.
It was a rare sight. In all his years of raising him, Harper had scarcely ever seen him act this defiantly.
“You must watch your tone,” Harper reminded him. “I came to discuss the Caldwell dinner and the household accounts.”
Joseph appeared unimpressed by this. “Before that? She was fine before the ball but she was not fine after. I noticed. Mrs. Peel noticed too, as she made her favorite biscuits the day after and left them outside the library door.”
Harper looked at his son for a long moment. He did not know when his son had gotten so observant.
“It is not your concern,” Harper said. “Besides, I have already asked you to keep a distance from her. You should comply with that.”
“I have been trying, but it has not been easy.” Joseph admitted. There was something quite sincere in the confession that made it difficult for Harper to be angry in response to it. “She is not a bad influence, and she makes me laugh. I would say that she is good and you upset her.”
Harper looked at his son, and realized that he had never before had seen his son react like this about anything.
“You seemed to have formed an opinion of her rather quickly,” Harper noted.
“You have taught me the skill of discernment,” Joseph replied. “And in this case, you should trust mine. I... I find her… she does things that are not… she is unconventional, I suppose.”
It was some strange relief that Joseph was having a hard time defining Temperance.
So it wasn’t only Harper who had this problem.
“That was putting it rather mildly,” Harper replied.
“I know,” Joseph said. “I like it as it the only fun I’ve had in a very long time.”
At his confession, the room went very still. For some reason this knowledge sat in Harper’s chest as an unspecific weight that he could not locate precisely enough to address.
“I see,” he said.
He said it because it was the only thing he trusted himself to say without it becoming something he had not planned and was not ready for.
Joseph looked at him for a moment longer with those clear, direct eyes that had apparently inherited nothing from Harper in terms of their willingness to conceal what was behind them.
Then he looked at the door Temperance had gone through, and something in his expression settled into the particular kind of resignation that was too old for a ten-year-old’s face.
“I know you’re going to tell me again to stay away from her,” Joseph said. “But I don’t think I will, I don’t want to.”
Harper looked at his son.
“Go and do your Latin,” he said.
Joseph held his gaze for one more moment. Then he nodded, once, in the small formal way he had, and walked out of the library. His footsteps went up the stairs and faded but Harper stood in the library alone.
The chair where Temperance had been sitting still held the slight impression of her.
The book she had been reading was gone but the teacup was still there, on the small table by the window, and there was a folded piece of paper beside it that appeared to be a letter she had been in the middle of writing before he had come in and rearranged the entire character of the room.
He looked at these things.