Chapter 17
The morning was cold and clear, and perfect for horse riding.
Harper had been riding since Joseph was old enough to sit on a horse, which had been earlier than most people considered advisable. It was one of the few things they did together without any of the usual scaffolding of instruction and expectation, and Harper valued it for that reason.
Joseph was good on a horse and they had been out for perhaps forty minutes, moving through the quieter paths of the park at an easy pace, before Joseph spoke.
“Miss Hosmer taught me something yesterday,” he said.
Harper glanced at him.
“What did she teach you?”
“How to whistle properly, with two fingers.” Joseph demonstrated, producing a sound that was considerably louder than the setting strictly required. “She says it is useful for calling dogs and also for getting people’s attention in crowds, though she admitted the second use is not very ladylike.”
“It is not,” Harper agreed, managing a small smile.
“She said she learned it from one of the sisters at the nunnery,” Joseph said, “which she thought was funny because the sister in question was very strict about everything else.” He paused. “You know, she tells good stories about that place.”
He had noticed this about Temperance himself, the way she handled the harder material of her own history, the lightness she wrapped around it that was not dishonest but was a kind of protection. She was only looking out for herself, perhaps but in way that that he could respect.
“I like her,” Joseph said. “They’ve begun to feel like home, honestly. Are we going to stay?”
Harper looked at him, having not expected a question like that.
“At Wilmington Manor,” Joseph said. “Long term. Are we going to stay or are we going back to Sedgewick?”
“We will go back to Sedgewick eventually,” Harper said. “That is our home. We came here to sort out the estate matters and the season and then we will go back.”
Joseph was quiet for a moment. He was looking at the path ahead with the expression he got when he was thinking about something that mattered to him and was deciding how directly to approach it.
“When?” he said.
“When things are settled here,” Harper said.
“What things?”
“The estate, the accounts, and Miss Hosmer’s situation,” he listed. “When those things are in order.”
“Her situation meaning her marriage,” Joseph said.
“Yes.”
Joseph was quiet again. They came out of the narrower path into a wider stretch and the horses moved into a more comfortable stride, and the park opened up around them with the particular spaciousness of early morning before anyone else arrived.
“I don’t think she wants to get married,” Joseph said.
“She has said as much,” Harper agreed.
“But you are making her anyway.”
Harper glanced at his son. “I am not making her do anything. I am ensuring she has opportunities that she would not otherwise have, and the choice is hers.”
Joseph looked at him with the expression of a boy who had listened to adults say things his whole life and had developed a reasonable ability to identify the gap between what was said and what was meant.
He did not push it further, which was either discretion or the decision to save it for later, and Harper was not certain which.
“If we go back to Sedgewick,” Joseph said, “I won’t see her anymore.”
“You will see her when she is married and settled,” Harper said. “We will visit.”
“It won’t be the same,” Joseph said.
“It will be something that you will have to get used to.”
Joseph absorbed this with the quiet steadiness he had, the way he took difficult things and held them without making a production of it, and Harper felt the familiar complicated weight of watching his son be braver than a ten-year-old should have to be.
“You should not get too attached,” Harper said, and said it carefully, meaning it as a kindness and aware as he said it that it was also a thing he was saying to himself and that the himself portion was probably the more necessary audience.
Joseph looked at him. “I am already attached,” he said. “That is rather the point, and I suspect that you have as well.”
Harper looked at him, but ignored it.
“To both of them,” Joseph pressed on. “I have watched you at dinner. You argue with her differently from how you argue with other people. With her, you actually listen to what she says, and you are different with Lady Wilmington now too. You were very stiff with her in the beginning and now you are not. I saw you having a conversation with her in the garden last week that went on for twenty minutes.”
“We were discussing the planting on the east side,” Harper said.
“You were laughing,” Joseph said. “I saw it from the window. I don’t think the planting was that funny.”
Harper looked at the path. He was aware that this conversation had gone considerably further than he had intended when they set out this morning and that the responsible course of action was to redirect it, and he was also aware that Joseph was ten years old and sharper than most adults and that a redirect would be identified and filed away for future use.
“We will be going back to Sedgewick,” Harper said, in the tone that meant the subject was being placed somewhere firm. “That is what is happening. I want you to understand that clearly so that you are not disappointed when the time comes.”
Joseph was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again his voice had changed slightly, gone a little more careful.
“Can I ask you something?” he said. “Did you love my mother?”
“Where has that question come from?”
“Please answer it for me,” he pressed.
The path continued ahead of them, wide and empty, the wet grass on either side catching the morning light. A long way off, someone was walking a dog that was moving in wide enthusiastic circles around its owner. The horses moved steadily on. Harper took his time with the answer.
“We cared for each other at the beginning and respected each other, I think. But it was not a love match. We married because it was the right arrangement for both families and because we thought it would be enough.” He paused. “It wasn’t enough. That is a thing I would do differently if I could.”
Joseph nodded slowly, looking at his horse’s mane.
“She was not well,” Joseph recalled. “For a long time. I remember she used to sit in the window in her room. The big window in the east wing. She would sit there for a very long time and just look out. I used to watch her from the doorway because I didn’t know if I was allowed to go in. Was I allowed to go in?”
Harper looked at his son and something tightened in his chest that he kept out of his voice.
“Yes,” he said. “You were always allowed.”
“I didn’t know that,” Joseph said. “She seemed very far away when she was sitting there. Like she was somewhere else.” He was quiet for a moment.
“She used to read to me sometimes. When she was having a better day. She did the voices and everything, different ones for each character.” A small pause.
“She was funny when she did that. I didn’t know she was funny until she did the voices. ”
“She was funny,” Harper said. “She had a very dry sense of humor but didn’t show it often. Though when she did it was genuinely good.”
Joseph looked at him. “You don’t talk about her very much.”
“I know,” Harper said. “I should do it more.”
“Why don’t you?”
Harper considered the honest answer, which was that talking about her meant navigating the territory between what was true and what was useful for a ten-year-old boy to know, and that the navigation was difficult enough that he had largely avoided it rather than do it badly.
But Joseph was asking the question directly and deserved a direct answer.
“Because there are parts of it that are hard to talk about,” he said, “and I have not always known how to talk about the other parts without the hard ones coming through. And I wanted you to have the good memories without me putting shadows on them.”
Joseph thought about this seriously. “The good memories are mine,” he said. “You don’t have to manage them. I’m not going to lose them just because some of it was hard.”
“Your mother loved you,” he said. “I want you to know that, because it was true and because it was not always easy for her and she did it anyway. I remember that she used to check on you at night after you were asleep.”
Joseph was quiet. He was looking at the path ahead with an expression that was trying to be composed and not quite getting all the way there.
“I didn’t know that,” Joseph said again, after a moment.
“I know,” Harper said. “I should have told you sooner.”
They rode in silence for a while. It was the comfortable kind, or close enough to it, the kind that had something being processed inside it rather than avoided.
The park was beginning to show the first signs of the day arriving, a couple of early walkers in the distance, the light getting warmer and less pale.
“If we go back to Sedgewick,” Joseph said eventually, picking up the earlier thread with the persistence he had when he wasn’t finished with something, “would she come and visit? Miss Hosmer. After she is married.”
“I expect so,” Harper said.
“Would Lady Wilmington come?”
“Possibly.”
“Would they bring the dogs?”
“Look, Joseph. You are asking me a lot of questions.” Harper looked at him. “I don’t know.”
“Biscuit would probably be too old for the journey in a few years,” Joseph said, “He sleeps a great deal already. Long journeys are not good for old dogs, you know.”
It warmed his heart to see how thoughtful his little one had become, and he wondered if Temperance was the reason he was able to express himself like this now.
“We are getting you a dog at Sedgewick,” Harper said. “You will have your own.”
Joseph considered this.
“I still want to see Biscuit,” he said. “My own dog is a separate matter.”
“You can see Biscuit,” Harper said.
“And Miss Hosmer.”
Harper said nothing.
“And Lady Wilmington,” Joseph said.
“Joseph.”
“I am just listing the things I want to see,” Joseph said with complete composure.
Harper looked at him for a long moment. Joseph looked back with the expression of a boy who had inherited his father’s ability to hold a position and had deployed it, and Harper felt the particular exhausted affection of a man who recognized his own qualities in someone else and found them considerably more difficult to deal with from the outside.
“We will visit,” Harper said. “When she is settled and married and the arrangements are in place, we will visit.”
“Promise?” Joseph said, and said it in the way he said things he was serious about, without any of the lightness that might have made it easier to answer loosely.
Harper looked at his son. At the clear, direct eyes and the straight back and the ten-year-old face that was so much older than ten in some ways and so exactly ten in others, and he thought about promises and what they cost and what they were worth and how he had made one six years ago at a bedside and kept it every day since.
“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”
Joseph nodded, once, in the small formal way he had when something had been agreed and ratified. Then he looked back at the path.
“Can we go faster now?” he said. “I want to try the longer stretch before we have to go back.”
“Yes,” Harper said.
Joseph urged his horse forward and Harper followed, and the park opened up ahead of them wide and empty and bright in the morning, and they rode without talking for a while, and Harper let the speed and the cold air and the sound of the horses do the work that the conversation had started, which was the particular work of sitting with something true that you had been not quite looking at directly and finding that, once looked at, it was not going to go back to where it had been before.
He thought about Sedgewick. About the quiet of it, the orderly rooms, the reliable routines, the life he had built there that worked and asked nothing unexpected of him.
He thought about the breakfast room at Wilmington, and the dogs on the settee, and Temperance with her book and her uneven hems and her way of saying things that landed somewhere real regardless of whether he was ready for them.
He thought about going back.
He thought about what going back would feel like now, which was a thing he had not let himself think about before this morning, and he found that thinking of it produced something he did not have a ready word for and was not going to name on horseback in a public park at seven in the morning.
He rode on. Joseph was ahead of him now, moving well, his back straight and his hands easy, and Harper watched his son ride and thought that Joseph was right about most of it, which was inconvenient, and that he had been right for longer than this morning, which was more inconvenient still.
The park was fully light now. The day had arrived and was getting on with itself, indifferent to the conclusions being reached on horseback within it, and Harper rode through it and kept his face composed and his thoughts where he could see them, which was the best he could manage for now.
It would have to be sufficient.
He was becoming less certain, as the weeks went on, that sufficient was going to be enough.