Chapter 18 #2
Temperance let out a breath and looked across the garden to where Harper was sitting with his hands around his cup and his face turned up toward the sun with the unguarded quality of someone who had forgotten, for a moment, to be composed.
She looked away, and thankfully interrupted by the sound of Joseph running towards them. He had found a ball somewhere in the bushes and came back across the lawn at speed.
“Can we play?” he asked to the group generally but looked at his father specifically.
“Play what?” Harper replied raising an eyebrow.
“Something with the ball,” Joseph said. “It doesn’t matter what, just something. Please?”
“I’ll play,” Temperance said, and stood up before anyone could decide otherwise. “You should join us, Your Grace. It is a lovely afternoon after all. And Joseph is being so terribly well mannered. Don’t you think he deserves some fun? I know the word is foreign to you, but you try to have some.”
“Yes, Father. Please. It will be good.”
Harper looked at Temperance and set down his cup.
“Fine,” he said, and stood up.
Joseph’s face lit up as he turned and ran back onto the lawn before his father could change his mind.
It started simply enough. Joseph threw the ball and Temperance caught it, as games like this usually go. Harper stood at the edge of it for the first few minutes.
He would come in when he was ready and there was no use in pointing out that he was standing on the edge, Temperance knew this and decided not to prod him further.
Until Joseph threw the ball to his father, which he caught with effortless ease.
Temperance could only note how fast his reflexes were, and why... God knows why… that both flustered and impressed her.
“Throw it back,” Joseph urged.
Harper did, and their little game began as they passed the ball to each other.
“Quick,” Harper said, throwing it to Temperance, “I do not take you to be much of the sporty type.”
“Oh, you do not know me,” Temperance grinned, catching the ball. “There was an entire summer at the nunnery when we had nothing to do, and got ourselves into a possession of a ball. I might have learned a few tricks there.”
Before she knew it, she and Harper were passing the ball over to each other, each trying to out maneuver the other. But Peabody intercepted the ball on its next throw, and then sat down with it between his front paws.
“Peabody,” Temperance said as Joseph moved to retrieve the ball from the dog. “He won’t give it up voluntarily, you have to negotiate.”
“How do you negotiate with a dog?” Joseph said.
“With Peabody specifically, you pretend to be interested in something in the opposite direction. He cannot resist investigating things. The moment he moves, take the ball.”
Joseph looked at Peabody, and then looked away with great elaborateness, toward something entirely non-existent at the far end of the garden, and Peabody, after a moment of suspicious consideration, stood up to look.
Joseph had the ball.
“That worked,” he said with genuine surprise.
“He is very consistent,” Temperance said. “Most reliable things are, once you understand them.” She said it generally, to no one in particular, but she was aware of Harper nearby glancing at her as she said the words.
The game continued. It had no rules to speak of, evolving organically.
At some point Joseph discovered that Midge would chase anything that moved, and spent five minutes testing the limits of this theory with his own jacket sleeve.
Harper said nothing about the jacket sleeve, which Temperance noticed.
Huh. She thought to herself that the Harper she met earlier would have redirected and corrected the entire exchange. But this Harper did no such thing.
She looked at him standing in the middle of the lawn watching his son laugh at Midge’s trajectory with something open and unmanaged in his expression.
He had changed.
Then Joseph threw the ball too hard and it went wide and bounced toward the rose bed and Biscuit, who had apparently been waiting for exactly this kind of opportunity, heaved himself to his feet and lumbered after it with surprising speed and arrived at the rose bed ahead of the ball and walked directly through the freshly turned earth at its border and came out the other side with his paws impressively dirty.
Harper looked at his shoes, which had also acquired some of the freshly turned earth.
“Your shoes,” Temperance said, laughing. “They are muddy.”
“I can see that,” he said. “But we are in the gardens, and I suppose that it could be worse.”
It was that moment that it occurred to Temperance that now was a great time to test out her theory to see if Harper had really changed. She picked up a handful of the loose earth from the rose bed border and held it up.
“It could be worse,” she said. “I could make it worse.”
He looked at the handful of earth, and narrowed his eyes at her. “You wouldn’t,” he said.
Something shifted in his expression that was not quite a smile and he took one step toward her.
She took one step back, and then she threw the earth, not at him exactly, more adjacent to him, and it scattered across the front of his coat.
He looked down at it and then looked up at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before.
Oh no. She was in trouble now.
So, she ran across the lawn with no plan whatsoever, hearing him come after her, which she had not entirely expected, and Joseph made a sound that was pure delight. Midge joined the chase while Temperance ran toward the apple trees.
“I bet you will not be able to catch me,” she giggled.
He caught up with her at the apple trees, which was faster than she had anticipated given the difference in their stride.
But he did not grab her arm or block her path, simply reached down and picked up a fallen apple from the grass and held it up.
“That,” she said, slightly out of breath, “is an apple.”
“It is,” he said. “You started this. Now shall I throw it at you?”
“I threw it adjacent to you,” she said.
“The coat disagrees,” he said with the apple was in his hand. She was against the apple tree now, realizing that he was closer than the situation strictly required.
Oh my.
“Truce,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment.
“Truce,” he agreed, and lowered the apple. They stood there for a second in the apple tree’s shade with the sounds of the garden around them, Joseph laughing somewhere behind them. “We should go.”
It was almost as though she had to remind him of it, too. He snapped out of whatever daze he was in, and cleared his throat.
“Right. Ladies first.”
Then she stepped out from the tree and walked back toward the blankets, finding Albina watching her.
Her mother’s expression was the one that Temperance had seen before, the expression of someone watching something they were glad to see and sorry about in equal measure. It was there for only a moment before Albina looked down at her cup and smiled at something in it.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Albina smiled. “I just... Sometimes I wonder how long it is going to take for you to see what is so apparent to me, and right in front of you.”