Chapter Two #2
Four years since Badajoz. Four years since he had stood in a Yorkshire church and received condolences for a father he had scarcely known, a title he had never desired, an inheritance that felt less like a gift than a sentence.
In those same years, the boy had been safely settled with his mother’s family, and Dominic—new to his responsibilities and scarcely equal to them—had let that arrangement stand.
Four years of building walls so high and so thick that nothing might breach them.
And then William’s son had arrived, and the walls had begun to crack—and Dominic had responded in the only manner he understood.
By building them higher.
***
At precisely nine o’clock, a knock sounded upon the study door.
Dominic was seated behind his desk—a deliberate choice, the broad expanse of oak serving equally as barrier and declaration of authority.
He had dressed with care: dark coat, immaculate cravat, every inch the forbidding nobleman.
If this Miss Weston were to remain in his household, she must understand from the outset that her employer was not a man who encouraged familiarity.
“Enter.”
The door opened, and the woman who stepped within was not what he had anticipated.
He had imagined someone older, perhaps—grey-haired and severe, as governesses were supposed to be.
Or young and timid, easily cowed. Instead, she was neither—somewhere in her middle twenties, with hair the colour of autumn leaves, pinned up in a style that was neat but already losing its contest with a number of unruly curls.
Her gown was grey, modest, and entirely suitable to her station.
Her eyes were not modest at all.
They travelled the room—the heavy curtains, the cold hearth, the whisky decanter Dominic had neglected to remove—and then settled upon him with an expression of frank assessment. Blue-green, those eyes. Changeable. The colour of the sea before a storm.
She did not flinch. She did not lower her gaze. She merely looked at him as though taking his measure, and had not yet determined what she made of it.
Something stirred, faint and unwelcome, in Dominic’s chest. He ignored it.
“Miss Weston.” He did not rise, nor gesture to the chair before his desk. “You are punctual.”
“Your Grace.” She dropped a curtsy—correct, neither too deep nor too shallow—and remained standing, her hands neatly folded before her. “I understand you wished to speak with me regarding the terms of my employment.”
“I wish to ensure that we understand one another.” He leaned back in his chair, studying her.
“You are here to care for my ward. To educate him, to oversee his welfare, and to prepare him for his eventual departure to India with his grandparents. This is a temporary arrangement. The Hardings are expected within a few months. Do you comprehend?”
“Perfectly, Your Grace.”
“Very good.” He adjusted the papers upon his desk—meaningless correspondence, but it occupied his hands.
“Mrs Potter will acquaint you with the household schedule. Meals are taken in the nursery. You may make use of the library when it is not otherwise engaged. Should you require anything for the boy’s education, submit a list to Graves, and it shall be procured. ”
“Thank you.” She paused. “And the boy himself? What can you tell me of him?”
Dominic’s hands stilled upon the papers.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Thomas.” Her voice remained pleasant, yet there was something beneath it—a thread of steel beneath silk. “I should like to know more of him. His temperament. His interests. His particular needs.”
“The only need of his that need concern you, Miss Weston, is his education. I trust you are equal to it.”
“Indeed.” She inclined her head slightly, and one of those errant curls slipped free to brush her cheek. She made no attempt to correct it. “But I was thinking rather of personal details. What does he enjoy? What frightens him? What makes him laugh?”
The questions struck like blows. Dominic felt his jaw tighten, the familiar cold spreading through his chest. “I am afraid I cannot assist you with such trivialities, Miss Weston. The boy has been in my care but a few months, and my duties to the estate—”
“Five months.” Her tone did not change. Her eyes did. “He has been in your care for five months, Your Grace. Surely, in that time, you must have formed some impression of his character.”
Silence stretched between them. Dominic was dimly aware that he ought to be offended—that this woman, this governess, should question him so directly, in his own study, bordered upon impertinence.
He was not offended.
He was something worse.
He was exposed.
“Thomas is… quiet,” he said at last. The word sounded insufficient, even to his own ears. “He does not speak often. He is not troublesome. Beyond that, I—” He stopped. Swallowed. Began again. “Beyond that, I suggest you form your own conclusions, Miss Weston. It is, after all, what I pay you for.”
She regarded him for a long moment. He had the most uncomfortable sensation that she saw straight through him—through the title, through the walls, through four years of carefully constructed distance—to the ruin beneath.
“Very well,” she said quietly. “Then I shall.”
She ought to have taken her leave then. Any sensible governess would have curtsied and withdrawn to the nursery where she belonged. Instead, she remained where she was, those storm-sea eyes fixed steadily upon his face.
“May I ask one further question, Your Grace?”
No, he thought. Certainly not.
“You may ask,” he heard himself reply. “I do not promise to answer.”
“The boy’s father. Captain Harding.” Something shifted in her expression—compassion, perhaps, or curiosity. “Mrs Potter mentioned that he served under you. In Spain.”
The cold in Dominic’s chest hardened to ice. His hand rose of its own accord, touching the scar that cut across his left brow—shrapnel, Badajoz, the same night everything had ended.
“Mrs Potter,” he said evenly, “speaks beyond her place.”
“She speaks out of care. For this house and for all within it.” Miss Weston’s chin lifted a fraction. “For you as well, I should imagine.”
“Miss Weston.” His voice emerged harder than he intended—colder. “You are engaged to instruct a child. Not to examine the household, its history, or its master. I trust I make myself understood.”
Something altered in her expression. For an instant—no more—he thought he saw hurt flicker there. Then it vanished, replaced by a composed blankness he recognised at once, for he wore it himself.
“Perfectly, Your Grace.” She sank into another curtsy. “I shall not trespass further upon your time.”
She turned to go. Her hand had just reached the door when he spoke again, the words escaping him before he could recall them.
“He likes birds.”
She paused. Turned back.
“Thomas.” Dominic kept his gaze upon the desk, unable to meet her eyes. “I have observed him at the nursery window, watching the birds in the garden. He appears… interested in them. I do not know if that is of any use.”
A brief silence. Then, softly, “It is of use, Your Grace. Thank you.”
The door closed behind her.
Dominic remained motionless in the grey morning light, his hand still resting against the scar upon his brow, listening as her footsteps faded along the corridor.
She looked at me, he thought, as though she could see something.
He did not know whether that was alarming—or something else entirely.
He reached for the whisky. Then stopped, his fingers hovering above the decanter.
Slowly, he withdrew his hand, folding both upon the desk and staring down at them—the scarred knuckles, the calluses that had never quite faded, the hands that had held William as he died and could not seem to hold William’s son at all.
He likes birds.
So small a thing. So insignificant a fragment of knowledge.
And yet it was the only thing Dominic could say with certainty of the boy who had lived beneath his roof these five months.
Who bore William’s eyes. Who sat in the nursery awaiting removal to grandparents he had never seen, in a country he had never known, because the man meant to protect him could not bear the sight of his face.
Somewhere above, footsteps sounded—light, purposeful. Miss Weston, ascending to the nursery.
Dominic closed his eyes and saw William’s face, slack in death, lips still moving around words he had not been able to hear above the gunfire:
Take care of him. Promise me. Promise.
He had promised. He had held his dying friend and sworn upon everything sacred that Thomas would be safe, would be cherished, would want for nothing.
And then he had come home and discovered that to keep such a promise required a capacity for feeling he had left buried somewhere in the Spanish mud.
She looked at me as though she could see something.
He opened his eyes. The study was cold, the fire long dead, the morning grey and unwelcoming.
But somewhere above, a woman with storm-sea eyes was walking into his nursery, armed with nothing more than the knowledge that a broken little boy liked birds.
It was, Dominic thought, more than he had ever given any of the others to work with.
It was more than he had ever given Thomas at all.