Chapter Three #2
And then—quietly, cautiously—a small hand slipped into hers.
His fingers were cold. She held them with care, as though they were something fragile and easily broken, and led him to the table.
***
That afternoon, while Thomas rested, Lorraine sought out Mrs Potter.
She found the housekeeper in her sitting room—a small, comfortable chamber off the kitchen that served as the household’s centre of operations. Mrs Potter was reviewing accounts when Lorraine knocked, but she set them aside at once and indicated a chair.
“Tea, miss? You look as though you might benefit from it.”
“I should be most grateful, thank you.”
The tea was hot and strong, and Lorraine wrapped her hands about the cup with genuine appreciation. The nursery was warm enough, but the corridors of Rovewood Hall seemed to draw the heat from one’s bones.
“How did the morning go?” Mrs Potter asked. “I saw Jenny in quite a state.”
“Thomas and I are becoming acquainted.” Lorraine took a careful sip. “He is a remarkable child, Mrs Potter. Intelligent. Observant. And far too serious for his years.”
“Aye.” The housekeeper’s expression softened into something like grief. “He was not always so. When he first came… well. He cried at night, the first few evenings. A terrible sound. And then one morning, he simply… stopped. Went quiet. And has been so ever since.”
Lorraine thought of the boy’s carefully blank expression, his folded hands, the measured way he weighed every response. “He has learned that feeling is dangerous.”
“Smart lad.” Mrs Potter’s voice was heavy. “Feelings are not much rewarded in this house.”
The words lingered between them. Lorraine set down her cup.
“His Grace,” she said carefully. “Forgive me, but… has he always been thus?”
Mrs Potter was silent for some moments. Her gaze drifted to the window, where rain had begun to tap softly against the glass, and her expression altered—softening with memory.
“He was not always so,” she said at last. “Before the war, Master Dominic was… oh, you would scarce believe it to see him now. He laughed. He joked with the servants. When he was a boy, he used to bring me flowers from the garden—fistfuls of them, all crushed in his grip, proud as anything.” A faint, sad smile touched her lips.
“He was the sun, miss. Lit every room he entered.”
Lorraine tried to reconcile this image with the cold, distant man she had met that morning, seated behind his desk like a figure carved from stone. She could not.
“And then he went to Spain.”
“Aye. Went away full of life. Came back… whatever he is now.” Mrs Potter shook her head. “Something happened there. Something bad. He will not speak of it, and we have learned not to ask. But he returned with those shadows in his eyes, and he has never been the same.”
“The scar,” Lorraine murmured, recalling how his hand had lifted to his brow. “Upon his eyebrow.”
“Shrapnel, they say. From the battle where Captain Harding fell.” Mrs Potter’s voice dropped. “Whatever occurred that night… it broke something in him. And then the Captain’s boy arrives, looking at him with the Captain’s very eyes…” She trailed off. “Well. You see how it is.”
Lorraine did see. She saw a man burdened by a guilt he would not name, turning away from the very child whose presence might have offered him some measure of redemption—because that same presence was also a living reminder of loss.
He is not cruel, she thought. He is not indifferent. He is afraid.
It did not excuse the neglect. It did not lessen Thomas’s loneliness. But it rendered the household intelligible in a new and painful way.
“He may yet be reached,” she said quietly. “I believe that.”
Mrs Potter regarded her with something like hope—and something like caution. “Take care, miss. Others have tried. Others have failed. And His Grace does not take kindly to those who prod at old wounds.”
“I am not here to mend His Grace.” Lorraine rose, setting aside her empty cup. “I am here for the boy.”
Yet even as she spoke, she knew it was not wholly true. The image would not leave her: a boy with crushed flowers in his hands, smiling as though he had captured the sun.
He was not always so.
Nor, she thought, had Thomas been. Nor had she.
Perhaps that was why she felt the pull of this place—this house, this strange, fractured household bound together by grief and silence. Perhaps that was why, as she climbed the stairs once more toward the nursery, she felt something dangerously like purpose stirring within her.
Do not grow attached, she reminded herself. Three months. Temporary.
But Thomas’s hand had been so cold. And his voice, when he spoke of the kestrel frozen in the sky, had held such fragile wonder.
And somewhere within these walls, a man who had once gathered flowers for the housekeeper walked alone with his ghosts.
This is dangerous, Lorraine thought. This is foolish. This is precisely the sort of situation you cannot afford.
She kept climbing anyway.
***
Sleep did not come easily.
Lorraine had expected exhaustion to claim her the moment her head touched the pillow—she had been cold, and long-traveled, and unsettled by too much new information—but her small blue room refused to deliver the oblivion she had earned.
She lay under the counterpane in her plain cotton nightgown, the fire banked low, the wind murmuring against the window, and she thought, against every instinct of professional self-preservation, about the Duke of Ravenswood.
Not Thomas. Thomas she had already considered—had already begun to plan for, lesson by lesson, small mercy by small mercy. Thomas she knew how to hold.
It was his guardian who would not let her sleep.
She thought about the way he had sat behind his desk that morning—framed and rigid, performing ducal authority like a man reciting lines in a play he had forgotten the end of.
She thought about his hand rising to his scarred brow when she had pressed him about Thomas's temperament, the small unconscious tell of a man who believed himself unreadable and was entirely readable to anyone who had learned, as she had learned, to watch.
She thought about the whisky decanter on the sideboard at nine in the morning.
She thought about his hands.
She had not meant to notice his hands. She had been attending, at the time, to the professional content of the interview—salary, duties, the boundaries of her authority over the boy—and she had schooled her gaze downward in the manner a governess was taught to school it.
Downward had meant the desk. The desk had meant his hands.
Long fingers. Scarred in places—perhaps from the war, or something earlier. A boyhood injury, perhaps.
You are a fool, she told herself, staring at the dark ceiling. You are a twenty-six-year-old fool lying in your employer's house cataloguing your employer's hands. You have not done this since you were nineteen.
She turned onto her side. She closed her eyes with the firmness of a woman commanding a recalcitrant child to sleep.
The dream, when it finally came, disobeyed her as thoroughly as any child ever had.
She was in his library. She had not been in his library yet—had only passed its door, had only glimpsed, through the gap, leather spines and a carpet worn by the passage of generations—but in the dream the room was vivid and particular, firelit, smelling of woodsmoke and the faint dry perfume of old books.
She was standing before the hearth. Someone was behind her.
She did not turn. The dream did not require her to turn. She knew, with the absolute knowing of dreams, who it was.
A hand came to rest at her waist.
The touch was slight. Through the layers of her dress and shift, she ought not to have felt anything at all—and yet she felt it everywhere, down the length of her spine, into the soles of her feet, up into her scalp. Her breath caught in a way her waking body had forbidden for years.
"Miss Weston." His voice, low and scraped—not the cold ducal voice of the study but something underneath it, something she had suspected was there and had not let herself consider. "You should go back to your room."
I know, she thought. She did not say it. Dream-Lorraine did not say anything sensible.
His other hand came up. It traced the column of her throat—the lightest brush, a fingertip only—and settled beneath her jaw to turn her face toward him.
She turned. She saw grey eyes, storm-dark in the firelight, and the scar through his brow, and the mouth she had spent the interview trying not to look at directly.
His mouth came down on hers.
The dream abandoned narrative then. It gave her, instead, sensation—the unfamiliar pressure of another person's body against the front of hers, the warmth of his hand sliding from her throat down the line of her bodice, the astonishing, indecent heat that pooled low in her belly and spread outward as though her body, denied for three years, had at last been given permission to remember what wanting felt like.
She was pressed back against something—a wall, a bookshelf, his arms, she did not know—and his mouth was at her throat, and her dress was loosening in ways dresses did not loosen under a governess's careful daytime control, and she was making a sound in her throat that she had never in her life made aloud.
He has not even called you Lorraine, some faint rational fragment protested.
"Lorraine," he said, against her skin.
The dream broke her open.
She came apart with an intensity she had not known her body was capable of—had not known, perhaps, that any body was capable of—and she woke with a small shocked cry muffled against her own pillow, her nightgown twisted around her thighs, her heart racketing against her ribs as though she had been running.
For a long moment she lay perfectly still. The fire had gone to embers. The wind was still at the windows. The house slept around her, vast and indifferent.
She pressed both hands flat over her face.
"No," she whispered, into her palms. "No. No. No."
The protest was useless. Her body, flushed and throbbing and shamelessly warm, was not persuaded.
Neither, if she were honest, was her mind.
The dream had been vivid in a way dreams were not supposed to be—had felt less like invention than recognition, as though her sleeping self had seen something her waking self was too disciplined to name, and had shown it to her with the clinical thoroughness of a physician presenting a diagnosis.
She had known the man for a single morning.
She had exchanged perhaps fifty words with him, most of them professional.
And her body had already decided.
Lorraine sat up in the dark. She pulled the counterpane around her shoulders, drew her knees to her chest, and stared at the shuttered window with the dry-eyed horror of a woman who had spent three years building a fortress and now, distinctly, heard the first stone fall.
She did not sleep again that night. She sat in the narrow blue room until the grey light came in at the edges of the shutters, and she listened to the rain, and she composed a lecture for herself of such withering thoroughness that a less determined woman would have resigned by breakfast.
Lorraine did not resign. Lorraine had survived worse than her own body.
She would survive this too.
Probably.