No one, dog nor human, noticed Claire in the trees. That was well.
Patricia arrived first, holding her finger in a novel like she expected to be kept waiting for a while. She settled in while the servants were still flapping the tablecloth and arranging the empty plates and bowls, simply pulling a chair far enough away to not disturb them and returning to her story while she waited.
A few moments later, Oliver arrived with his governess, still rubbing sleep from his eyes. Claire leaned against a tree, her heart softening at the way his hair stuck up at the back, a stubborn cowlick that water alone often failed to tame. His face brightened once he’d spotted his grandmother, and he immediately increased his speed, tugging along his weary-looking governess behind him.
He did not, Claire noted with satisfaction, release the governess’s hand. That had been a hard-won lesson. She waspleased to see that, even without knowing his mama was nearby and watching, it had stuck.
She kept an ear turned toward the conversation while she watched the approach from the house. Patricia dismissed the governess and took Oliver onto her knee, indulging his questions about the book she was reading, with a few clear modifications about the propriety of its content.
Her legs did start to ache a bit. She bent her knees and tried to prop herself against a tree, which would have likely knocked the poor thing completely over if she’d committed to it. She shifted from foot to foot. She set her jaw and told herself to grin and bear it.
Then, flashing against the morning light like a polished brass button, Freddy appeared.
It still made her breath catch, no matter how firmly she cursed herself for it. His own golden hair blew freely in the breeze, with nothing like a layer of water or the firm hand of a styling wand to hold it into order. It bounced and swayed with his movements, feathering charmingly over his brow every time the wind ran its fingers through it.
She dug a fingernail into her thumb and told herself to stop it. Freddy’s beauty was irrelevant to the matters of order this morning.
Though she couldn’t help noticing a bit of hair sticking up at the crown of his head. A cowlick.
She frowned.
She watched him draw closer.
She held her breath.
Freddy had risenat dawn again. Perhaps it was becoming a habit, or perhaps he was living in such a constant state of panic that it would simply happen to him forevermore, every sunrise linked to a jolt from his sleep and a spike of anxiety in his chest.
He supposed he deserved that.
Today, he’d gotten to enjoy the agonizing several hours between waking and breakfast with only a short walk by the water outside of Crooked Nook while the sky was still in twilight. Then, he’d taken so much care dressing that one would think he was lovesick and meeting his sweetheart.
He supposed, in a way, that was true.
Sonwas a word he hadn’t let himself think for these last many years. He’d think of him instead asthe childorthe boyor even justOliver.And when he did, he’d imagined a little boy who looked like Claire, with light brown ringlets glinting with hints of gold and copper and bronze under the candlelight, with her eyes like warm amber and the rosebud shape of her mouth.
Millie had told him, more than once, that Oliver had his own coloring, not Claire’s. It hadn’t changed his mental image, even when he’d tried to adjust his imaginings with the full force of intentional thought.
He could only imagine the boy as an extension of his mother. Surely nothing so pure would take Freddy’s visage rather than his wife’s. Surely not.
In the end, he’d spent so long putting on and taking off clothes, wondering which waistcoat, which trouser, which shirt saidfather,that the chime of the clock startled him. Even with a multi-hour preparation window, he was still running behind. Imagine that.
He pulled a comb through his hair, grimaced, and made haste toward the orchard, weaving his way through wedding guests who were meandering toward the breakfast room or otherwise congregated in feminine thickets, scheming amongst themselves.
One such thicket contained Millie and Ember alongside his mother’s terrifying spinster friends. Both murmured morning greetings and nodded at him as he passed in a way that made him suspect they already knew where he was off to.
He decided to cut diagonally over the green and perhaps send an apology note and a portion of dessert to the groundskeeper later. He couldn’t see the man, but he could feel his glower all the same as he stomped over the neatly combed and cultivated lawn, almost as sharp as the glare of early-morning sunlight bouncing up over the dewdrops that still blanketed the wolds.
The gazebo was new, something Tommy had been planning just before he’d left for London that final, fateful Season. He knew exactly where she intended to have it built, however, smack amongst the fruit trees at the bottom of the hill her house sat on. He’d been there when they cut down some of the fruit trees to make room, after the harvest.
He tried not to break into a run, though it would have both gotten him where he was going a lot faster and possibly soothed some of the bouncing, roiling bits in his chest. Fathers are stoic, he reminded himself. Fathers are steady.
He was a father.
He had been avoiding that word too. It didn’t feel earned.
Finally, he could see them, or at least the impression of them, black like shadows from the wealth of low sunlight that threaded around their bodies from behind them. He could see two maids moving around in silhouette and, on a chair slightly removed from the table, a woman with a child on her lap, possibly reading a book to him.
That was him.
