“Hm?” Joe glanced up, drawing his brows together. “Ox. Why?”
“Ox?!”
“Oh, or it can mean … erm …” Joe’s smile flickered, dimples threatening to emerge on his cheeks. “Did someone call you that?”
“No,” Freddy lied, suddenly overcome with a desire to examine something off in the distance.
“Papa! Papa,” Oliver called, running at such a tilt that it was almost a waddle as he collided with Freddy’s legs. “I sat on the big horse! Did you see?”
“I missed it!” Freddy replied, aghast. “Which horse? Shall we go back?”
Oliver pointed but shook his head. “I already used up my bravery the first time, Papa, but I did sit on him. I swear!”
“I believe you, Son,” Freddy assured him with a pat on the head and a sniffle. “Are you ready for luncheon? Ready to tell the story?”
He lifted the lad onto his shoulders to walk up the remainder of the way as the food was laid out. The maids looked like regatta sails in the afternoon wind, their starched aprons and bonnets playfully tugged at and lifted as they went about their task, murmuring in little sounds of distress when napkins were unfolded by a particularly mischievous gust.
It smelled good, Freddy noted with satisfaction. Appetizing.
“Papa, that’s the Stone King,” Oliver whispered, gripping Freddy’s face on either side to turn it in the proper direction. “That’shim.”
“Goodness,” Freddy marveled. “Do you think we ought to make him a plate?”
Oliver gasped, clearly affronted by the idea. “No, Papa! He is very bad!”
“Oh, right, right,” said Freddy, chastened. “My mistake.”
He made a show of swinging Oliver back to the ground once they reached the blankets, determined to outdo Murphy’s acrobatics from the Crooked Nook drive. He did win a delighted series of giggles, but not quite the squeal of surprised delight that he’d heard before.
It was still enough. He pressed a kiss to the boy’s brow before letting him run off, and when he stood, straightening his jacket, he found he was being observed.
By Claire.
She was stood by Silas and Tommy, who were deep in some sort of argument over the skyline, and had her hands folded in front of her. She was watching with a look on her face that seemed to Freddy like shock. She looked the way someone might look after seeing someone fall into the Thames or get kicked by a donkey.
He met her eye, and for a moment, there was nothing at all there on the little green wold. There was no crowd. No picnic. No oxygen.
Just Claire. Just Freddy.
It was the only time he’d managed to get her to look at him since that day in the master chamber. He wanted to raise his arm, to wave at her, to smile, but he could not do any of it. He could only stare back.
He realized that he could currently relate rather well to that person he had imagined, who had just seen someone get a donkey kick to the heart and land in the Thames.
It took the maids walking between them to break the spell, to bring the air and the heat and the smell of food back into focus.
He considered dismissing all of them with harsh prejudice for doing it, for daring to exist in a moment that he had longed for so fervently. He sighed, squeezing his eyes against the glare of the abruptly returned sun, and when he opened them again, Claire was gone.
CHAPTER 9
Claire didn’t eat very much.
How could she?
The day in the orchard had affected her, of course. Why else would she have floated off to Tommy’s dower house for hours afterward? Why else had she allowed days to blur into an incomprehensible muddle of memory? Why else had she continued to run and to hide as though she’d been born to do nothing else?
So yes, that had been the whole of it, hadn’t it? She’d cried. She’d watched her son get the father he’d always dreamed of. She’d felt her heart ache for this Freddy, who knew when to joke and when to listen.
That had been it. She’d already gone through it!
