She stared at him. “You are asking me... what I think you should do?”
“I am asking you what is best for Oliver.” He turned to face her fully, and the distance between them seemed suddenly inadequate. “You know the boy better than I. Youunderstand what he needs in ways I cannot pretend to grasp. If this gathering would benefit him—if the companionship of other children his age would help him heal—then perhaps accommodations must be made.”
“What sort of accommodations?”
“I could send you away.” His voice was flat, stripped of inflection. “Temporarily. Until the gossip dies down. Until Oliver’s position is secure enough that no one thinks to question his circumstances.”
Lady Maribel took a step backward. “You would send me away?”
“I did not say I would. I said I could.” Thaddeus ran a hand through his hair, disturbing its careful arrangement. “I am attempting to consider all possibilities, Lady Maribel. I am attempting to do what is right for a child who has already lost everything, and I find myself singularly ill-equipped for the task.”
The admission cost him. He saw her register it—saw the surprise flicker across her features before she schooled them into neutrality.
“You will not send me away,” she said, her voice low but firm. “Oliver has already lost his parents. He has already been uprooted from everything he knew. He is only now beginning to trust that I will remain. If you take me from him now, for the sake of appeasing a shipping baron with social aspirations?—”
“I am not attempting to appease anyone.” His voice rose before he could stop it. “I am attempting to protect him. From whispers. From cruelty. From a society that will judge him for circumstances beyond his control?—”
“And you think removing the one person who offers him comfort will achieve that?” She stepped closer, her eyes blazing. “You think isolation is protection? You think a child learns to weather cruelty by being shielded from it entirely?”
Without meaning to—or fully realizing it—his hand captured her arm, though he was not sure whether he meant to push her away or pull her closer.
“I think,” Thaddeus said, his own voice dangerous now, “that you have no concept of what I am trying to?—”
The door opened.
Later, Thaddeus would reconstruct the moment with agonising precision: the creak of hinges, the sudden flood of light and noise from the corridor beyond, the rustle of silk as three figures swept into the library without so much as a knock.
Lady Forsythe. The two women who had flanked her earlier. And behind them, barely visible, a fourth figure with a lorgnette raised to her eye and an expression of delighted scandal.
They stopped just inside the threshold, their gazes moving from Thaddeus to Lady Maribel and back again with the speed of predators scenting blood.
In the confrontation, neither of them had noticed how close they had drifted. Now Thaddeus became acutely aware of it—the mere inches that separated them, the impropriety of their positioning, the intimacy that even a slightly ajar door could not mitigate.
“Your Grace,” Lady Forsythe breathed, her eyes glittering. “Forgive us. We were seeking the card room and appear to have taken a wrong turning. We had no notion the library was... occupied.”
She was lying. Thaddeus knew it with absolute certainty. The card room was on the opposite side of the house. She had followed them. She had waited until enough time had passed to make discovery damning. She had planned this with the precision of a military campaign.
And she had won.
“Lady Forsythe.” His voice came out steady—remarkably steady, given the roaring in his ears. “You may leave us.”
“Of course, of course.” But she did not move. Her companions did not move. They stood, and they looked, and their smiles widened with every passing second.
“Such a charming tableau,” one of them murmured. “Do you not think so, Lady Forsythe? Quite... intimate.”
“Most intimate indeed.” Lady Forsythe’s gaze lingered on the space between Thaddeus and Maribel—that damning, insufficient space. “We shall leave you to your... discussion, Your Grace. I am certain it was of the utmost importance.”
They withdrew in a flutter of silk and feathers, their whispers already beginning before the door had fully closed behind them.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Thaddeus did not move. Beside him, Lady Maribel stood frozen, her face drained of all colour, her hands trembling slightly at her sides.
“They will tell everyone,” she said. Her voice was barely above a whisper. “By morning, there will not be a drawing room in London that has not heard. The library. Alone together. Standing so close. They will say—” Her voice cracked. “They will say whatever serves their purposes, and there will be no defending against it.”
“I know.”
“My reputation. What little remained of it?—”
