“Thomas is nice. He knows about frogs and rabbits and where the best blackberries grow. And he doesn’t mind that I don’t know about any of those things yet.” Oliver’s voice had taken on a plaintive quality that tugged at her heart. “I just want a friend. Is that so very bad?”
“No, sweetheart. It’s not bad at all.”
“Then why?—”
“I don’t know.” The admission pained her. She was meant to have answers, meant to be the steady presence that made sense of a senseless world. “But I shall speak to His Grace again.”
Oliver frowned.
“Will he listen?”
Maribel leaned forward with a smile that showed a confidence she did not truly have. “I will make him,” she whispered.
He nodded once, then returned his attention to the puzzle, and Maribel sat beside him in silence, watching him work, her mind already turning toward the conversation that awaited her.
Night came far too quickly today. As much as Maribel did not know how to approach Thaddeus, she knew she had no choice. So when she found him in the library after nightfall, she lifted her chin and moved towards him.
He turned when she entered, a frown appearing between his brows.
“Lady Blackwood. Is there something you require?”
“A moment of your time, if you can spare it.”
He gestured toward the chair opposite his own—a concession, however small. Maribel lowered herself onto its edge, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap.
“It concerns Oliver.”
“I have yet to hear you consider something that does not.”
She ignored the edge in his voice. “He asked me today why he cannot play with Thomas Brennan.”
Thaddeus’s expression did not change. “I believe we have discussed this matter already.”
“We have. And I find myself dissatisfied with its resolution.” She held his gaze without flinching. “He needs a companion, Thaddeus. Someone his own age. Someone who can teach him about frogs and blackberries and all the things children ought to learn from other children, not from tutors and governesses and well-meaning adults.”
“He has tutors. He has you.” Thaddeus took a measured sip of brandy. “He does not need a groundskeeper’s boy trailing after him, filling his head with unsuitable notions.”
“Unsuitable notions? The boy wanted to show him where the frogs live. What possible harm could that cause?”
“The harm of teaching Oliver to seek companionship in quarters where it cannot appropriately be found.” His jaw tightened. “The harm to the garderdener’s boy of teaching him to presume upon his betters, and all the consequences that can arise from such presumption.”
“He is four years old. He doesn’t understand quarters or appropriateness. He understands loneliness.” Maribel leaned forward, willing him to hear her. “He understands waking up in a strange house without his parents, surrounded by adults who speak to him in careful voices and servants who treat him like something fragile. He understands that every child he sees through the window has something he is denied.”
Thaddeus set down his glass with a sharp click. “You presume to know what is best for him while your own precarious family situation…” He sighed. “I have been planning for his futuresince his parents passed. You must understand that his life, the expectations placed upon him have changed.”
“Planning is not the same as understanding.”
The words hung between them, sharp and unretractable. Maribel watched the colour rise in Thaddeus’s face, watched his hands clench upon the arms of his chair.
“This discussion is over.”
“It is not over simply because you declare it so.”
“In my household, Lady Blackwood, it is.” He rose, towering over her, his presence suddenly overwhelming. “I have tolerated your interference in the nursery. I have permitted your rearrangements and your requisitions and your wholesale dismantling of the structure I established. But I will not tolerate challenges to my authority on matters of consequence.”
Maribel rose as well, refusing to be diminished. “You will not allow me to challenge you when it comes to the happiness of this child?”
“His future is a matter of consequence. His happiness will follow when he has been properly prepared for the world he will inhabit.”
