Every instinct Maribel possessed urged caution. She remembered the footman sent to retrieve Oliver. Remembered Thaddeus’s tight-lipped fury. Remembered the careful negotiations that had yielded precisely nothing.
But she also remembered Julian’s words:Some men need to be taught that love isn’t weakness.
And she remembered the wooden soldier on her dressing table. The reinforced fort. The small, careful gestures of a man who didn’t know how to soften but was trying nonetheless.
“Ten minutes,” she heard herself say. “Stay where I can see you from the window. And do not—under any circumstances—leave the grounds.”
Oliver’s face transformed. Before she could reconsider, he was gone—racing down the corridor with the particular speed of a child escaping before permission can be revoked.
Maribel watched from the nursery window as he appeared below, a small figure in grey wool darting across the wet grass. Thomas spotted him and waved, and within moments the two boys were deep in conversation, heads bent together over something in the garden bed.
They looked happy.
Normal.
Like children, rather than miniature adults performing careful protocols of class and consequence.
Maribel settled into the window seat, prepared to maintain her vigil. Ten minutes, she’d said. Surely no harm could come in ten minutes.
Forty-five minutes later, Oliver still hadn’t returned.
Maribel had watched the minutes tick past on the nursery clock with increasing anxiety, watched as ten minutes became twenty, became thirty, became undeniable evidence that the boys had forgotten time entirely in whatever game they’d invented.
She’d seen them move from the garden bed to the hedge-line, seen them disappear from view entirely around the corner of the groundskeeper’s cottage. She’d told herself she would give them five more minutes—just five—before going to retrieve Oliver herself.
But the decision was taken from her hands by the sound of voices raised in alarm near the kitchen entrance.
Maribel’s heart dropped.
She gathered her skirts and ran.
By the time she reached the side door, a small crowd had assembled. Cook stood wringing her hands. Two footmenhovered uncertainly. And in the centre of it all, covered head to toe in mud so thick he was barely recognizable, stood Oliver.
He was grinning.
Absolutely, radiantly, unapologetically grinning—his face streaked with dirt, his clothes soaked through, his hair standing up in muddy spikes that defied gravity. He clutched something in his hands, and as Maribel drew closer she saw it was a frog. A truly enormous frog, exactly as Thomas had promised.
“Maribel!” Oliver’s voice rang with triumph. “Look! We caught him! He was hiding under the old boards by the pond, and Thomas showed me how to sneak up without scaring him, and he’s ever so fat from summer bugs just like Thomas said!”
The frog, unimpressed by its capture, chose that moment to leap from Oliver’s grasp. It landed on Cook’s shoe with a wet plop, causing her to shriek and jump backward into one of the footmen.
Chaos erupted.
Oliver dove after the frog. The footmen attempted to help whilst simultaneously avoiding touching anything remotely muddy. Cook had retreated to what she clearly deemed a safe distance, still clutching her chest.
And through it all, Oliver laughed—that pure, unrestrained sound of childhood joy that Maribel had not heard since before his parents died.
She watched him chase the frog across the flagstones, watched him finally recapture it with Thomas’s shouted encouragement from somewhere outside, watched him hold it aloft like a trophy whilst mud dripped from his elbows.
And she thought:This. This is what a four-year-old should be.
“What is the meaning of this?”
The voice cut through the commotion like a blade through silk.
Thaddeus stood at the corridor entrance, still in his riding clothes, his face carved from ice. He coldly surveyed the scene—the mud, the chaos, the dripping child, the escaped amphibian, his lips pursed.
The servants scattered.
