Sophia watched him rejoin the group of gentlemen. She watched Lord Thornwaite glance between them with knowing eyes. She watched her mother bid them farewell with polite smiles.
Then she turned back to the water and to the families gathered there, with her chest aching with a loneliness she couldn’t name.
Miss Stanton was precisely everything Edward had told himself he wanted.
She stood at the appointed gate with her aunt, a small woman wrapped in so many shawls that she resembled a particularly well-upholstered armchair.
“Your Grace.” She fell into step beside him with natural ease. “I confess I have always preferred the park in the afternoon. The morning crowds are rather relentless.”
“Agreed.” Edward offered his arm. “The Ring path, if you have no objection?”
“Not at all.”
Her aunt shuffled along behind them at a discreet distance, close enough for propriety, far enough to allow conversation. Edward had arranged for Thornwaite to collect him in an hour, which gave him sufficient time to be agreeable and not a moment longer than necessary. He was not proud of that calculation, but there it was.
Miss Stanton was easy to talk with. She asked sensible questions about the improvements he was making to the Heatherwellestate, listened with apparent interest, and offered opinions that were neither insipid nor combative. She laughed when something amused her and did not perform the laugh for his benefit. She was, in every measurable way, promising.
Miss Stanton was on the list of names I gave you.
Edward’s jaw tightened imperceptibly. He made himself attend to something Miss Stanton was saying about her time in Bath.
“—though my aunt found the waters entirely too cold for her constitution. Didn’t you, Aunt Millicent?”
The elderly woman behind them made a sound that suggested the waters of Bath were a personal affront she had not yet forgiven.
“Mrs. Fenmore is not a devotee of cold water?” Edward asked.
“Aunt Millicent,” Miss Stanton said warmly, “is a devotee of warm fires, strong tea, and strategic complaints. She deploys them with considerable skill.”
“Amelia.” Mrs. Fenmore’s voice was dry as parchment. “You describe me as though I were a general.”
“You are a general, Aunt. I have always thought so.”
The old woman made a sound that might have been a laugh. Edward almost smiled.
Then do something about it.
He dragged his attention back to the path ahead. The afternoon light shifted across the water, and two small boys were shrieking at the ducks near the bank while their nursemaid looked on with resigned patience.
He thought of Oliver. Of the way the boy had stood at the nursery window that morning, watching the street below with that stillness that Edward was beginning to dread. Not the stillness of a contented child. The stillness of a child who had learned to wait.
Lady Sophia had no right to say what she had said.
She had no right to stand there with her chin lifted and her eyes blazing and tell him what the boy needed, as though Edward did not lie awake considering precisely that question. As though he had not stood outside Oliver’s door a dozen times, hand raised to knock, only to walk away because he could not trust himself to say the right thing. Because every time he looked at the boy, he saw his brother’s face and felt the weight of everything he had failed to do.
Lady Sophia, in her practical gloves and her too-steady voice, had reduced all of that tostop avoiding him.
Infuriating woman.
“Your Grace?”
He realized Miss Stanton had asked him something. “Forgive me. The sun, I think.” An inadequate explanation, and she was perceptive enough that she probably knew it.
“I was only asking whether you enjoy the park yourself, or whether this is strictly a social obligation.” Her tone held no reproach, only genuine curiosity. “You may say either way because I appreciate honesty.”
He looked at her then, properly. She was watching him with calm brown eyes, and there was nothing in them that required him to perform anything.
“I prefer the Serpentine path,” he said. “The rest of the park is rather too much performance for my taste.”
