Seth turned to Heron. “I think you’re going to win.”
Heron laughed. “The duke always wins.”
“He always wants to be the duke,” Fallon muttered sadly while looking at the soldier he held in his small hand.
“No I don’t,” Heron came right back at his younger sibling. “But I am the oldest and I get to choose first.”
Seth ruffled Heron’s combed hair with his hand. “Tomorrow let your brother be Wellington. Now tell me, who won the other battle today? You two or Miss Prim?”
Both lads looked at him with their big brown eyes as if they hadn’t understood a word he’d said. He tried again. “So who won the snowball fight this afternoon?”
“We didn’t have one,” Heron said.
“Really?” Seth had imagined they would all have had a devil of a good time. The two boys running around on the snowy lawn, coats flapping open, and throwing balls of snow at the clever Miss Prim, who would be cleverly hiding behind a tree ready to pounce as soon as they ran past.
But, as he had suspected might happen, it appeared she didn’t get their lessons finished in time for play. Seth smiled, feeling vindicated. Perhaps he’d gloat a little to Lillian when he went down to dinner. After all, she did hit him with a snowball three different times. He needed to do something to pay her back. But now that he thought about it, he’d really rather kiss her.
“So you didn’t get your schoolwork finished and missed your outing,” he said to the boys. “I’m sorry about that. I know you were looking forward to it.”
“We played,” Fallon said as he righted an overturned cannon. “But didn’t have a fight today.”
“We finished our lessons, Uncle,” Heron added. “Then went for a ride in a carriage through the woods.”
Fallon’s eyes widened and he rose up on his knees. “And Miss Prim found us each a long limb. We didn’t have to share.”
“A limb?” Seth asked. “What for?”
“So we could knock the snow off the low branches of trees as we rode underneath them.”
Trying to talk over his brother, Heron used a louder voice and said, “The snow fell on top of us and we opened our mouths and tried to catch it with our tongues.”
Both boys laughed.
Seth chuckled too. He would have never thought of letting the boys do something as simple as that. So they had their time of play with Lillian and got their lessons done too? There would be no smirking in triumph from him tonight.
“And when we stopped for a while,” Heron continued, “she let us roll down the hill before we had chocolate to warm us.”
“You fell in the pond!” Heron pointed at Fallon and laughed.
“I did not,” Fallon yelled and grabbed his older brother around the neck to try and wrestle him to the rug. Youthful arms, legs, feet, and hands were flailing in every direction. Grunts and groans rent the air.
“Enough of that,” Seth said, pulling Fallon off his laughing brother. He stood him away from Heron. “Stop this, and tell me about falling in the pond.”
Fallon gave Heron a murderous look and tried to go after him again, but Seth held him back. “I didn’t fall in. I was stomping on the ice and it broke. Heron’s mad because he didn’t get to break any of it.”
“I am not!”
“Yes you are!”
Seth’s heart pounded as he envisioned Fallon going under the frigid waters. “Stop arguing and tell me how you got out of the water? How long were you in it? Where was Miss Prim and why was she letting you walk on an icy pond?” He was going to have a few things to say to that young lady and her careless ways.
“We weren’t on the pond, Uncle,” Fallon said. “Only my feet got wet. I was only at the shallow edge of the water stomping the ice.”
Seth’s pulse slowed and his temper cooled. For a moment he’d thought the worst. But Lillian wasn’t free from guilt. Cold wet feet could cause a child to catch a fever, cough, or something too worse to even think about.
“Yes, Uncle,” Heron said with a smile. “It was the best day. Miss Prim’s nice. She laughs all the time.”
“She smiles often too,” Fallon said, completely over his anger with his brother.
