But he could not stop watching Valeria. She was a different person. The careful composure was gone. The measured responses were gone. She was racing a nine-year-old down a garden path and losing on purpose and laughing about it. She was spinning Horace in circles until they were both dizzy and fell on the grass. She was shouting instructions and changing the rules halfway through and arguing with John about whether tripping your own brother counted as cheating—which it absolutely did—and she had done it twice.
She was not the woman he had met in the entrance hall. That woman was controlled and careful and held together with sheer will and fear. This woman was different. This woman was real. The other was the costume, the performance, the face that three years of marriage to Gordon had forced on her.
Then Ruth marched up to him. She stood at the bottom of the terrace steps and looked up at him with the directness of a child who had not yet learned to be afraid of adults.
“You are very tall,” she noted. “Can you reach that branch?”
He looked at the branch. An oak, old and sturdy, with a branch about nine feet up. Then he looked at Ruth. She was barely four feet tall. Her arms were crossed, and she was waiting with the patience of someone who was used to waiting for things and rarely got them.
He looked at Valeria, who was watching from across the lawn with one eyebrow raised and a look on her face that said,I dare you.
“Aye,” he answered.
“There is a bird’s nest. I want to see if there are eggs.”
He came down the steps. He reached up, and his fingers closed around the branch and pulled it down, easy as breathing. He held it down while Ruth stood on her tiptoes and peered into the nest. Her face lit up. It was the first time he had seen her smile.
“Three eggs,” she breathed. “Blue ones.”
“Careful now.” His voice was different. Quieter. The gravel was still there, but the edge was gone. “Don’t touch. The mother will come back.”
“How do you know?”
“Because mothers always come back.”
He released the branch. Ruth watched it spring back into place. Then she looked up at him with the naked admiration that only children could manage, the kind that had nothing to do with titles or reputations or the things he had done in cellars and alleys, and everything to do with the fact that he was tall enough to reach the branch and kind enough to hold it down for her.
“Thank you,” she said, before running back to the others.
After that, he came down from the terrace. He did not announce it. He did not make a decision. He simply appeared at the edge of the lawn, and the children absorbed him into their games the way children absorbed everything—without ceremony or hesitation or the slightest concern for his reputation.
Thomas asked him to be the monster in a chasing game. Edward agreed and lumbered after them with his arms out, his knees bent, and a growl that was so exaggerated Horace laughed instead of running and fell on his bottom on the grass and hadto be picked up and dusted off and growled at again before he would play.
William challenged him to a race and lost spectacularly, then demanded a rematch and lost again, then demanded another one. Edward let him win the third.
Valeria saw the exact moment he slowed down. His expression did not change, but his stride shortened by half a step.
William darted past him and threw both arms up in the air. “I beat the Hound!”
Edward stopped and put his hands on his knees. “So ye did, lad.”
Valeria was standing ten feet away. She had not been ten feet away a moment ago. She had crossed the lawn without realizing it, drawn toward him the way she was always drawn toward him, by gravity or instinct or the simple fact that he was the only person in the garden she wanted to be close to.
“Ye are very competitive,” Edward remarked, not looking at her.
He was watching the children running. Horace had abandoned David the Caterpillar and was now methodically pulling daisies from the lawn and presenting them to John, who accepted each one with the grave solemnity of a man receiving medals of honor. John was wearing a crown of them. Caroline was laughing so hard in her chair that she had to hold her belly with both hands.
“I let Ruth win,” Valeria said.
“You let Ruth win the relay race,” Caroline said. You did not let anyone win at blindman’s buff. You caught three children and a footman in under two minutes.”
“The footman was standing still. He does not count.”
“You also tripped John.”
“He was in my way.”
“This is who ye were. Before,” Edward commented quietly.
